Helene Landemore

Hélène Landemore is a French professor of political science at Yale University. She has a PhD from Harvard. She is the author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule.

Biography After a childhood spent in Normandy, Landemore began higher studies in Paris at the age of 18.

She researched the 2010 participatory constituent process in Iceland and directly observed the 2019-20 French’s Citizen Convention for Climate. In September 2022 she was appointed to the governance committee of the French Citizens' Convention on end of life. She regularly presents her ideas and proposals in French and American newspapers.

Theories Hélène Landemore’s research focuses on deliberative democracy and collective intelligence. As a result, the United States more closely resembles a plutocracy, in which the economic elite has more influence on politics than the vast majority of the population.

Sortition and Citizen’s Assembly Hélène Landemore sees a new institution as the "key" to a new form of democracy. She calls it the "open mini-public". It is a citizen’s assembly of a few hundreds of people chosen by lot. Reflection will be more rich and nuanced if it involves different perspectives, life experiences, and knowledge. That is why an assembly chosen by lot is generally preferable to an assembly of experts. People cannot predict in advance what knowledge and experiences will be useful to face a political problem. Reason then commands that maximum diversity should be chosen over specialized ability.

Participation rights: the rights of expression and association, to which are added the rights of petition and citizen’s initiative. These rights would enable the convocation of a referendum on a law voted by the Parliament. Deliberation: the decisions must come from discussion between equal citizens. The floor must not be monopolized by few gifted orators. Majoritarian principle: instead of super-majorities rules, which produce blocking minorities, the vote must integrate new and fairer methods, such as the Majority Judgment. Democratic representation: thanks to sortition (selection by lottery) and, to a lesser extent, voluntary participation. Transparency: of the process and of the results of the deliberations, in real-time or afterwards. Transparency is a means of control, which requires that information be made public and legible to citizens.

Works

Books in English Hélène Landemore, Jon Elster, et al., eds., Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017. Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020. Hélène Landemore and Jason Brennan, Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less?, Oxford University Press, 2021. Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich, eds., Digital Technology and Democratic Theory, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2021. Hélène Landemore, Politics without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, London, Allen Lane, 2026.

Books in French Hélène Landemore, Hume. Probabilité et choix raisonnable, Paris, PUF, 2004.