Foreign Policy Live How to Have Politics Without Politicians
Mar 18, 2026
Hélène Landemore, political theorist at Yale who champions deliberative democracy and citizens' assemblies. She argues electoral politics skew toward elites. She explains how randomly selected, diverse assemblies learn from experts and deliberate. She contrasts this collective sortition model with populist leadership and explores real-world experiments like France’s climate convention.
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Elections Produce Oligarchic Selection
- Elections systematically oversample the wealthy and connected, producing an oligarchic selection bias rather than equal access to power.
- Hélène Landemore argues random selection (lottery) is the only method that approximates one-person, one-chance equality in political selection.
What Citizens Assemblies Are And How They Work
- Citizens' assemblies are large, randomly selected groups brought together over months to deliberate on controversial public issues.
- Landemore notes almost 1,000 cases worldwide, mostly local, that mix ages and backgrounds and produce consensus recommendations for policymakers.
France's Climate Convention Rejected A Carbon Tax
- France's 2019-20 Citizens' Convention on Climate convened 150 randomly selected citizens for nine months and rejected a national carbon tax.
- The assembly proposed 149 alternatives, prioritizing not punishing working-class drivers and favoring EU-level pricing instead.
