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Hélène Landemore, "Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule" (Penguin, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, June Wei Li, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Helene Landemore about her new book, Politics Without Politicians, published by Penguin in February 2026. Professor Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University. She specializes in democratic theory and the ethics and politics of AI. Welcome, Professor Landemore.
- [00:37]
B
Thank you, June. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [00:40]
A
So, yeah, I just wanted to give the audience maybe a little bit more context about your work. I know that you've published a lot about democracy and democratic reason over the years, and this is one of maybe the most recent installments of A Long Trajectory. How do you see the work that you're having now stemming out of previous research? And how is it adding onto what's already out there?
- [01:09]
B
Yeah, that's a very good question. So my first book, Democratic Reason, was a sort of deep dive into the political epistemology of democracy. So, meaning, what kind of assumptions about knowledge do we have to have about democracy as a set of procedures? What are the information aggregation properties of such procedures, whether it's majority rule or deliberation? And I came to the conclusion, kind of purely based on theory, that if we cared about maximizing the epistemic properties of democracy, we would probably need to select our representatives differently in order to maximize the cognitive diversity of the group of people making laws and, you know, producing policies and making decisions. So we would have to select them by lot rather than through elections. So then my second book, Open Democracy, was an attempt to answer a question that came up in a workshop actually, in Montreal, about the book, the first book, which was. Okay, so if we take your conclusion seriously, and we do want to maximize the epistemic properties of democracy, what does it look like? What does a Landemorian sort of democracy look like? And I remember being completely stumped by the question. I just couldn't see that far. So it took me seven years and I wrote Open Democracy where I tried to lay out the vision. And I think the vision was informed not just by theory at this point, but also by practice and empirical observation, preservation, including of the Icelandic process. In 2010 13, Iceland tried to rewrite their constitution using crowdsourcing techniques. A randomly selected sample of the nation to produce some core values and ideas that they wanted to see embedded in their new social contract. A group of elected constitution makers, but from a pool that excluded non politicians. So really, like an interesting way of running things differently. And that was what convinced me that it's not that you need to select. It's not just that you need to select your representatives by lot rather than by election, it's that you need to keep the moment of decision making among the subset of representatives or open to the larger public's input at all times, pretty much. So that's what I called open democracy. Like a system that centers ordinary citizens selected at random as the locus of representation, really, but at the same time constantly wide open and receptive to the input of the larger public and connected to moments of mass voting and referenda and a system of citizens initiatives to make sure that you're not closing to, you're not sort of excluding views that could be useful. So from a purely epistemic perspective, that's what I thought would be the most promising way of organizing institutions, right? I mean, and I kept a number of, I held a number of things constant, meaning I didn't really look at the executive, the courts. It was a very simple model, right? I left a number of things unsaid and unless under theorized, frankly. But I thought, okay, that's the beginning of a vision, right? It's very unfinished and it's not a complete blueprint. But it seems to me that if the legislative power is the core power in a democracy, and we want it to be truly inclusive and representative of all views, that's what the skeleton of this sort of epistemically promising democracy would look like. And okay. And at that point I got roped in the study of citizens conventions in France, my native country, and I managed to include the case of the first citizens convention, the one on climate change, in that book, Open Democracy, even though the process started about the time I thought I was done with that book, but I managed to include a chapter on it and a couple of pages on it here and there as a shadow kid, if you want to the Icelandic case, which had been more central. And then between that book that came out in 2020 and now, I was also roped in the actual governance of a second French Citizens assembly, one on end of life issues. And I learned so much from that second experience as well, like in being involved not just as a researcher, observer, but now as an organizer slash co governor of a process like that, which gave me access to the engine room of the Citizens Assembl and Assembly and made me realize how hard it is to steer a body like that. But at the same time how. And at the same time how problematic it is that it's people like me, who are actually not members of the assembly per se, who makes a number of key decisions about pace, selection of experts, selection of materials, et cetera, delineation of the output, et cetera. So this gave me a number of new ideas and set of new problems that I wanted to address. And even more importantly, I would say, beyond the intellectual sort of conundrums that I found fascinating, it's very clear that I had missed out on a very important dimension of these processes, which is the emotional dimension. So I, you know, I collected a number of stories and, you know, examples that just didn't know how I would really talk about in a scientific way. And so I thought. So I wrote the lectures, the Tanner Lectures for Michigan on Love and Truth in Politics, where I was trying to fit this experience of the emotional dimension of citizens assemblies into my epistemic framework. But I really wanted to have the space in a book to develop that thread about the emotional dimension, the human dimension, really, of these processes in a book that would be less academic, more personal, less burdened with footnotes and stuff like that. So that's this book. This book is really about the more emotional human dimension of the kind of vision for politics that I have that really got enriched. And so if you want, if the two books before provided a form of skeleton, I think with this book I start providing the flesh on the skeleton and the more relatable human dimensions that I think are actually a lot closer to what people experience when they're there. And so additionally, I would say I build on these prior books, but I use this building blocks, if you want to develop two argumentative lines that are a little. That are new, that are really new. One is about the centrality of the shy to an authentic democracy. I think I build on a quote that I found in a book by Maurice Pope called the Keys to Democracy. He uses them as a, you know, at the beginning of a chapter or maybe at the beginning of the book, but he doesn't really comment on them. And I was really struck by that one. So it's a quote by a British essayist from the 19th century called G.K. chesterton, who is very good at formulating very neat aphorisms of all kinds. And he coined that definition of democracy, which really I found arresting and inspiring. He said, all real democracy is an attempt, like that of a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out. And I was thinking, wow, that's the opposite of democracy as we practice it, which is all about competition between powerful and charismatic elites who are the opposite of the shy. Right? And they speak on behalf of the shy and they act on behalf of the shy, but they don't really make room for the voices of the shy. And so I thought that this vision of democracy as a joyful female figure was, you know, kind of like feminist and empowering and so different and could sort of, yeah, inform a much more exciting vision of politics than the one we currently have, which is agonistic, you know, based on emotions that are actually not that positive, like rage and resentment and envy and all of that. So that's one argumentative line that is new in the book where I tried to. That. That forced me to go back to my data about the citizens conventions in France and. And fish out the evidence that indeed these. These deliberations empower the quiet people, the people who feel powerless, the people who are made powerless by the system. Because by the shy, I don't mean just the natural introverts, but truly people who are, you know, kept down and made humble and shy and not because they are like that, but because the structures make them like that. And I found some stories that actually, I mean, once you look. When I started looking at the data through that lens, a lot of things aligned with that vision. And so that's something I'm trying to bring out in that book. The other argumentative line is what I just said about the role of emotions. So this is something that I had bracketed entirely in my prior books. I was focused on information aggregation, bringing out the arguments, right. Not really bringing out the shy or seeing the transformative potential of solidarity and civic love. So I talk a lot about civic love in the central chapter of the book called the Power of Love. And I hesitated. I'll tell you that. I wasn't sure whether I could address this in a way that wouldn't come across as corny or overly naive or romantic or something like that. But actually, I think that's the truth. That's what I saw. That's what I do believe is core to these experiments and these processes. And so it needed to be said.
- [12:20]
A
Well, I think thank you so much for giving, like, a broad, I think, trajectory of how all your research has led to this book. And I think the first thing that really caught my eye, like, what got me really interested is the title, right? Like Politics Without Politicians. And like, I think maybe I wanted to ask a little bit more to specify your views on what do you sort of mean by, you know, like, you've said a bunch of terms like we want to have politicians. We want to sort of have, like a democracy who's meant to be this jolly hostess who brings the shy in. So how are you thinking about, like, what a politician is, the ways that they're chosen and how these ways that they're chosen sort of in your work marginalize these people who you think have been sort of shy. Right. They're now sort of excluded from this process. Could you maybe expand a bit on this?
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B
So. Well, politicians for me are people for whom politics is a profession. So it's a professionalization that is part of the definition, but that's also brought about by the particular selection mechanism we use to select them. So. Sorry, sorry, can I take that back? So politicians for me. So just to be clear, politicians for me are a category that I contrast with ordinary citizens. And politicians are different from ordinary citizens in two ways. One, they see politics as a job, whereas for ordinary citizens, it's not a job, it's a civic duty, a responsibility, perhaps. It's not a job, it's not a profession. And the second way in which politicians are different from ordinary citizens is that they are not a random sample of the population. They are typically wealthier, more educated, more male, more white, more, Less shy and bolder. Right. This is the axis I prefer to focus on because I think, like a lot of people, maybe at this point we're a little tired with the essentialization that comes with all this focus on race and gender. And so I actually think the shy, for me is a way to. And the notion of ordinary citizen is a way to talk about all the diversity in the population without necessarily pinning down certain traits over others or emphasizing certain traits over others. So, you know, so politicians tend to skew again, male, white, educated, wealthy, et cetera. But that's not really what neither of these criterion per se is the problem. The problem is that they are not sufficiently as a group like the rest of the country. Right. And they treat politics as a job as opposed to. A duty or a responsibility.
- [15:29]
A
Okay.
- [15:30]
B
And. Sorry. And the shy in all of this are a subcategory of ordinary citizens. Because, of course, among ordinary citizens, among a random sample of the population, you will have some, maybe some politician types. You will have bold people who would be at ease in front of the cameras. But the shy are all the others who are not like that and do not seek power, do not really enjoy attention, do not feel necessarily capable of winning elections, et cetera, et cetera.
- [16:03]
A
And so I think, for me, one of the things that I really thought about when reading the book was we normally. I think most listeners, especially me, normally associate democracy with sort of needing a politician class. And I think what your book does sort of really well is to say that, hey, maybe politics can be something that's not just a profession, but maybe something sort of more right. And so I was sort of wondering, where do you think we went wrong? Like, why is this association between politicians and democracy so strong in our current climate? And how do you sort of go about in your book trying to make that seem a little less. As less natural?
- [16:48]
B
Well, I tend to think that this goes back in part to the founding moment of our modern democracies in the 18th century, when we chose a sort of natural aristocracy as the cast that was going to speak for the people and basically rule with their consent that already genealogically, so to speak, we anchored our understanding of democracy in a very elitist and oligarchic sort of terrain. And then we sort of domesticated the world democracy by using it to refer to that regime form in the 19th century, even though the elitist components were still there and are still there. So it's very interesting. Like, it's. Because it's a. I mean, you know, I myself, I go back and forth on this, okay, are we living in oligarchies, really? It's hard for me to even, you know, completely own that statement. So I think that we could say that we are in hybrid democracies. Hybrid oligarchies. Like these are mixed regimes really, where there is a democratic component. It's true. A moment of popular sovereignty, you might say, in the fact that we choose our rulers and our leaders. But it's very constrained because we don't, you know, the party slates are not decided by us. We really have a limited choice to begin with. So the agenda is set for us by people who are not us. Um, and. And so the oligarchy component is very strong. Uh, so there is. So there's that original scene, if you want, of. Of going with natural aristocracies, as the founders would say, in the US and, and same thing in. In. In France, the Abbe CIS was, you know, sort of the masterminds behind the. The political philosophy of the French Revolution and later the developments that that followed. Really thought that you have to entrust the ruling of the country to people who, you know, are more elevated minds, more educated minds and, and people who will turn this into a job because we live in modern commercial societies. So there's also this argument that unlike the ancient Greeks, we. There's a division of Labor. And so most people are pursuing their own activities, trying to make a living. And then we need some people who will devote their lives to the public thing. Right. So I think there's the original oligarchic dimension. There's this argument from modernity that we live in complex commercial societies where we cannot take care of politics ourselves. It's got to be delegated to a class of professional people. I think that's kind of like the main reasons, I believe, why we call democracy something that's actually very hybrid and insufficiently democratic.
- [20:12]
A
Can you speak maybe to a little bit more about how this system of selecting people through lotteries is going to work? Like, what are the. Yeah, like how do you intend to. I guess, what's the sort of blueprint that you offer in the book for making these kinds of selections?
- [20:32]
B
Well, the initial intuition is very simple. It's one person, one lottery ticket. So as long as you're a member of the Demos. I mean, actually, in practice nobody checks whether you're a citizen, actually. So it's interesting, these citizens assemblies are called citizens assemblies, but in fact there's no gate if you want. As long as you have a phone number in the country or an address, you can be plucked at random. But that's something we could discuss whether it's the right way to do it. But the idea is that as long as you're a member of the Demos, you have an equal chance of being selected to join a representative body that is large enough to capture the main traits and categories that exist in the population. That's a simple way to do it, of course, because in practice, these lot based bodies are quite small. Still in practice, Fishkin's deliberative polls are quite large. They reach the few hundreds. But citizens assemblies per se tend to be much smaller, between 50 and 184. I mean, that's the largest one in France that I know of. You need to do what's called a stratified random sampling, where you define some categories like gender, you know, an education level or bracket, an income bracket, rural versus urban distinction, et cetera, et cetera. And then you fill your assembly on in a way that satisfies those predefined quotas that you have to make sure that the small group is roughly representative of the diversity of the larger country. So it's a bit more technical when you do it that way and a little bit less intelligible for ordinary citizens, perhaps. But it's a variation of the simple principle. One person won lottery ticket. So there are Sortition advocates like my colleague, the philosopher Alex Guerrero, who thinks that we shouldn't do stratified random sampling. He thinks that that's a violation of the political equality that is inscribed in the principle one person lottery ticket. So he's willing to live with distortions of the, you know, of representation inside the assembly in order to preserve this equality. But I think he has in mind large assemblies anyway, so I'm not sure that would be necessarily a problem for him. I think that I'm a pragmatist. I think that as long as you're being very transparent about the methods and the criteria you use, and you use reputable agencies, statistical agencies, to do your sampling, I think it's fine. In fact, there's a professor at Harvard, of course, computer science, who's even designed an algorithm that tries to optimize for both perfect representativeness of your sample and maximal equalization of your chances so that you make sure that some people don't have disproportionate chances of being chosen just because they're a demographic niche or something like that. So I'm not exactly sure how they do that, but mathematically, apparently you can try to both get your representative sample and stay as close as possible to the principal one person won lottery ticket. Hope that makes sense.
- [24:28]
A
Yes, no, it definitely does. And I think you speak a lot in the book about how you came to sort of this model by being very involved in a few of these real life examples of citizen assemblies. Right. Can you talk maybe a little bit about what are some of the cases that you're really inspired by? How did you get involved in them and what did you sort of learn from all of these processes?
- [24:56]
B
Well, so as I said, I come from pretty much pure theory. The first book was mostly pure theory and the second book was going to be a bit more empirical, based on the observation of, I mean the second hand of observation and after the fact, interviews about the Icelandic process. And then what happened is that my native country of France decided to run one of those processes. President Macron was faced with the so called Yellow Vest revolt in the fall 2018, which is when I was finishing the book, more or less, maybe, yeah, I was almost done, something like that. And then he didn't know what to do, I guess. So he used police forces first and then when that didn't work out so well, he thought, okay, I'm going to try a deliberative solution. And he convened what he called a great national debate. So it was a two month process through which all French people were invited to convene and gather in town hall meetings, online, in forums, or were invited to join local citizens assemblies at the regional level on the basis of random selection. And that series of processes took place over a period of about two months, between February and March 2020, I think 2019, 19. And what came out of that process was first that, well, it really helped President Macron's popularity, which shot back up because people felt, okay, he's really listening and he's really trying. And another thing that came out of this is that people seem to want new forms of democratic governance when it came to climate issues. So he heard that message loud and clear, and he said, I'm going to convene, starting this summer, a citizens Convention for climate inspired by the Irish president. So a few years back, in fact, since 2012, there had been many Irish Citizens Assembly. So Macron thought, why don't we try that in France as well? So when I saw that, I, you know, I thought, well, I'll just go and sit there and from the galleys, galleries, and watch what's happening. And so I got my accreditation as a researcher and I went there and I sat on all the meetings and, you know, because I also gave my opinion and I knew people in the Governance committee, of course, I guess they. They thought that could be a useful resource for the next one. So when the next Citizens Convention came around, I got a phone call from the cesus, the third Legislative assembly in France, which is now in charge of organizing this convention. And they asked me if I would sit on the governance committee alongside 14 other experts to help steer and. Conduct these Citizens Assembly. So that's how I got involved.
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A
And what do you feel like were the main learning points that you got after you sat through this entire process?
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B
You mean the first one or the second one, or both?
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A
Well, we can maybe go in sequence. So the first and then the second.
- [28:15]
B
Yeah, well, so as I said, the first one, for me, the main lesson was that it's as much about creating a civic bond as it is about producing a report or a policy recommendation. That this was really striking, how much friendship and love there was in this type of assemblies and. And how transformative it was of people who participated in them. So it was really touching. I saw people come in like that. I always tell the story of this guy that I called Jules in the book. I didn't use their real names because I wasn't sure whether this was appropriate or. So I used pen names, so to speak. So Jules came in the first Day the first weekend, and he had his carry on with him, you know, all weekend long. He was going from room to room and people were asking, why, why don't you check your carry on? There's a quote, you know, room and everything. He said, no, no, no, I, I, this is all a scam, I'm leaving any minute now. And, and he kept saying that. And he stayed until the end of the nine month process and he ended up even going back to his home region to run for elections in his home region. So he was completely transformed and towards the not sure when exactly, I think it's more precise in the book, but I caught him at the end of one of the weekends when the janitors were pushing us out the building on a Sunday afternoon. And I asked him, you said you were going to leave and now you're one of the most active and vocal participants. What happened? And he said, well, when I feel loved and there are a lot of people who love me in this assembly. And he just, you know, he went from disgruntled to happy and feeling recognized as a human being. And I think it just causally affected his commitment to the group, to his desire to be involved in politics more generally. And so for me, it would be idiotic not to see the potential to reconnect people. We live in an age of loneliness and disconnection and assortative matching, as the economists say, where people only marry within their narrow economic group. And here is a tool that you can use to bring people together across all kinds of divisions, across, you know, socioeconomic inequalities, across partisan divides, and they bond and they become friends and they find some dignity in the whole thing. They express gratitude to the organizers and I think they rediscover a form of patriotism, if you ask me. I did. I mean, vicariously, I did. I had the, I think this is an emotion I didn't even know felt like, and I felt it. So I think that given the dire state of our democracies, I don't see why we wouldn't leverage this potential to mend the social fabric, cure loneliness in some ways, and give dignity to people who feel very diminished and ignored. So that was the main lesson from the first one. The second one, I guess the lesson there were confirmed the lesson from the first convention. But additionally, because now I got to experience the use of power, I'm very concerned that the current design of the citizen assemblies is too vulnerable to capture. I think this is something that critics had been saying and I had heard it in a Sort of abstract way, but having been on top of one of these assemblies and in charge of kind of like leading one, I realized yeah, absolutely, we could totally shape the outcome. We could. I mean, it's not that simple because the citizens push back. I mean, this is the other lesson. Like if you give them this much, they will claim the whole pie. I mean, once you tell them it's your convention, you're the one in charge, they take you very seriously. So when you then try to or inadvertently try to lead them a certain way, they resist. So that was both reassuring and worrying. So the worrying part is that I realized we had too much power for our own good. I do think the next iteration of the citizens assemblies need to basically be self governed. There needs to be a subset of the citizens who are rotating, probably on the basis of random selection, to make the key decision that are about process, about expert selection, about all of that, which means a degree of sophistication and planning. And it's more demanding of the citizens for sure. But I don't see how we can answer the accusation of potential for capture unless we do that. And when you think of the model of, you know, the bullet, the council of five hundred in ancient Athens, or like these are self run assemblies, they were not governed from the outside by experts. So we need to shoot for that the next time around, I think. But on the other, the flip, the flip side of that lesson is that the power we had qua governance committee at the beginning just vanished as we went. As time passed by, like, first of all, the citizens kept saying, well, we don't like these experts, we want to invite these other experts. And it would just go on Twitter and invite them anyway. So you know, they just took the, they took their freedom and they ran with it. They thought we were incompetent in some ways, which we were because, you know, it's 15 of us, we have full time jobs, we're doing this and I mean I'm doing this from the U.S. can you imagine? I had to fly there. And it's completely inefficient if you ask me. And I was on zoom meeting at 3am and it was ridiculous. So when they realized they couldn't get from us what they wanted, which is for example, organizing the visit of palliative care units in hospitals and we couldn't get acts together in time. Didn't happen. They just did it themselves. They went and knocked on doors and you know, connected with like doctors they knew through their own networks. By the end, 70% of the participants, 70% of the 184 members of the Convention on End of Life had visited in person a palliative care unit. And it's very interesting because, you know, it was the initiative of the people in the group who were opposed to liberalizing the law on assisted dying. They. They thought that the solution was not to make it easier for people to kill themselves or easier for doctors to kill their patients when they were in too much pain. It was to invest massively instead in palliative care units so that everybody would have access to the medication and care and reassuring environment that you need when you're close to the end. Right. So I just think that this was very reassuring. We saw that over time, the citizens took the power in their own hands. And luckily, on this committee you had people like me, we had three specialists of participatory deliberative democracy, including me. And we are, of course, naturally, professionally predisposed to letting go of power, I think. So I had no issue with that. But you also had doctors in there, people from the medical profession who are pretty predisposed to the opposite, and in fact, had very paternalistic attitudes throughout. But even they, I think, were changed by the process and came to realize, wow, we need to let go of power. We need to let them decide. So, for example, at the end.
- [36:41]
A
There.
- [36:42]
B
Was a discussion about, okay, who's going to write the statement to the nation that the citizens had decided they wanted to produce? And then who is going to bring the. Who is going to represent the group in the meeting with President Macron at the Elysees at the very end? And we asked ourselves, our committee of 15, we asked ourselves, do we have them identify who's going at random? Which had been more or less the default approach. Do we have them elect the people they think are best for the purpose? What do we do? And we had no idea. And we realized this is not even for us to decide, this is something they should decide. So we organized a plenary where they were given a chance to debate the pros and cons of various selection mechanisms. And interestingly, it was one of the most interesting sessions, actually plenaries, in terms of the quality of the debate. So when it came to choosing the people who were going to write the text and speak it to French tv, they went with so called election without candidate. So that's a mechanism which is like election, but you don't have a slate of candidates, right? People can vote for anyone they want from among the entire group. So that's what they did and they chose the seven people who had been the quiet, I call them the bees, but, you know, the quiet workers inside the subgroups. And so they'd been sort of known, you know, it's not that. I mean, even after nine months or eight months or maybe seven months, I don't remember exactly the duration. But 184 people, it's hard to know them all, but somehow, you know, because they were rotated into different subgroups, there was enough of a distributed knowledge about each other that they identified the ones that were the hard workers and the people who were likely to produce a good text and be able to speak it convincingly to the rest of the nation. But then when it came to choosing who was going to speak to President Macron at the end and render the report, they had a back and forth about that. And some said, well, we need to identify people who can measure up to President Macron who can speak at his level. And you had a huge pushback from other people who said, well, actually, no, he needs to be brought down to our level. And our assembly is based on the principle of random selection, and we should use that principle to identify the representatives who are going to speak to Macron. And so that's what they did. They chose randomly one man and one woman to go and speak to President Macron at the very end. So just to say again, we came to the conclusion we were not the ones competent to make some of the key decisions. So we had, you know, there's a trade off there, because on the one hand, upstream of the process, you need people to organize this thing, so you need to scaffold it, you need to bring it up to speed, and you need to kickstart it. So it's gotta be someone, might as well be people who have some knowledge of the topic, some knowledge of the process, etc. But once the process starts, the question is, do we still have the legitimacy to run it? Who are we? We've been appointed by the Prime Minister. I don't know. Yeah, we have some procedural legitimacy that way, but I think from the perspective of the citizens, it's a bit dubious. Right. And in fact, I'm editing a special issue of a Journal of Sortition with my former postdocs, Theophil Penigo and Antonin Lassell Webster. And we collected some testimonies from citizens from that convention who said, we actually think it would have been more efficient and more accurate to have more input and control by the citizens themselves. And they liked us. I mean, I can't complain. I Think this citizen convention on end of life ran a lot more smoothly than the first one on climate, which had a lot of tensions. And I think in our case it went well because in part the president of our governance committee was very approachable and we had learned the lessons from prior mistakes. So we were really course correcting all the time and we made tons of mistakes, don't get me wrong. So they liked us, but they also saw our limitations. And I think many of them thought that it's too micromanaged, it's too top down and next time this needs to be bottom up and truly self governing. And the question is, can we do it? I don't know, it's never been done. So now I'm. I mean this is a separate project maybe for the next book, but I'm trying to get with a number of partners here in Connecticut. We're trying to get a citizens assembly at the state level in Connecticut on local public services funded. And I think at this point we're halfway through our funding goal. So I'm very optimistic it will take place this summer. And the key design feature I'm focused on personally is self governance. I want this assembly to be empowered from day one so that they have complete ownership of the process and the output. So we'll see if that happens.
- [42:04]
A
Okay? No, I really love this. Like to me the Citizens assembly is so beautiful because I think not only are the citizens able to get more control and power over the sort of things that matter to them, but even I guess what you were saying, like you have the top down administrators or like bureaucrats or experts who are actually changing their view on what it means to I think give the citizens more power. For me personally this is something that is so interesting because I think I hear so much about why any sort of government needs technocracy. You need technical experts and you need sort of people with sort of expertise to do this. I was wondering, you know, do you think. I think what you've shown us is this really good scenario of how political change or a referendum can sort of be very important in maybe eliminating some of that technocratic culture that we currently have today. Do you think maybe. I don't know how much thought have you given to thinking about the ways that your model when applied to politics maybe can be applied to some other administrative forms. Do you think this goes beyond, can be scaled to beyond government bureaucracy to. I don't know.
- [43:24]
B
Yes, I think it can. I'll tell you what was really interesting is indeed the transformation. It's not Just the transformation of the citizen participants. It's a transformation of the experts and the technocrats who come to speak to them. For example, the Climate assembly, from day one, you had a litany of recommendations and a series of experts that came to testify and said, you need to propose a carbon tax. A carbon tax is a solution to everything. And of course, they were a bit skeptical because the carbon tax that Macron tried to implement in 2018 was what caused the yellow vest movements. And. And so people knew it was kind of like explosive and a very regressive tax that punished poor workers who need their cars because they don't live in the city center and have access to public transportation and stuff like that. So they listened. They listened, but they resisted. And in the end they said, you know what? No, we're going to try 149 other solutions before we look at the carbon tax. And if we're going to do a carbon tax, it can only be at the EU level, because otherwise France is shooting itself in the foot and we're not going to be competitive. And so they were very, I thought, smart about it and definitely not captured by experts on that particular issue, even though the consensus from experts was overwhelming. And what was fascinating to see is that by the end, so the experts who had stayed with the convention started to mellow and they were like, well, you know what? Yeah, maybe we can do without a carbon tax. Maybe there are other levers we can pull. And so I think they got. They were a bit shell shocked and even converted in some ways, or at least they saw it from a different perspective and they were sobered. And I saw other experts come in. We have these civil servants, public servants called enarc, people who are trained at LENA in France, which is the top sort of school for making it into the top bureaucracy. And in fact, they are sort of crypto rulers, really. They have so much power in the background in the French state. And they came in and they were lecturing with great authority about, you know, they came in with long PowerPoints about the hierarchy of norms and this and that. And then because in a group of 150 people or 184 people, you always have someone who's gone to law school at some point or vaguely remembers the hierarchy of norms. And you got a question out of left field where like, well, what about private contracts? And I could see the woman at the podium was like, what? These people are actually very competent. And so it sort of humbled them in the right way. And I have to say we have Great public servants. I think that there is an arrogance of that group of people, but they're also very smart. And so when you all of a sudden flip the script and say you're not on top anymore, you're on top, that's a phrase I use all the time because it's such a shortcut for the whole concept, right? It's, you're at this, remember, you're a public servant, you're a civil servant. You're at the service of ordinary citizens, the public. So your job is to advise, enlighten, you know, answer questions, offer frameworks, but your job is not to decide. It's not to nudge or direct or steer or, you know. And I think they got it very much. And I think once they bought the concept and they were convinced of the actual competence of that group, they were completely on board. So I think it wouldn't be. It's not implausible to me that we could really fundamentally change the dynamics inside existing hierarchies or bodies. And in fact, what's interesting to me is that shortly after the great national debate in 2019, I remember the people who contacted me and people in my space of deliberative democracy were actually bureaucrats. They were very eager. They were like, you know, we're supposed to be serving the public, but we have barely any interactions with them. Our interactions are only at the lower levels of people who are at the desk and receiving all the grievances. And we need to have a more direct contact with the public we serve. And we are thinking maybe small juries of randomly selected citizens could do some work alongside our bureaucracies at the higher level and help them come up with regulation that actually work. And I don't have all these blind spots that French complain about, right, that are not so heavy, that are not so slow, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought that was very interesting. And then finally, I should say something about maybe an interesting and to me, surprising transplantation of some of my ideas to the world of its investment funds and pension funds. Actually, it's not my ideas, it's ideas that are, you know, in the space of sortation and lot based assemblies. But it's, I guess in that case for me that this came about. So economists like my colleague Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago School of Business and Oliver Hart at Harvard have been kind of like thinking about corporate governance reform for many years because their view is that currently shareholders are not represented well inside pension funds, inside investment funds in particular. And they think that the money is managed according to a very narrow. Function, which is, okay, maximize profit. But it turns out that many shareholders value other things than financial value. They value ethical considerations, they value environmental considerations, they value animal welfare, et cetera, et cetera. And they're willing to pay a small price, but still a price, to include these ethical considerations in the calculation and the investment plans. But somehow investment managers never factor in these views. And in that sense, they claim to be fulfilling their fiduciary duty, but they're also violating the actual preferences of their shareholders. So they've been struggling to find a way to translate and bring to the level of managers the preferences of the shareholders. And in the industry, there's something called pass through voting, through which shareholders who have the time and energy can vote. And it's a complicated process, it's very boring, and nobody really does it. And then I gave a talk on Luigi's podcast called Capitalism, which, by the way, is an amazing podcast. I recommend it. And during the podcast, we were talking about Citizens Assemblies, and he was like, well, could this be used in the context of investment funds? And could we bring shareholder juries like that to delineate investment guidelines that are ethical? And I said, sure, why not? And then so few months later, we ended up writing a paper with Oliver and Rigi putting forward that idea. So I think it's really a building block or a tool that you can use in many contexts where you're not happy with the representation you're getting, in my view. And it breaks because it pulls from people deep in the body politic or deep in your shareholder body, you get information you would not get otherwise. And on top of that, because it's a deliberative body, you process all that information in a way that can be very generative and. And will be producing policies and recommendations that are more likely to satisfy the larger group you're trying to satisfy.
- [51:43]
A
Now, I'm really curious to see whether these investment funds, these assemblies for investment funds are going to work out, because.
- [51:51]
B
I think, well, so I should say. Sorry, I just want to plug the work of Emily Cooper, who actually tried this before we thought of theorizing it, to be honest. So she's already been running Citizens Assemblies in the context of a Dutch pension fund. So she did that two, three years ago. this point, it was a small group, 50 people, but it was a very compelling first sort of experiment and pilot. And now she's been hired by Nest, which is a British pension fund, to do the same thing for another pension fund. So I Think in our case, what's interesting is that, you know, she's using the Citizens assembly model as is, meaning it's like one person, one lottery ticket. In our model with Luigi and Oliver, we're considering, we're taking as a constraint the framework of shareholder democracy, where how much money you have invested actually matters. So it's not like one. So we're struggling with that because on the one hand, there are good reasons to want to give more weight to wealthier investors or more invested people if you want. But on the other hand, I think since the question is to arbitrage between value and values, between financial value and ethical values, I tend to think that it should be one shareholder, one lottery ticket, not one share, one lottery ticket. So we're having this back and forth. It's very interesting. I think in the end we're probably going to end up in a place where it's kind of like a sensitory democracy where richer people have more of a chance of being selected. But the key thing is that once they're selected and part of the representative assembly or jury that's based on random selection, they have the exact same voice inside that assembly. So basically, just to answer your question, yes, it can be transposed to different contexts, but there are some constraints in the case of investment funds, for example, that demand some tweaking potentially.
- [53:56]
A
Okay, this is amazing. I'm really, I think this is definitely going to be something that's really exciting and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about this. I think in the future. We really like to ask our authors this as like a final question, but what are you most excited to work on next?
- [54:15]
B
Oh, many things. So one, there's this, as I mentioned, this Citizens assembly on local public services in Connecticut. I mean, if it takes off, it's going to be really interesting. And as I said, I'm particularly excited about trying to bring about a self governing assembly from the beginning. We'll see. Maybe it will fail. I hope not. I trust it won't, but I can't guarantee it, of course. And I'm also excited about work on the AI that I've been postponing for too long now. But I really want to spend more time with that because, you know, I'm an epistemic democrat and so I place a lot of emphasis on the instrumental properties of democracy and in particular the knowledge aggregating properties of democratic procedures. And basically it's an argument for democracy based on the collective intelligence of humans. But now of course comes in this, you know, powerful new entity called artificial intelligence. And what if it turns out to be so much smarter than humans, even when they are connected and sort of made smarter together through democratic procedures? And I have some objections and some ways to some answers and ways to answer that objection, but I haven't really taken the time to write it down. So I hope to be able to do that in the near future.
- [55:40]
A
This is really exciting. Yeah. No, I'm really curious to see, like, what your eventual answers are going to be. And. Yeah. Once again. Oh, sorry.
- [55:48]
B
Me too.
- [55:50]
A
Yeah. But once again, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. And remember to, for the audience, that Professor Lan De Mo's book, politics Without Politicians, will be out in bookstores today. Thank you. Thank you, Junior. Sam.