Over the past decade or two, concerns about democracy’s future have moved to the center of political debate. In many long-established democracies once thought stable and secure, polarization has risen, trust in political institutions has fallen, and governments appear unable to respond effectively to the challenges their countries face. In the United States, internal divisions, political dissatisfaction, and institutional dysfunction have become so severe over the past year that the country is backsliding “much faster” than “any other democracy in modern times,” according to the think tank Varieties of Democracy.

Scholars, activists, philanthropies, and nonprofits across the United States and Europe—and across the ideological spectrum—have responded by turning their attention and resources to fixing what is wrong with democracy. Most assume that the basic structure of representative democracy is sound and that its problems can be addressed by improving the institutions and procedures through which it operates. But not everyone shares that view. To some, the crisis of democracy goes deeper—it derives from a system that is so rotten, corrupt, unrepresentative, and incompetent that it is beyond reform.

Today, this critique is commonly associated with the populist right and the far right. In the United States and elsewhere, some right-wing intellectuals and activists argue that liberal democracies should give way to illiberal regimes that still hold elections but restrict rights and that will promote the “common good,” traditional values, and nationalist projects that emphasize ethnic and religious homogeneity. Some argue that democracy must be discarded altogether in favor of strongman rule or some form of monarchy.

Outside those right-wing circles, other thinkers begin from the same premise—that contemporary democracy is fundamentally unworkable—but arrive at very different conclusions about what should replace the existing system. One such proposal comes from Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale. Landemore is hardly opposed to democracy; indeed, she is a defender of democracy, albeit an increasingly critical one. Her first book, Democratic Reason, celebrated the system’s advantages over other forms of government. Her second, Open Democracy, argued that democracy could be improved if it allowed citizens more direct influence and participation. Her latest book, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, goes a step further. In it, Landemore argues that representative democracy is fundamentally flawed and that what is needed is nothing less than a revolution. “It gives me no pleasure to see myself converging on a conclusion associated with the populists,” she writes on the first page. Yet they “have a point.” The current system “is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.”

Landemore’s solution is a reimagining of democracy from the ground up, replacing representative institutions with direct citizen rule. But just as transitions to illiberalism or authoritarianism are not the answer to democratic malaise, neither is discarding elections and other features of representative democracy that create vital links between citizens and their government. The current system requires repair, not revolution. Making governments more representative and responsive will require a wide variety of reforms, potentially including the kinds of citizens’ assemblies Landemore champions. But such assemblies are one promising improvement among many, not a substitute for representative democracy itself. Contemporary democracy needs all the innovative reforms it can get.

All modern democracies are representative: rather than governing themselves directly, citizens elect politicians to govern on their behalf. Many definitions of democracy therefore focus on elections. Perhaps the most famous was offered by the early-twentieth-century Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter, who defined democracy as an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” Adam Przeworski, Schumpeter’s most influential contemporary successor, describes democracy as a system in which rulers are selected through contested elections and incumbents relinquish power when they lose.

For Landemore, however, this electoral core is precisely the problem. She argues that any attempt to repair democracy while leaving elections at its center is bound to fail because elections create a professional political class that is unsuited to genuine democratic rule. As she puts it, members of this group, “whatever their personal, individual qualities,” cannot create “assemblies capable of either fully democratic representation or smart, optimally beneficial legislation.” One reason is that elections select for a particular type: those who seek power and are prone to be corrupted by it. These are, as Landemore writes, “alpha types, the charismatic, the daring, the entitled, the arrogant, even those with no shame whatsoever, and sometimes even the downright psychopathic.”

Elections thus deny meaningful influence to ordinary citizens, especially those she calls the........

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