Politics Without Politicians: A conversation with Hélène Landemore
On civic love, citizen governance, and why democracy isn't broken - we've just been doing it wrong
Claudia Chwalisz, CEO and Founder of DemocracyNext, spoke to Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (Penguin, 2025) and Open Democracy, and a founding advisor of DemocracyNext. Hélène has served on the Governance Committee of the French Citizens’ Assembly on End of Life, and observed the French Climate Convention.
This interview was recorded as part of our interview series with leaders in democratic innovation for our Another Democratic Future Spotify podcast. Listen to previous episodes and subscribe here.
The following has been edited for clarity and brevity. Listen to or watch the full interview below, or on Spotify or YouTube.
CC: Your new book opens with the argument that democracy isn’t actually broken - we’ve just been doing it wrong. What do you mean by that?
HL: I’ve been resisting this conclusion for a decade or more, but I’ve now reached it as unavoidable. We think we reinvented democracy in the 18th century, but we didn’t. We invented a form of legitimate oligarchy based on popular consent - one where power is not truly shared equally. It’s concentrated at the top: among the wealthy, the educated, people with connections and a certain psychological predisposition to want to rule.
If we truly meant to empower everyone equally, we would do democracy differently. The normative ideal is as appealing as ever. People are eager for a voice, eager for a say. And I think they want more than just the option to vote for power-hungry people every few years. Something else is available. We just have to have the courage to embrace it.
CC: It’s interesting that you say you’ve been resisting that conclusion. And I’m also wondering - because I find, depending on the audience, I veer between being more or less radical - but actually, when I was at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens recently, I was thinking: is it really that radical to quote Aristotle, who said elections are a form of oligarchy? It’s just that most people are not familiar with that.
HL: For years the reaction was: ‘this is utopian, this is unfeasible, and to the extent that it’s feasible, it can only be advisory’. Some reactions were quite violent. During the Citizens’ Assembly on End of Life, a citizen raised their hand and asked why they had less power than the first French climate assembly. The President of the National Assembly lost it. She said it is out of the question that randomly selected people replace elected officials. ‘You represent the diversity of the country, but you are not representatives, and you have no legitimacy to decide.’
I saw that in Chile as well - people who are afraid of empowering the “riff-raff”, conservatives who think the people are too uneducated and incapable.
CC: Plato’s argument [in favour of elite rule] lives on in modern ways…
HL: That said, the more we do these assemblies, the more people realise that as long as they remain purely advisory, they’ll be too weak, prone to capture, prone to what we call ‘participation washing’ - creating the illusion of empowering people without giving them any actual control. So there’s a bit more of a realisation that we should go further.
And even for me, it took a while to realise that we’ve kind of done it already. If you look at the French Climate Convention - the first one we ever did, and actually the most ambitious - I have written a new paper with co-author Théophile Pénigaud [Citizen Legislators: Citizens on Top and Experts on Tap in the French Convention for Climate], where we argue that this assembly was actually a de facto group of citizen legislators. Because in a sort of hubristic move, President Macron outsourced the legislative initiative of the Office of the Prime Minister to that assembly, and promised to take the recommendations directly to regulation, a referendum, or a parliamentary vote.
And then there’s the Michigan redistricting commission. In 2021, a social movement managed to change the state constitution to put the drawing of electoral maps into the hands of a newly created body - 13 ordinary voters, four Republicans, four Democrats, five independents - and they were the ones who legislated the new maps.
So this idea that citizens’ assemblies cannot be binding is becoming less prevalent. We’re already proving it can be done.
CC: But do you feel like that French Climate Convention actually was binding, though? Because I think a lot of the criticisms were overblown - KNOCA, the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies, published a paper not long ago that looked at the recommendations one by one over several years, and actually, the vast majority did in some form make their way into legislation. But it wasn’t quite binding either.
HL: It’s tricky. What it was meant to be was the initiative power of the Prime Minister - not the final say, but putting things on the agenda. The final say was still in the hands of existing institutions. But I feel like to a degree, this was contingent - it didn’t work out better partly because there was a mechanism that could have helped the assembly get close to being binding, which was the referendum. Macron had said he’d send recommendations to a referendum, but the citizens themselves chose not to.
And sadly, it’s not that they had too much trust in the system. They also had not enough trust in their peers. They got convinced that people outside the assembly would vote against them if they went to a referendum. But if you look at the polling data, 13 out of the 14 structuring proposals that came out of the convention were embraced by a majority of the wider public. I was floored when I saw that. I think they got misled by what they read on social media, which is not representative of the silent majority out there.
CC: But are they not wrong, in some ways? Because that’s part of, in my mind, the weakness of the referendum as a mechanism - precisely, these people have spent a huge amount of time thinking in depth, weighing the arguments, finding common ground. And then it goes out to people who are being asked their top-of-mind opinion. Though I think the polling showed that on the French Climate Convention specifically, the population actually wanted those recommendations to be binding - so fellow citizens trusted the assembly, and that would have helped get it over.
HL: No, but it doesn’t mean that the people outside the assembly are so far apart. The polls showed strong support across the board. I wish we had given those results to the convention to say: you have this misconception that people outside won’t support you - look at this. There was only one recommendation that was rejected outside, which was reducing the speed limit on highways. That’s the only one. And that was also the one with the least support within the assembly.
So I think it was a big missed opportunity. They got misled by the extremes on social media. And the lesson from Ireland’s referendums on abortion and marriage equality is interesting - the public’s preferences tracked those of the assembly fairly closely. So I’m now curious to see what happens in Connecticut, where we’re working on property taxes. Because there, the issue is solidarity across town lines - sharing tax revenue - and you build that solidarity in the assembly. You can’t make it appear out of thin air outside.
CC: Can you tell us more about the Connecticut citizens’ assembly? What are you learning from it?
HL: It’s a very different context - the US is so far behind the deliberative wave. We sent 240,000 letters to Connecticut residents, roughly 10% of the population. And we’ve built in something genuinely new: full citizen governance of the assembly itself.
Seventeen of us are on the Governance Committee through July 11th. On that date, we surrender our voting rights entirely. From then on, it’s up to the citizens themselves to make the remaining decisions - who the experts are, how time is structured, what format they want. There are constitutional guardrails, but within those, they govern themselves.
I fundamentally believe they can do this. And I think we won’t be credible as promoters of democratic innovation unless we go all the way - unless we run fully with the idea of citizen competence. As long as we constrain their agenda, constrain decisions about procedure, we’re not going all the way.
CC: That’s very interesting. I have not heard of that being done before. The only somewhat similar thing I’m aware of is the collaboration we’re doing with Arantzazulab - a democratic innovation lab in the Basque Country - and MONDRAGON, one of the world’s biggest cooperatives. They’re co-designing how the assembly will work, what the topic of deliberation will be, and all the relevant decisions in the lead-up. Arantzazulab still has a decision-making role, but they’re only one part of a whole committee that’s mostly made up of people from the institution. I think that’s pretty cool.
HL: I think that’s amazing. We need more of it. The lesson I took from being on the Governance Committee of the French Assembly on End of Life was: who are we to decide all this? Increasingly, I felt it was obvious - the citizens should be in charge. We ended up organising votes in plenaries for decisions we shouldn’t have been making ourselves. Like: who gets to speak to Macron? Why should the fifteen of us [on the governance committee] decide that?
And the testimony I’ve found most haunting came from a former member of the French Assembly on End of Life - published in the Journal of Sortition - who said: ‘we had so little control over the proceedings, the agenda, the choice of experts. We never really learned how to govern ourselves or exercise power. So when given the choice between letting the facilitators write the report or doing it ourselves, we chose the facilitators - not because we thought we were incapable, but because we didn’t trust each other.’
That’s the danger. We don’t want the citizens’ assembly movement to replicate the mistake of electoral democracy: you let people choose the elites, but you never let them actually exercise power.
On civic love - the idea that changed everything
CC: I felt in reading this book, and also in our conversations, that being on that Governance Committee really had a profound impact on you - on your research agenda, but also just how you view these assemblies. And I remember, because I had read an earlier draft - we had a little feedback session after that conference you organised - even the former title of the book had the word “love” in it at some point. And you do write about love. I think that also came from your experience of actually being part of this. And there’s a real difference between academics who’ve been directly involved and those who’ve only ever done theoretical work on the sidelines.
In a lot of the earlier work, there’s more emphasis on the benefits of deliberation for collective reasoning and cognitive diversity. But I have a sense of a profound realisation of this other element - the impact it has on people. I’d love for you to say more.
HL: You just summarised it brilliantly. I do think it transformed me in a quite profound way. I came at it from a very theoretical, abstract, hyper-rationalist perspective - also the product of being educated in elite institutions, in what I would almost call very masculineist assumptions about how a philosopher reasons. Emotions were just bracketed. The analytically tractable was all that counted.
And then when I went to the First Citizens’ Climate Convention as a pure observer - the shock of it was really the human dimension. The love. I remember going to the third session - I’d missed the second. And the difference between the first meeting, where everybody was cautious and timid and sceptical, and the third, where everybody was hugging, slapping each other on the back, joking, with all these tender gestures and declarations of love.
In Chapter Seven of the book - which I think is the best chapter, because it’s the most humane - they use that vocabulary themselves. One member said: ‘we’ve become like a family born out of the works of chance and necessity’. Another - I call him Omar in the book - said about another member: ‘I fell in love with him on day one’. And another one said simply: ‘I feel loved’.
I didn’t think politics like that was possible. And once you touch that, you think: why is this such a microscopic part of politics? Why don’t we scale it up massively?
And not to lose the collective intelligence argument -
I think what I’ve concluded is that you will only get the epistemic benefits, all the collective intelligence, if you trigger the love part first.
It’s the bond that opens people’s minds and hearts and makes them capable of generating that collective wisdom.
CC: There’s research on this - the concept of “group building” - which finds that the quality of relational connection is the single most important factor for people’s ability to grapple with complexity. I think the scepticism about this comes partly from the fact that when you witness politics as we know it today, it’s nothing like what you’re describing. So it’s hard for people to imagine it’s even possible.
HL: Completely. I remember some really moving moments at the climate convention. One of the most beautiful debates was about whether to consider a 28-hour working week - the left-wing side of the assembly thought that if you want to fight greenhouse gas emissions, maybe you want a slower economy. And people on the other side were like, it’s not realistic, we need growth. In any classic political setup, that conversation goes ugly very quickly - it’s invective,’ you communist,’ ‘you capitalist,’ nobody listens. It’s crude and caricatural.
This time it was truly respectful. People are clearly open to changing their mind, not putting all their identity into being right. Truly curious. I’d never seen that anywhere except philosophy seminars, basically.
CC: I think part of it is because you’re bringing people into a space where they’re not there to represent a party, or a business, or a sector, or a group identity. They’re just there as humans who happen to all live in the same place, collectively figuring out how to live together around an issue. And that just makes such a difference.
On scaling, AI, and what counts as deliberation
CC: I want to explore the question of how you scale this. Because there’s a conflation happening right now in what people mean when they talk about scaling deliberation. Some are saying: more in-person assemblies on more issues, because we have no shortage of issues. Others are talking about getting a million people onto a text-based platform sharing opinions with one another. And then on a different part of the spectrum, given AI and agentic AI, there are people saying: train an agent on someone’s preferences, and those agents can deliberate with one another to reach some form of consensus. That to me feels like the furthest possible move from what you’re describing - all the benefits of deliberation totally absent from anyone’s experience. So where do you sit on all of this?
HL: It’s going to sound like a cop-out, but I actually think we should explore all of these options, because I genuinely think we don’t know. I’ve moved a bit myself - I’m more optimistic about Zoom-based assemblies than I was, partly because of the Michigan assembly during COVID. The same psychological mechanisms can work if it’s done well enough.
But on mass online asynchronous deliberation - I have to say, I have a hard time calling that deliberation. I see it more as a wisdom-of-crowds type of process - like bees, where some bees do this and some do that, and it’s generative of collective intelligence, very useful, but it’s more aggregative than deliberative. For me, deliberation has to be much more structured, with everyone almost equally exposed to arguments and able to respond. The ideal is closer to the plenary at the Climate Convention, where everyone was listening to the ping-pong of arguments and could join in. Millions of people putting a thumbs-up on a platform - that’s useful, but it’s too fragmented. I don’t know that I’d lump it under deliberation.
On agentic AI - I think we should experiment, just to see how far you can disaggregate the task of deliberation. Right now we talk about it as one thing, but it’s multiple components: the listening, the processing, the generating arguments. Maybe some of those can be outsourced to an agent who is very faithful to how we think. I’m not 100% sure. But I’m also fully convinced you cannot outsource it entirely - you will lose the democratic muscle, the capacity to even understand what’s going on and make it yours. The minute you lose that, it becomes blind deference to an AI.
CC: It makes me think of David Krakauer - the executive director of the Santa Fe Institute - who has this really nice comparison of complementary versus competitive cognitive artefacts, and how technologies can be one or the other. The abacus is complementary: it helps you strengthen your skills so that when you take it away, you’re much better at maths without it. The calculator is competitive: you’re great when you have it, and you take it away and you haven’t learned any maths. I think the same applies here. You can use AI in ways that help people deliberate better - that’s why I’m excited about tools like dembrane and Cortico. But you could also introduce things that appear efficient and make things faster while totally defeating the point and weakening people’s capacities to take those skills into other areas of their lives.
HL: I completely agree. And it goes back to your point about what it does to you to watch these things in person, as opposed to theorising from your armchair. I used to think - even when I first went to the climate convention - I was thinking, why don’t they just deliberate? The first few sessions were really going in circles. But I realised no, this time is not completely wasted. They’re getting to know each other. They’re building trust. And back to what you described - if you try to use AI before that trust is built, it’s not going to be productive.
I was recently at a think tank in Washington discussing the potential of AI for democracy, and someone asked: well, democracy is inefficient - isn’t the potential of AI to make it more efficient? And the group was really taken aback, because is it inefficient? Or is it exercising democratic muscles - doing exactly what you described, figuring out the parameters of the conversation? If you short-circuit that, you don’t build the trust, you don’t build the muscle.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify or YouTube. We highly recommend getting a copy of Hélène Landemore’s book Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule.
Resources & references
As this newsletter is an edited version of the conversation, below we have included additional links to papers, films, and books mentioned in the full interview found on YouTube and Spotify.
The documentary Goodbye Elections, Hello Democracy by Adam Cronkite - filmed during COVID in Michigan.
Research on the French Climate Convention’s recommendations and public support - see KNOCA.
Pre-deliberation AI tools for surfacing personal values - reflection by Shutaro Aoyama.
‘How To Implement Shareholder Democracy’, paper by Oliver Hart, Hélène Landemore & Luigi Zingales.
Andrew Konya and Remesh - research into AI-assisted consensus-finding in peace dialogue settings.
➡️ On the radar
🙏 Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, released last week, frames AI as the new Industrial Revolution and calls explicitly for broad public participation in shaping it. As we work through the Magnifica Humanitus, we wanted to share Eli Pariser’s first-hand account from the Vatican, and Nathan Schneider’s thoughtful piece published in The Conversation. These three new moments in the wider AI conversation, reminded us of the talk Claudia Chwalisz gave at the FARI AI conference last year in Brussels, in which she made the case that AI governance cannot be left to technocrats alone.
🤝 Andrew Sorota & Josh Hendler have published, ‘A Blueprint for Using AI to Strengthen Democracy’, in MIT Technology Review - a timely argument for why the design choices shaping AI today will determine whether it erodes or reinvigorates democratic participation.
📔 What if everything we thought we knew about democracy was wrong? Terry Bouricius’ new book, Democracy Without Politicians: Government With The People, is now available as a free PDF download or e-book.
Do Multilingual Citizens’ Assemblies Work?
Join us for the launch of two new DemocracyNext reflection pieces on multilingualism in citizens’ assemblies - one by Hugh Pope, author and DemocracyNext International Advisory Council Member about the EU Citizens’ Panel on Intergenerational Fairness, and one by James MacDonald-Nelson and Hannah Terry about the Esch Citizens’ Assembly. These short papers draw on observation and interviews with interpreters, facilitators, technologists, and assembly members.
Save the date(s)!
In July, DemocracyNext will be publishing two new papers, and we invite you to join us online for discussions around them:
9 July, 17:00-18:30 CEST
How can deliberative technology strengthen citizens’ democratic capacities to deliberate? This is the question authors Claudia Chwalisz, Sammy McKinney, Jorim Theuns, and Eugene Yi have been considering in their latest paper: “Deliberative Muscles & AI”.
15 July, 17:00-18:30 CEST
As the Cities Programme comes to a close, James MacDonald-Nelson and Hannah Terry examine in greater detail the learnings from working with a cities and regions to institutionalise citizens’ assemblies - Vilnius, Lithuania, Kerewan, The Gambia, Esch-Sur-Azette, Luxembourg, and Central Oregon, USA.
Wonderful feedback from the cutting edge of democratic re-energising - many thanks!! (Am sharing with Oxford City Green Party activists and others.)
Hélène Landemore is a present-day visionary for our future history. On trust in referendums: from the experience of USA ballot initiatives, we know media framing, massive advertising spending, and digital misinformation can heavily drive the final outcomes. It's not a matter of trust in the public, but being realistic about the media environment and the power of opposition campaigns can biased media networks. We can never talk about public opinion without talking about public information channels (media, social media).