Hélène Landemore | Who Owns Democracy? Citizens vs. Elites

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Welcome to Season 7 of How to Fix Democracy. This season, we're turning our focus to one of the defining questions of our time, democratic resilience. Democracy today faces extraordinary pressure, from polarization and disinformation, to geopolitical rivalry, economic shocks, and declining public trust. In Season 7, we ask, what makes some democracies withstand stress while others falter? What roles do institutions, civic culture, leadership, and citizens play? And can resilience be intentionally built into democratic systems? Across this season, we'll speak with leaders, scholars, and innovators to examine crisis, backsliding, and renewal, and to explore how democracies adapt under pressure. At a time when democratic norms can feel fragile, this season takes a sober but forward-looking approach. Democracy is not self-sustaining.

It requires vigilance, adaptation, and participation. Because the real question isn't whether democracy will face disruption. It's how it responds. Welcome to Season 7

Andrew Keen (1:15)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to How to Fix Democracy. We're on to our seventh series now. We're focusing on the resilience of democracy in this series. Our first episode was with Maury Giles, the CEO of Braver Angels. And today we're talking to an old friend of How to Fix Democracy, Hélène Landemore. She is a very distinguished professor of political philosophy. She teaches at Yale University, and she's an expert on citizen assemblies and direct democracy. She was on series three of our show, and she's back now. Hélène, welcome back to How to Fix Democracy.

Hélène Landemore (1:56)

Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back.

Andrew Keen (1:58)

So Hélène, this idea of the resiliency of democracy seems to suggest that we can always go back, that the system, if it's threatened or undermined, is resilient. But I wonder if there's another way of thinking about the resilience of democracy in the sense that the formal institutions of representative democracy are of course one way or the other resilient, but there's a deeper, a more profound resilience about democracy that goes back to citizens. Is that a fair beginning to a conversation about the resilience of democracy?

Hélène Landemore (2:40)

Yes, I think it is. I mean, I assume you mean by resilience, the capacity to, you know, rebound, overcome obstacles, get stronger from the sort of shocks you receive. And I do think that one of the superiority of democracy over competing regimes is that it's more resilient that way. It's less brittle, it's less fragile, because it distributes power widely. And so that means the center of gravity is low, if you want. It's spread across the citizenry. And so it's as strong as the citizenry, really. Whereas for me, oligarchies, autocracies tend to be only as strong as the leader. And the leader, it's one or a few, and they can be caught up in very counterproductive ways of thinking. They can be fragile health-wise, they can be too old for their own good, they can be, you know, or they can be stuck and stubborn.

And it's too personalized. Whereas I think that the resilience of democracy is in the proceduralization of sovereignty, of decision-making. So again, it's spread across the citizenry. That's supposed to be the case in a real democracy, right? So the question is, are we in sufficiently real democracies that we can expect this kind of resilience?

Andrew Keen (3:56)

Yeah, and a real democracy, of course, is defined by the kinds of democracy you want. I mean, supporters of representative democracy, when they think of real democracies, perhaps go back to the 19th century in the United States, to the Constitution, the Federalist Papers. But I know for you, in a lot of your writing, particularly in your new book, Politics Without Politicians, you go back much further than these modern institutions of representative democracy. You go back to the Greeks, Helene, and to the promise, the idea of citizen, direct citizen democracy in Athens.

Hélène Landemore (4:38)

Athens, classical Athens, so 5th and 4th century BC Athens. In the way they considered politics a non-professional job, right? It was the job of everyone and anyone, whereas our modern conceptions have tended to sort of draw a circle around power, and only some people are in it. And usually ordinary citizens are not in that circle, because you need to have the right credentials, you need to have like the right almost diplomas or a law degree. You need to have the right connections and money.

And so we've professionalized politics, so people go into politics when they are 20, they climb the party ladder, they stay, they win some seat somewhere, and then they stay in power for 20, 30, 40 years sometimes. Sometimes they die on the job, as we've seen recently in the US. So it's a very different conception of democracy. It's very, in my view, insufficiently democratic conception of democracy. So it has some democratic elements. We are still voting. We're still asked for our opinion about, you know, whose leaders should be chosen. And sometimes in some democracies, we get a say about key issues, like, for example, Brexit or, you know, the referendum options. But for the most part, we're very passive. Most of us only get to intervene every five or four or five years in a decision process where the outcomes have been predefined by other people than us, typically elites, you know, bureaucrats, party leaders, etc. Whereas ancient democracy considered that everything was in the hands of ordinary people, whether poor or rich, whether educated or not, including the agenda. So the agenda was set by a jury of ordinary people selected at random. And then the decision making was performed by an assembly of everyone, everyone who wanted to show up, to show up could. So that to me is closer to the real essence of democracy, right? It's ruling and being ruled in turn. It's political equality taken so seriously that you actually distribute power in a way that scales us today on the basis of one lottery ticket, one person. And I think that today when I bring up these ancient ideas, I sense the fear, the panic almost of people who want to defend the status quo. Like for them, it's too democratic. But my question to them is that, well, are you a democrat or not? Like, do you really believe in ordinary people and the people in general? Or do you just pretend to, and you want to keep invoking that notion, but really keep power in the hands of just a happy few?