Modern democracies are broken, but there is a way to fix them, according to Hélène Landemore.
“I have good news and bad news,” Landemore said. “Bad news is electoral politics, it seems to me, is beyond repair. The good news is democracy isn’t, and you can fix it.”
The Clough Center hosted Landemore and other speakers in an event titled “Envisioning Democratic Futures” on Thursday, in which panelists addressed issues facing democracies around the world today.
Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale University, wrote a book in 2020 titled Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, in which she argued for a new system of democracy in which popular rule is available to all.
“A system based on an external representation is no longer conducive—if it ever was—to democracy,” Landemore said.
Even in countries with advanced democracies, the majority of the population thinks their leaders are corrupt, Landemore said.
“In three of some of the supposedly most advanced democracies—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—over two-thirds of the population think the governing elites are corrupt,” Landemore said.
Given the development of society, Landemore said she believes there should be major changes in the way democratic governments function.
“While electoral representation may have been sent 200 years ago in a very different context and for a very different population, it is no longer fit for this purpose, especially in modern societies of educated citizens with access to information,” Landemore said.
Landemore argued that solutions like campaign finance reform or greater efforts to educate voters may have good intentions but are nonetheless not the right answer.
“This way of thinking is wrong,” Landemore said. “Worse, it leads to blaming and indeed punishing the victim.”
An integral part of Landemore’s solution to the problem facing democracies is to empower ordinary citizens.
“What is the solution?” Landemore asked the audience. “It is a system in which power is accessible to all and open, in that sense, to ordinary citizens.”
Landemore’s vision for improvement includes appointing assemblies of citizens and creating citizens’ initiatives, she said.
“My preferred vision for something like this, which is by no means the only possible one, centers on deliberative assemblies of citizens appointed through civic lotteries, large juries, and combine those with regular moments of mass voting on silent issues or issues put to a referendum by citizens initiatives, as well as other forms of local direct participatory mechanism,” said Landemore.
A system like this, Landemore said, will foster more connection among the citizenry.
“Citizen’s assemblies, where people are brought together, are places where solidarity and even a form of civic love can flourish between people from different sides of the political spectrum and on different rungs of the socio-economic ladder,” Landemore said.
