Automatic transcription, it can contain errors.
Alessandro Oppo (00:00)
welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator podcast and our guest of today is Ellen Landemore. ⁓
Thank you for your time.
Helene Landemore (00:08)
Hi Alessandro,
nice to be here.
Alessandro Oppo (00:12)
And I mean, you're working with the intersection of, I don't know, politics and philosophy. How would you define it in your...
Helene Landemore (00:24)
⁓
Technically, I'm a political theorist. So I work in ⁓ a subfield of political science that looks at ⁓ the history of political philosophy, ⁓ the concepts that are used in political science, like sovereignty, equality, freedom, things like that, legitimacy. ⁓ And so I'm bit of a social scientist as well, you could say, but I was trained mostly in political philosophy.
Alessandro Oppo (00:55)
and also the intersection with technology, if I'm right.
Helene Landemore (00:59)
Yes,
it's more recent. I have developed an interest in artificial intelligence, not as an expert, I would say, of the technology itself, more as a user, as a person, as a citizen concerned about its implications for democracy and for ⁓ generally the freedom of human beings. ⁓ But also an optimist about the potential of this technology to augment.
our capacities for connection, ⁓ mobilization of knowledge, and generally improvement of the epistemic properties of democracy, which was my initial field of research.
Alessandro Oppo (01:42)
And how do you think that it can improve democracy? ⁓ Like I also have a lot of trust, but maybe trust is not the right word to use. ⁓ Because I see how technology could help people, could empower them. I wonder in your vision how it would do it.
Helene Landemore (02:08)
Well, I guess I'm an optimist by nature. It's one thing. But the other thing is that my early work was on, as I said, the epistemic properties of democracy, which means simply the knowledge aggregating, knowledge producing properties of our democratic institutions like deliberation and majority rule and other things we think are core to democratic practices and even norms. ⁓ And so it's kind of natural that I would think that a tool that is supposed to
build on human collective intelligence to all the data we generate, all the connections we've established, all the text we've produced, to generate an even higher form of intelligence ⁓ would be a good thing. I I just think that ⁓ artificial intelligence, it is artificial, but fundamentally it is human at the beginning, at the roots. So as long as we keep it...
Under human governance, which of course is the difficult piece in all of this, I think it can be a force for good and a way to connect us more closely, ⁓ solve problems for us, make ⁓ possible a vision of democracy that I think would be difficult to implement without these kind of tools, because you need to aggregate data at a very mass scale. need to...
again, connect people, the mass scales, if we want to have global governance institutions, things like that. I don't see how you do that ⁓ sustainably without this kind of technology. So it's a good news in a way. It comes at the right time. But I do worry that we didn't put in place the dams, know, the institutional checks and balances and the governance structure we need.
to channel that sort of technological breakthrough for the greater good rather than the enrichment of a few people at the top.
Alessandro Oppo (04:07)
Regarding democracy, ⁓ could be several things that can be fixed. For you, is ⁓ something that is problematic? Now we talk about democracy, but then it's representative democracy. It works in a certain way. ⁓ People can vote, but...
then they are sort of inactive or passive for many years. ⁓ I don't know, is this something that... ⁓
Like what is for you democracy and what can be fixed and should be fixed about democracy?
Helene Landemore (04:52)
⁓
So for me, democracy, it's people's power. So it's exercise of power by everyone, if not at once, at least in turn. And so that means that it cannot be just what we have right now, which is consent to power by others every few years, which is its own form of power, you might say, but it's very, very minimal. And I think it's too minimal for... ⁓
you know, the for given our expectations about what democracy should be. So I think the current system, the problem is, that it's not sufficiently democratic. There's not enough democratic power in it. It's power exercised by elites that are selected by elections. ⁓ And I think the fact that these elites are demographically too different from the rest of the people.
makes them more likely to make mistakes, makes them more likely to have blind spots, make them more likely to lose sight of the common good and become a corporate class with its own interests. So that, ⁓ you know, even with the people, the most well-intentioned people at the top, you still do not get the kind of good governance that democracy is supposed to be the promise of. So my view is that we should reform our institutions.
to create spaces at the very least for ordinary people to exercise a real kind of power, which for me would be the legislative power. And at the very least, some kind of agenda setting power for the program that politicians would then legislate on. So how you do that? Well, ⁓ if we could start from scratch, I would not design institutions the way they are designed currently. I would just not start from elections. I would just not use elections at all.
I would follow the Athenian model, just scaled and adapted to modern circumstances and augmented with technologies. So I would have a large randomly selected legislature of maybe 600, 700 randomly selected people who deliberate for months and set up an agenda for the country. And then,
put this program to a referendum with maybe some key issues made more salient because they are more controversial and more likely to be perhaps rejected. And you would have like local ⁓ debates about this, et cetera. You would create a sort of like permanent feedback loop between the people at the top and the people in the larger public. And conversely, I think the agenda of that assembly, which because somebody needs to sit down and spend hours poring over
the complex problems we're facing and come up with proposals. That's not something you do through a referendum. In a referendum, there's a question that's asked that you cannot shape. so referenda are not the proper tools to set an agenda and formulate proposals. But I would say even that assembly that has an agenda-setting power should be informed and base its work on the larger input of the larger public.
through crowd-sourcing techniques, through data sensing tools that could be deployed, through a constant circular process of iteration that makes sure that you get upstream of the deliberation of this agenda setting assembly as much information as possible. Midstream, you also get feedback, and downstream, you get feedback. And so at some point, there's always this question of, OK, but do you really want this?
small group of even 600 people making the loss for us without any kind of accountability. I think if the process is iterative enough and ⁓ you have referenda attached to the key decisions and ⁓ consultation constantly, I don't think that you're at as much risk of losing sight of the common interest that then we are in this sort of... ⁓
much less iterated system of, well, we elect people every few years and then we completely lose control for years and then only recuperate the control of kicking them out but not really swaying necessarily the direction of policy making that much. So that's a vision that I laid out in my book, Open Democracy. It was very abstract and academic in a way. although I...
did rely on examples from Iceland, which in 2010 had a really interesting constitutional process that was inclusive in that way, that was based on the recommendations of a forum of 950 randomly selected people that excluded politicians from the council that wrote the new constitution, that used crowdsourcing techniques to bring in the wisdom of the larger public, that had a referendum downstream that approved the new constitution, et cetera. So was very inspiring.
and I put that in the book. But I also looked at the French Citizens Convention on Climate that President Macron convened in France in 2019-20. Also very inspiring, sort of quasi-legislature really, ⁓ that was at the root of one of our most ambitious climate bill later, the one passed by parliament.
But in that book, it was still a little ⁓ academic, I would say, because I was really focused on rethinking the concept of representation, trying to detach it from elections and saying, representation can be performed by different types of people. It's just the act of speaking and acting on behalf of other people. So this can be done by elected officials, but it can also be done by randomly selected people or appointed people, for that matter, or, you know.
self-selected people. There's nothing mysterious about representation that means that only elected officials can do it. ⁓ And I just argued that if these people who do it based on lot do it, it's likely to be actually better and more accurate in tracking the preferences of the larger group, just in virtue of the fact that they look and think like the rest of the public because they are demographically similar. So that was like the main argument. And so,
In the recent book, Politics Without Politicians, that just came out, I tried to basically turn this into storytelling rather than abstract arguments and really root everything in the observation of the citizens' conventions ⁓ in France, including when I co-governed ⁓ on end-of-life issues. that's, I guess that's a very long way of answering your question about democracy.
Alessandro Oppo (11:49)
I had lot of thoughts while you were speaking, change the way of representation, how people represent other people. So I was thinking also about possible change in the party, so not just left or right, so the person that is elected is representing, I don't know, leftist party or a party from the right, but maybe could be topic related. ⁓
I don't know. And then also I have a sort of question. When you are talking about, let's say, permanent assembly of, I don't know, 600, 700 people, why not more if there is a reason?
Helene Landemore (12:30)
Why not
more? Because it's roughly the average size of parliaments around the world. think historically we seem to have evolved a size that sort of works logistically. Although the Italian parliament, mean, I'm guessing you are Italian or... Yes, well, so apparently it's the largest one in the world. It has over a thousand people. So you could go there.
Alessandro Oppo (12:53)
Yeah.
Helene Landemore (13:00)
I mean, I imagine that if we created a global parliament at the scale of Earth, really, I would want a thousand people because, know, that symbolically almost it's like the minimum number of people you think could legitimately speak on behalf of the entire planet. Though statistics is funny that way. You don't necessarily need that many more to have a sufficiently demographically representative group. So I don't know the broad...
the broad categories, gender, ⁓ geography, cetera, language, you could do a lot with even just a sample of a thousand. And I just assume that a thousand is already quite ⁓ a size to manage, create connections amongst, to have meaningful deliberation amongst in plenaries. It gets really unwieldy past a certain threshold. are sort of physical and cognitive limitations.
But who knows, maybe even larger would be feasible. I just think maybe there are some constraints and constants across human history that I'm trying to stay close to and 600 sounds like a good size to me.
Alessandro Oppo (14:12)
Yeah, actually, I was thinking that in Italy also, like, politicians are also very well paid compared to other countries. about the number, because I was thinking like with technology, so technology now could also enable a sort of direct democracy. Well, as an example, the fact of extracting people and sort of building ⁓
Helene Landemore (14:20)
Yeah.
Alessandro Oppo (14:40)
Basically it will be like it is now with the parliament but instead of people that are elected, people will be just randomly selected based on different...
not properties based on different like I don't know if someone is poor, rich, so based on the class, on the gender and so on. And so I wonder like before I was talking about maybe more people than 600 ⁓ because like as the book say, politics without politicians or at the same time could be like a sort of, I don't know, ⁓
Helene Landemore (15:06)
Mm-hmm.
Alessandro Oppo (15:28)
cities without citizens. I mean, citizens that also participate in the political life. So there would be this mix between politicians and citizens. ⁓
Helene Landemore (15:42)
So I'm not sure I completely understood, what I would say is that I really want to insist that for me, I'm not talking about mass direct legislation, which is ⁓ kind of like somewhat feasible. mean, you can do it in Switzerland. They have that. They at the constitutional level, at the federation level, actually, they, can have a small group of people who get together and gather enough signatures to support a particular constitutional reform or amendment.
Alessandro Oppo (15:43)
I won.
Helene Landemore (16:12)
And then if it's, I don't exactly remember, if it's not countered by parliament with a better version that's accepted, it goes straight to a referendum. And if it's accepted in the referendum, is directly a law. It transforms the Swiss constitution. So you could say that's a form of direct legislation by the masses. But notice that still someone has to formulate.
the proposal as to write down the law and this cannot be done in the millions, it's got to be a subgroup and this subgroup in this particular example will be self-selected. And I think it's fine for some things but I don't think self-selection is always good, in fact it's sometimes very bad. It has the same sort of inegalitarian implications as elections do because elections are also very unrepresentative in terms of who they send to power.
So since I'm a little skeptical about both self-selection and elections, ⁓ I tend to prefer the random selection process because at least you get a purely egalitarian distribution of the task of thinking through, deliberating, and writing the law proposal. And then you can have a moment of direct mass democracy where absolutely everybody is involved in thinking about the proposal or the set of proposals or the bundle of proposals.
and then vote on it. So for me, what I'm offering is often confused as a form of direct democracy, really it's not. Unless by direct democracy, you mean ruled by ordinary citizen, okay, fine, but that's not what people mean. They usually mean ruled by a subset that is chosen a certain way. And I think I also want ruled by a subset chosen a certain way. It just happens not to be the way of elections. It's random selection.
So my model, I don't know if I ought to describe it, would say it's more like semi direct democracy, but it's semi representative, except it's representative by lot, not by elections. So you have moments where only a subset really is at work with the consent of course of the larger group. don't imagine the, know, institutionalizing something like that without a moment of constitutional approval by the entire population, of course.
But they delegate that task because not everybody can be involved in politics all the time. I think that's like a myth. Even the Greeks didn't do that. You cannot. It's physically very difficult. We have lives to live and money to make and pursuits that are our own. So there needs to be a division of labor. But somehow since the 18th century, we've convinced ourselves that this division of labor needs to be to the benefit of a small class of people who stay in power very long, who sometimes transmit the...
the senator seat to their children and just die on the job rather than let go. And I don't think that's very good. Maybe it's better than what came before. It's better than actual dynasties or actual absolute monarchies, all of that, but it's still not as close to democracy as it should. So ⁓ I'm just trying to push us in a slightly more democratic direction.
Alessandro Oppo (19:31)
And very interesting. And how do you think it can be tried, this model, ⁓ like in an unapplied way? ⁓ So could be because a lot of times I think about the five star movement in Italy, but also other kind of experiment where they tried like leaving the system as it was to bring something new. So in that case was an external platform.
that had but was not perfect also there. So I would like ⁓ to try this new model. Should like a country to switch ⁓ all the system to this new model or there could be a way to test it without changing all the everything.
Helene Landemore (20:23)
⁓ Well, yes, of course, I wouldn't want to switch over brutally to this new system. I don't think there's enough, you know, I think it's never a good idea to change an entire system for something that is still mostly theoretical. So obviously, no, my job is to come up with theories. But of course, I think my job and other people's jobs is also to test those theories and try to tweak them and make them better until we can sort of ⁓ engage in more radical reforms.
That said, just want to say that, when the French and American revolutions happened, they kind of jumped into the unknown. And maybe if we continue on this trajectory, we'll reach the point where our systems break down and we'll have to try something. And when that time comes, if it comes, it's good to have at least some theories as to what to do. And when the founders created the American constitution, it's not like they had a...
a blueprint that they could rely on or, you know, they borrowed from the Roman Republic example. They purposely did not borrow from Athenian democracy, actually, which I think was a mistake, but you know, they came up with a hybrid regime that they thought would be a republic with oligarchy, monarchy, and democratic principles countering each other. I mean, they were very creative, but they did, it's not like they had much
opportunity to test run it before. So, okay, so let's say we want to be a bit more safe because in the American context it worked quite well. They still have their constitution. In the French context, they didn't do that well. It collapsed instantly. was, we've had, don't know how many constitution at this point, five, I guess. And, I mean, five republics, sorry, and many more constitutions in between, including.
you know, imperial ones. So, it's true we need to test. Okay, so how can we do that? I think we can do it at the local level. So for example, in the speaking, the German speaking region of Belgium, they've implemented ⁓ a permanent institutionalized agenda setting citizen jury of 27 people, I believe, or 24 maybe only. So it's very small. It's at the scale of a town of
something like 75,000 people, it's very small. But it's working quite well, people seem to like it. The powers of this ⁓ agenda setting assemblies are limited but real, so it can put stuff on the agenda of the local parliament. It can also convene one of citizens' assemblies on single issues of interest. So that's one tiny example we can start looking at.
I also think that online platforms who need a governance structure might want to experiment with that format. ⁓ And maybe there are countries that transition from autocracies to something else who might say, look, electoral democracy hasn't worked out so well in many emerging countries or transitioning countries. In fact, it often leads to more violence around election time, ⁓ oligarchies that sort of entrench themselves and use
supposedly free elections to have a veneer of legitimacy when in fact it's, you know, super manufactured and controlled and ⁓ kleptocratic in essence. So maybe there's a country who has, you know, less to lose at the transitioning moment like that who may want to try that. ⁓ It is a lot based assembly as opposed to elected ones. It saves you the cost of elections. It saves you the...
agonistic nature of elections. doesn't save you the conflicts, of course, but I do believe that conflicts are also channeled and resolved in part through these assemblies. I say that though, there's indeed one part of my model where I'm not so sure. It is the pure conflict resolution aspect, because I see it take place within these assemblies, but maybe it's wiser to split the tasks into, ⁓ to divide the labor of
resolving conflict and the labour of coming up with a common solution and to perform these things in different assemblies. So it could be that we still need elected assemblies to adjudicate pure conflicts of interests. And once that's done, then the task of actually writing the law based on the outcome of that adjudication could be passed on to a citizens assembly.
I'm open to many variations of the model, just that it's really hard to think of hybrid systems, dual systems, and it's very hard for me to envisage how the relationship between elected assemblies and citizens assemblies would work, except in the Irish case, which I could talk about, it's usually been a little bit conflictual. Like there's a competing...
There's a sort of competition between them in France, for example, to me means that at least for now, inevitably, the Citizens' Assembly will be minoritized and ⁓ marginalized because the elected officials just don't like the competition.
Alessandro Oppo (26:00)
Okay, this is a very interesting point. I'm very ⁓ excited by online citizen assemblies and data spaces and also by, let's say, citizen assembly that can be self-organized by citizens because of the reason that you said. And also, this is something that... ⁓
There was a Tiago Pesotto on the podcast and he was explaining how budget that is spent in a participatory way, it's well spent and the people are happier and so on.
Helene Landemore (26:29)
Mm-hmm.
Alessandro Oppo (26:45)
But then sometimes, you know, people that are elected, want the power to decide where to spend the money. ⁓ And so I was thinking a lot about this tension from what is possible now and at the same time about... ⁓ Yeah, things, I mean, we're still humans. And so there are a lot of things that we follow.
and also power can also be one of them. And then I also have a question that is maybe not very related to this. So if people participate in online citizen assemblies, and so...
If the governance is not tied to the territory anymore, ⁓ then can we talk about the centralized states? if there is not this connection between governance and land, that also... ⁓
that also creates the territory, land without governance is not a territory.
Helene Landemore (28:12)
Okay, so there are a lot of questions there. I think for the last part, you have in mind a global governance of sorts, I guess, where we would bring people from all over the world into this global assembly, maybe of a thousand people, and it would not be connected to nationality. Well, it's been done already, actually. There was a pilot called the Global Assembly. I think it was 2021. They brought...
a hundred people only online because they didn't have much of a budget and they brought together people from all over the world identified through geographic coordinates and work with local associations to pick a person in that you know adjacent to that geographic coordinate and who did they represent not our countries I guess not the you know one was from Afghanistan was from
China, one from Brazil, ⁓ they came shaped by their nationalities for sure, but they came up mostly as representatives of Earth and human beings and humanity in general. one of the outcomes of their deliberation was to recommend ⁓ entrenching the crime of ecocide at the global level. So it was an assembly convened to deliberate about climate issues.
And they said, what we need to recognize international law at the global level is the crime of ecocide. So that when Exxon goes and pollutes the Gulf of Mexico, whatever, they're liable, not just in front of US courts, but really in front of the international community. And they have to pay a price. And everyone, every other company has to pay a price. What I found really interesting is that this is also an outcome that...
This is also a recommendation that came out of the French Citizens Convention on Climate that took place in 2019-20. They said, we would like French companies to be tried for ecocides when they massacre the environment and kill species and pollute water and things like that. But President Macron at the time vetoed that proposal. So he didn't even want to consider it because he said, if we create that ecocide,
and concept and recognize it only at the French level, it will basically sink French companies who will be liable, whereas the competitors won't be, and that's not acceptable, which kind of is understandable in some ways, ⁓ even though it's a pity that we didn't set in motion a trend of recognizing eco-sites all over the EU, for example, and beyond, hopefully.
So someone has to start really. But the reality is that there's a collective action problem and that some of these proposals can really only work if everybody recognizes these proposals. so that means we need governance structures at the global level, which we don't really have. Or the ones we have are like the UN are not very efficient or let alone representative and in a demographic way. ⁓
and ⁓ legitimate in a democratic way. So it's not really happening right now, but I do think it would be a decoupling of governance and nation states for sure. That's an example. You could also imagine ⁓ people creating their own communities and maybe governing them like that through a model like open democracy. ⁓
on online platforms, this would be very virtual of course, because like you don't have a physical entity that you can relate on, you don't have natural resources, don't have armies, don't have, so it's a virtual state of sort, but I don't know if it is a state lacking, know, monopoly on the use of violence, stuff like that. ⁓ Yeah. So these are my thoughts on the last part of your question.
Alessandro Oppo (32:29)
you
Yeah, I mean, it's an open question and that is because I did my thesis about this.
Helene Landemore (32:43)
I can't hear you.
Alessandro Oppo (32:46)
Okay, I clicked on the microphone. Yeah, I was thinking about, because I did notice it's about this sort of the coupling between ⁓ land and governance and also the fact about the monopoly of violence where it goes. Who has the monopoly of violence? That was an open question that I had. that's ⁓ why I was curious to know your point of view.
and also I was thinking about the poor conflict solution that you were mentioning before.
Many times I thought about possible workflow because at the end if we think about governance structure, they follow a sort of flow, but we don't have instruction. If there is a conflict now, it is stuck somewhere.
we don't discover it. And so if it is a sort of like, okay, there is a conflict, what we do, there is a conflict resolution workflow. I don't know how to call it. Yeah, and I see it also very connected with ⁓ last interview ⁓ that we did that
where the topic of modular politics was also central, about how, was with Nathan Schneider, about how maybe different and composable way of governance can be created. So I don't know if you were also thinking in this direction.
Helene Landemore (34:39)
So the conflict resolution piece, I have no certainties. just thought that what happens in citizens' assemblies is that you don't come in with the presumption that conflicts are ⁓ unbridgeable and ⁓ that you're here just to defend the interests of, say, property owners or homeowners versus renters, right?
sometimes feels like that in politics where the right and the left distribute among themselves the defense of certain interests and then they don't really budge and then it's only if there's progress it's only through negotiations and extractions of compromise and stuff like that. In citizens assemblies they approach things more like a collective problem and try to shift things around until there's a framing that maybe
works for everyone and when it doesn't work for everyone at least the losers get to really shape the outcome or get a chance to shape the outcome ⁓ and I think get a recognition that is different from the purely procedural recognition you get in electoral politics. So I'll give you an example of a somewhat
zero sum game, which was the question of end of life. So you have people in the assembly, about 80%, I mean, ultimately 76 % of people in the assembly who basically thought that the law needed to be liberalized to accommodate ⁓ forms of assisted dying and even some forms of euthanasia. So allowing people to inject themselves with lethal medicine.
that would just end their suffering. And in some cases, allow doctors to inject the medicine to people who are completely sedated or incapacitated or to also end their suffering. If they, of course, consent to it and they are all like these constraints and processes and family reunions and medical advice. But there are some people about 20 % to maybe 16%, 14%.
14 % who actually reject
Sorry, 24%, my God, I can't calculate. So, who reject the very idea of allowing any form of assisted dying or euthanasia. So it's not a case where you can turn a negative zero-sum game into a positive-sum game, right? Where you can find a way to reconcile all the... No, it's just not gonna work out. This is our ideological vision that are radically opposed. But somehow, because the process was long enough, because there was...
⁓ efforts to really take into account the point of view of the minority, they were able to shape the constraints on the permission to allow euthanasia and assisted dying. And they were able to say, look, we want half of the report to be about palliative care. So palliative care is when you create special units in hospitals to take care of the dying so that you...
⁓ assuage their pain and their fears as much as possible to the point that in fact many who thought they needed the pill or the injection decide not to get it and they die of natural causes and it's peaceful. And I think that was really, really nice to see how ⁓ minority and majority respected each other, didn't agree, but at least worked really hard to forge a final document, a package of proposals.
that of course in the details didn't work for everyone but as a package worked for everyone so that 95 % of the group of 184 participants approved the final package. And even better than this almost like I remember being very touched because in the final session we had the minority leader if you want the informal minority representative who...
a woman who I think was deeply Catholic and opposed to any form of assisted dying, she stood up and she said, I want to thank the 76 % for giving us, the minority, 50 % of the final report and 50 % of the speaking time. So they felt that in the context of Citizens' Assembly, selected by law, that had eight weekends to talk this.
very difficult topics through listening to experts, listening to doctors, listening to families. They had been given a lot of time, more time than their size, sort of like, you know, ⁓ technically required, you might say. So they were really integrated in the process. They felt seen, they felt heard, and they felt at peace with the outcome, you know? So that's a way to me of reconciling even seemingly, you know, ⁓ zero sum game.
conflicts.
Alessandro Oppo (39:56)
It's very interesting because I was thinking about time and space and the fact that the ⁓ citizen assemblies often they are not connected in time and space and I think that mean that the spaces could connect them so a citizen assembly that is done in the UK can also connect to one that is done in Italy. ⁓ So in that case it was a process over several weekends so it was connected in time.
And also I was curious like maybe it's a sort of not important question but in that case it was like a sort of person that was with a certain point of view but that was ready, how do you say, ready to talk about it.
how it was the composition of the group. Because you said that there was a minority and a majority. ⁓ So I can imagine majority was pro, how do you say? Yeah, assisted dying. ⁓ While the minority, it wasn't. And yeah, if you, ⁓
Helene Landemore (41:10)
Assisted Dying?
Alessandro Oppo (41:24)
I mean, I many questions about this experiment or could be about some other examples that you could think about.
Helene Landemore (41:36)
I mean, what is the question? How were they selected? Yeah, well, know, citizens assemblies are always selected by random section, right? So in theory, it should be one lottery ticket, one person. So, you know, everybody would be given a number and then you, you know, pull out a number from an urn or a bowl from a rotating sort of contraction. ⁓
Alessandro Oppo (41:39)
Yeah, this was the first question.
Helene Landemore (42:06)
In the case of citizen assemblies, because typically they're quite small, mean ours was not that small, it was 184, but still it's not a thousand, so you need to do what's called stratified ⁓ sampling, random sampling, where you identify basically quotas, like categories of people you want to make sure are represented so that you end up with an assembly that tracks the broad categories that matter for a given topic. So in our case, we stuck to the very traditional categories of gender.
socioeconomic bracket, education level, geographic origin, so that we pulled people from the different regions of France, but also our overseas territories. We had a big conversation on the governance committee of this assembly, which is composed of experts like me, and who decide about this kind of questions. We had to decide, do we include religion as a category? So do we want to make sure we have a certain number of, say, Jews, Muslims, Catholics?
Protestants, cetera, Buddhists, atheists. And we decided against it because we thought, my goodness, this is gonna, I mean, know, it's tricky because then you have to ask people when you call them and then if they are not accepted in the assembly in the end, they might think that it's because they said they were X or Y. So we thought, you know what, let's not touch this. And in the end, ⁓
it felt to us at least that there was a great diversity of profiles in the assembly. We don't think anybody really documented them, ⁓ you know, done well these things. I we had a statistics institute who did that for us. It's supposed to track the categories of the larger population. So we ended up having pretty much the same divide in the assembly as exists in the larger French population. So it's...
typically 80-20, roughly. ⁓ 80 in favor, 20 against. In our assembly, as I said, it was more like 76-24. So pretty close. think it suggests even that there might have been ⁓ either a movement away from liberalization of the law after the liberation or maybe an over-representation of the people against or...
or the fact that they had more influence in the assembly, I'm not exactly sure. But clearly, we were not ignoring the minority and we were not under-representing it.
Alessandro Oppo (44:44)
Thank you for the clarification. Now we don't have a lot of time, I wanted to ask you something about your background, also personal background and academic.
Helene Landemore (44:54)
yes. So
my personal background, I'm French by birth, although I'm American now as well. I grew up in Normandy. I studied in Paris for seven years. After that, I moved to the US to do my PhD at Harvard University. And after that, I did a few post-docs and then went on to ⁓ my job at Yale University, where I've ever since, pretty much since 2009.
And I started as a, I would say a pure philosopher, pure historian of ideas even. I wrote a book on David Hume and the notion of probability in his decision making theory, in his decision theory. And that led me to social sciences. So I studied some economics and I became very interested in rational choice theory. And from then on, I don't know, I just developed an interest in the connection between democracy and...
the law of large numbers and collective arguments, collective intelligence arguments for democracy. I discovered Habermas, Rawls, et cetera. And I wrote my first book was my dissertation, Democratic Reason, Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many. And at the end of that book, somebody asked, okay, but what does a Landemorean democracy look like if you believe that we'd be better off? ⁓
maximizing the cognitive diversity of decision makers. So I wrote Open Democracy, which was an attempt to flesh out a vision of democracy that is not based on elections. And just now I had my book out, Politics Without Politicians, which is an attempt to make that vision very concrete by telling the stories of the citizens have observed in citizens assemblies, even as, as you pointed out correctly, it's not quite the...
the reality of the full system is just a pilot of sorts.
Alessandro Oppo (46:55)
But I totally agree about the fact that we should have some theory ready for one. Yeah, it happened in the past, so it will happen also in the future. And yeah, also then, okay.
Helene Landemore (47:02)
The system collapses.
Yeah, because
the alternative is known ⁓ regime forms, but they're not appealing. Like, you know, authoritarian regimes, fascist regimes. I don't think that we know doesn't work very well for people. So we have to have something else that's ready and more appealing.
Alessandro Oppo (47:30)
Yeah, absolutely. The other kind of regimes are not very, as you said, appealing. yeah, I mean, if you have a message for the people that are working on similar things.
Helene Landemore (47:47)
Well, so maybe two things. One is that I also now have an interest in ⁓ shareholder democracy and workplace democracy more broadly, but right now it's more restricted. I work with economists, ⁓ Louis J. Zingales and Oliver Hart, who became interested in this idea of citizens' assemblies and think that it can be used in the shareholder democracy context to give more voice to shareholders.
Oliver Hart in particular really argues that shareholders don't want just maximization of financial return. They're actually people with ethical preferences and values that are not taken into account. So for example, on the treatment of animals in meat farms and in the use of antibiotics in, know, ⁓ poultry processing, et cetera. ⁓
or the environmental concerns or other kinds of ethical concerns. So they think that we could use a version of citizens assemblies in the corporate context to represent more ethical interests and constrain management decisions, which tend to be purely mercenary and profit-oriented at the cost of ⁓ ethical considerations.
So that's what I'm working on, which I think is interesting. It's not as ⁓ radical as say workplace democracy, which would actually give a voice to workers. For that I have my friend and colleague, Isabelle Ferras, who's a full steam on that track and I support her fully. ⁓ As well as the group we call ourselves, Democratize Work or Democratizing Work. And so there's a number of very talented people in that group that push that agenda. And then finally, there's another thing that I work on that
might be of interest to your listeners, I'm designing a citizens assembly in Connecticut on the topic of local public services. And we have great partners. have the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. We have the Comptroller's ⁓ Office, Sean Scanlon, who is behind us and has promised us a legislative hearing in October. And so we've raised enough money to launch it this summer.
we plan to bring a large sample of 150 randomly selected Connecticut residents to try to figure out how to better deliver and fund local public services. And I'm really excited about that prospect because it's, I think it's exciting to bring about the first state level citizens assembly in the US. There have been local experiments, but none at the state level. And also the design.
is bolder than what I've seen before in the sense that we really want to make sure the citizens are on top and the experts are on tap and that even when it comes to the governing structure it's the citizens making the decisions and not people like me because in prior experiments and I've been on one of those assemblies it's people like me who decide the duration, the criteria, the process, the experts we invite etc and the citizens are a bit
You know, I mean, it's natural because how do you do this before they even convene you, you need someone to kickstart the prospect, the project, right? But once it starts, I really want all the experts to surrender their voting rights and step back and stay at the disposal of citizens ⁓ to help them make their own decisions. And they may decide that they follow our recommendations, but it's choice. So how do we do that? We're going to have to figure it out because it's never been done. So it's going to be very exciting.
Alessandro Oppo (51:34)
This is a very exciting experiment. I'm very encouraged to know how it will go. Absolutely, it be awesome. Thank you a again.
Helene Landemore (51:42)
Yes, me too! I'll come back to let you know. ⁓
Thank you
very much, Alessandro.
