It’s no secret that democracy is in trouble. Studies show that a growing number of countries are less free, and polls suggest ordinary citizens are losing faith in their governments. What can be done to fix this? Conventional wisdom often points to piecemeal reforms on campaign finance, for example, or on better educating voters and taking steps to increase turnout on election days.

Hélène Landemore once subscribed to those theories, too, but no longer. The Yale scholar has come to believe that it’s not democracy but electoral politics that is the problem. And the answer isn’t some sort of Band-Aid but to get rid of elections altogether. It’s a radical idea, to be sure, and Landemore accepts as much in her new book, Politics Without Politicians. I invited her on FP Live to interrogate her ideas further. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or on the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

It’s no secret that democracy is in trouble. Studies show that a growing number of countries are less free, and polls suggest ordinary citizens are losing faith in their governments. What can be done to fix this? Conventional wisdom often points to piecemeal reforms on campaign finance, for example, or on better educating voters and taking steps to increase turnout on election days.

Hélène Landemore once subscribed to those theories, too, but no longer. The Yale scholar has come to believe that it’s not democracy but electoral politics that is the problem. And the answer isn’t some sort of Band-Aid but to get rid of elections altogether. It’s a radical idea, to be sure, and Landemore accepts as much in her new book, Politics Without Politicians. I invited her on FP Live to interrogate her ideas further. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or on the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You say that electoral politics is beyond repair but that democracy is not. Explain that.

Hélène Landemore: Maybe because I’m a theorist, I have the luxury of taking a step back, philosophically, historically, and looking at the bigger picture. And my sense is that the ideal of democracy, our aspiration to people’s power, is still very much alive and very much in people’s hearts. But the implementation—electoral democracy—is failing us over and over again. And I think, at this point, it’s time to ask the tough questions, like: Do we still need politicians? They may have performed a valuable role in the 18th century, when the conditions and the levels of education were lower, when technologies didn’t connect us so closely. But now they might be causing more problems than they solve.

RA: You’ve been a scholar in this area for so long, and there was a time when you entertained ideas to fix specific elements of electoral democracy, such as campaign finance reform. What’s made you give up on all of those discussions and debates?

HL: Elections are an oligarchic selection mechanism. It means that they will systematically, not accidentally, oversample the wealthy, the connected, the already powerful in society. They will sample from the top of the distribution. So they won’t distribute power equally, which would be a democratic way of selecting representatives, when everybody has an equal chance of accessing the center of power. The only way to get an equal distribution of power is through random selection. One person, one lottery ticket. Any deviation from that basic selection mechanism will generate inequalities.

RA: So let’s move to your alternative to elections. The idea at the heart of your new book and also your previous one, Open Democracy, is citizens’ assemblies. Tell us what they are and how they work.

HL: Citizens’ assemblies are large groups of ordinary citizens, picked at random from the source population and brought together for a sustained period of time—several weekends typically, over many months—to deliberate about issues that are controversial or difficult, like abortion, climate justice, urban planning, what to do with nuclear plants, questions of gender equality, marriage equality, biodiversity, electoral reform, you name it. They’ve been done around the world. We have close to a thousand cases of various sizes, mostly at the local level. But they’re really able to address a number of issues and bring together people from opposite ends of the political spectrum, all ages, all backgrounds, and get them to talk to each other and learn together and eventually agree and make recommendations to the politicians who commission such assemblies.

RA: How does an ordinary citizen who’s taking time out from their regular life get up to speed on a complex issue that they don’t know anything about? Who helps them? And then how do they reach consensus?

HL: There’s a very important role that experts play in these assemblies. The first phase of a citizens’ assembly typically is about learning. But it’s not learning as if they’re students who are going to be taught by experts. They’re going to teach each other and learn on the basis of expert debates, expert presentations. The idea is really as if they’re the ones on top and the experts are on tap, helping them learn, helping them educate themselves and each other about a particular topic. Sometimes they will question expert frameworks. Sometimes they will ask another expert to come in and testify. And they will debate among themselves how convincing the evidence is, how convincing their arguments are, etc. By the end of the process, they themselves become a different kind of expert. For example, at the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which I observed in France in 2019 and 2020, by the end I was completely lost. The level of the conversation was above me.

RA: Tell us a bit more about that, actually, because that’s one of the most famous examples of a citizens’ assembly. How did it come about?

HL: In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron decided to pass a fuel tax in the name of environmental concerns, maybe to fill a hole in the budget, who knows. But the result was catastrophic. It caused a massive rebellion from the so-called “yellow vests,” people who live in the suburbs, who are lower-middle-class, who need their cars to go to work. Typically, they do not have electric vehicles, do not have access to public transportation, and felt unjustly punished by this fuel tax. So they rebelled. They occupied roundabouts, they demonstrated on highways, and then they went all the way to Paris and demonstrated on the Champs-Élysées and burned things down. It got really ugly, and Macron ran out of options.

So we did what he called a great national debate that lasted two months, during which everybody got a chance to say what they wanted to say, either on an internet platform or in locally organized meetings or also in the context of 18 randomly selected assemblies, organized at the regional level. That latter experiment went so well that Macron said, “I will organize a citizens’ assembly at the national level, with 150 randomly selected French citizens, whom I will bring to the Iéna Palace in Paris for nine months and eight weekends, and you’ll have to come up with a better solution than my fuel tax to the problem of climate change.”

RA: And these people were being paid for it, of course.

HL: These people were being paid around 84 euros per day, I believe, which was around 2,500 euros for the whole thing. So a full month of work for a lot of people. He just told them, “If you think you can beat the politicians, then show me a better answer than a carbon tax,” which is, by the way, the recommendation that all the experts who came to the assembly made, over and over again.

Interestingly, the citizens decided not to follow this recommendation. Among the 149 proposals that came out of the convention after nine months,........

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