How to Have Politics Without Politicians

**Ravi Agrawal** (0:00)
When you want your spring break to feel like...

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
And your kids' pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like...

**Ravi Agrawal** (0:13)
Ooh, and room service to feel like...

**Hélène Landemore** (0:16)
Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at hilton.com.

**Ravi Agrawal** (0:27)
Hilton.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
For this day.

**Ravi Agrawal** (0:31)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.
So it's fair to say that democracy is in trouble. Several rankings show we are in what scholars call a democratic recession. That countries have become less free, less democratic, less equal. Poll after poll shows that ordinary citizens are losing faith not only in their politicians, but in their political systems as a whole. The conventional wisdom is that the fix to these widely acknowledged problems is to reform various aspects of it, to focus on more equitable rules around campaign finance, or to better educate voters, or maybe even to limit voting to better educated citizens. In other words, the answer is piecemeal fixers that often place the burden on voters and not elites. On the victims, in other words. Well, my guest today says that those fixers will not work. She says democracy isn't the problem. The problem is electoral politics. And the answer is not some sort of band-aid. The answer is to get rid of elections altogether, to cut out the politicians. And in their stead, to find new ways of involving ordinary citizens in deliberation. To make them feel heard. To make them listen to each other and come closer. To have them deliberate on housing crises or drug crises. And come up with solutions. In consultation with experts. But to come up with solutions that make sense for their particular communities. All of this might sound radical. It might sound fuzzy. But it is, in fact, being experimented with, right now, in a growing number of countries. So I thought we could carve out a little bit of time today to drop our assumptions and listen to what might seem like a radical idea, but has some real lessons for all of us. Hélène Landemore is the author of the new book, Politics Without Politicians. She grew up in France and is today a professor at Yale University. This conversation was taped in February. Let's dive in.
Hélène, welcome to FP Live.

**Hélène Landemore** (2:55)
Thank you, Ravi. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Ravi Agrawal** (2:57)
The pleasure is ours. The book is fantastic. So let me start with a point at which you begin in the book where you say that electoral politics is beyond repair, but then you say that democracy is not. Explain that.

**Hélène Landemore** (3:11)
Well, maybe because I'm a theorist, I have the luxury of taking a step back philosophically, historically, and looking at the bigger picture. And my sense is that the ideal of democracy, our aspiration to people's power, is still very much alive and very much in people's heart. But the implementation, electoral democracy is failing us over and over again. And I think at this point, it's time to ask the tough questions. Like, do we still need politicians? They may have performed a valuable role in the 18th century, when the conditions and the levels of education were lower, when technologies didn't connect us so closely, etc., etc. But I think now they might be causing more problems than they solve.

**Ravi Agrawal** (3:58)
But what is it about the whole debate about specific reforms? And you've been a scholar in this area for so long, and I think there was a time when you entertained ideas to fix these elements of electoral democracy as we know it. What's made you give up on all of those discussions and debates?

**Hélène Landemore** (4:17)
Well, two things. One, on the theoretical side, there's this basic truth that I think our societies refuse to face up to, which is that elections are an oligarchic selection mechanism. The Greeks knew it. The philosophers of the 18th century...

**Ravi Agrawal** (4:34)
Explain that for a minute. What do you mean by oligarchic selection?

**Hélène Landemore** (4:38)
It means that they will systematically, not accidentally, over sample the wealthy, the connected, the already powerful in society, right? So they won't distribute power equally, which would be a democratic way of selecting representatives, when everybody has an equal chance of accessing the center of power. The only way to get that, to get this equal distribution of power, is through random selection, one person, one lottery ticket. So any deviation from that basic sort of selection mechanism will generate inequalities, but elections specifically create an oligarchic, even plutocratic selection bias.