Hélène Landemore

French political scientist

Hélène Landemore
Born	1976
Nationality	French, American
Education	Harvard University, PhD
Occupation(s)	Researcher, political scientist
Employer	Yale University (since 2009)
Known for	Open Democracy, Cognitive Diversity
Website	https://www.helenelandemore.com/

Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University.^[1] She has a PhD from Harvard University.^[1] Her subfield is political theory and she is known for her works on democratic theory.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

Biography

After a childhood spent in Normandy, Landemore began higher studies in Paris at the age of 18.^[5] She joined the École Normale and Sciences Po Paris. In 2008 she received a Ph.D. from Harvard University with a thesis on the idea of collective intelligence applied to the justification of democracy.^[6]

Public life

She researched the 2010 participatory constituent process in Iceland and directly observed the 2019-20 French’s Citizen Convention for Climate.^[7]^[8] In September 2022 she was appointed to the governance committee of the French Citizens' Convention on end of life.^[9] She regularly presents her ideas and proposals in French^[7]^[10]^[11]^[12] and American newspapers.^[5]^[13]

Theories

Hélène Landemore’s research focuses on deliberative democracy and collective intelligence.^[5]

Criticism of electoral democracy

Like David Van Reybrouck and Brett Hennig, she observes that elections are more aristocratic than democratic, as they empower a tiny social elite.^[12] Elected parliaments are never representative of the entire population. In particular, women, working-class people, and social minorities are systematically underrepresented.

Money provided by rich donors to political campaigns have an important impact on electoral politics, particularly in the United States of America.^[14] 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.^[15]

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.^[12]

Cognitive Diversity

The diversity of the members of an assembly is a strength for deliberation.^[16] 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. We cannot predict in advance what knowledge and experiences will be useful to face a political problem. Reason then commands that we choose maximum diversity over the specialized ability.^[16]

It is an epistemic and probabilist argument in favour of democratic inclusion and sortition.

"Open Democracy"

Hélène Landemore proposes a new paradigm, "Open Democracy," which rests on five principles:^[17]

Participation rights: the rights of expression and association, to which are added the rights of petition and citizen’s initiative. It shall 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 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. Edited volume: 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, Jason Brennan. Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less?, Oxford University Press, 2021.

Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich. Edited volume: Digital Technology and Democratic Theory, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2021.

Books in French

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

References

^ ^a ^b "About". Hélène Landemore. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
^ Hurst, Alexander (2020-02-18). "France Turns to Citizen-Legislators to Craft Climate Reforms". The American Prospect. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
^ Cohen, Patricia (2011-06-14). "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth (Published 2011)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
^ "There Are Better Ways to Do Democracy". Bloomberg.com. 2019-04-11. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Heller, Nathan. "Politics Without Politicians". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
^ "Hélène Landemore | Department of Political Science". politicalscience.yale.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ ^a ^b "" La Convention citoyenne pour le climat pourrait préfigurer une nouvelle forme de démocratie "". Le Monde.fr (in French). 2020-02-10. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ Andéol Lê Quan Phong (2020-06-23). "Sauver le climat, renouveler la démocratie : l'épopée de la Convention citoyenne pour le climat". lvsl.fr - Tout reconstruire, tout réinventer (in French). Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ Cummings, Mike (2022-11-29). "Yale's Landemore helps guide France's unique citizens' convention". YaleNews. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
^ "Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat : peut-on réconcilier les citoyens avec leurs institutions ?". France Culture (in French). Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ "Hélène Landemore : " Être capable de définir les termes d'un débat, c'est la moitié du pouvoir "". L'Humanité (in French). 2017-01-06. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Hélène Landemore : " Le vrai pouvoir démocratique va bien au-delà de la possibilité de choisir ses gouvernants "". L'Humanité (in French). 2019-02-24. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ Klein, Ezra (2021-02-23). "Opinion | A Radical Proposal for True Democracy". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
^ "Pas vraiment une démocratie, de moins en moins une république. La grande fatigue d'un système rongé par l'argent et trop verrouillé au niveau constitutionnel, par Hélène Landemore". tnova.fr. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
^ Gilens, Martin; Page, Benjamin I. (September 2014). "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". Perspectives on Politics. 12 (3): 564–581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595. ISSN 1537-5927.
^ ^a ^b Landemore, Hélène (2013-05-01). "Deliberation, cognitive diversity, and democratic inclusiveness: an epistemic argument for the random selection of representatives". Synthese. 190 (7): 1209–1231. doi:10.1007/s11229-012-0062-6. ISSN 1573-0964. S2CID 21572876.
^ Landemore, Hélène (2020). Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691181998.