Hélène Landemore's Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This roundtable brings together scholars from across the political science and political theory spectrum to discuss the theory, practice and prospects—both intellectual and political—of Hélène Landemore’s exciting new book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century (Princeton, forthcoming 2020). The book speaks directly to this year’s theme, “Democracy, Difference and Destabilization,” in the unusual boldness with which it tackles one of the foremost political questions of our time: Has traditional representative democracy run its course and if so, what other form of democracy can and should replace it?

Landemore’s Open Democracy theorizes a new paradigm of democracy where access to power is meant to be genuinely accessible—“open”—to ordinary citizens. This paradigm is meant as an alternative to and an improvement on the electoral paradigm we know as “representative democracy,” whose oligarchic biases are partly to blame for the crisis of our democracies. Resisting the sirens of direct democracy, however, against Rousseau, e-democrats, and advocates of a democracy of permanent referendums, the book defends instead a non-electoral understanding of democratic representation, where the act of standing for others counts as democratic when the selection mechanism for that role treats citizens equally and inclusively. The book explores in particular the democratic merits of lottocratic representation (resulting from random selection), self-selected representation, and even liquid representation, concluding that lottocratic representation, in particular, offers a promising path forward. The book suggests centering democratic institutions around the ideal of the deliberative “open mini-public”—a large body of randomly selected citizens gathered to debate central political issues and define an agenda for the polity. The book more generally defends five institutional principles as the normative core of an open democracy: participation rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency, arguing that these should inform our mental schema about what democracy means and guide future institutional reforms. In keeping with its commitment to “inductive political theory,” the book builds on empirical case studies, centrally the 2010-2013 Icelandic constitutional process, but also elements of the French Great National Debate and the Convention on Climate Change, to demonstrate that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elected elites, at the heart of democratic power is both feasible and desirable.

We anticipate that our discussion of this pathbreaking project will cover a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to the theory and history of political representation, the normative significance of each of Landemore’s five institutional principles, and the rewards and challenges of doing “inductive political theory”.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

Presenters

• Helene E. Landemore Yale University

• Christopher H. Achen Princeton University

• Daniela Cammack University of California, Berkeley

• Joshua Cohen Stanford University

• Ethan J. Leib Fordham Law School

• Peter C. Stone Trinity College, Dublin

• David M. Farrell University College Dublin