Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule - Hardcover

Landemore, Hélène

 
9780593713983: Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593713982 ISBN 13: 9780593713983
Verlag: Thesis, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to.

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do?

In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working, and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.

When regular citizens come together in this way, they make smarter, fairer, more forward-thinking decisions, often bringing out the best in one another. Witnessing this process firsthand, Landemore has learned that democracy should be like a good party where even the shyest guests feel welcome to speak, listen, and be heard.

With sharp analysis and real-world examples, drawing from her experience with deliberative processes in France and elsewhere, Landemore shows us how to move beyond democracy as a spectator sport, embracing it as a shared practice—not just in the voting booth but in shaping the laws and policies that govern our lives.

This is not a book about what’s wrong—it’s a manifesto for what’s possible. If you’ve ever felt powerless, Politics Without Politicians will show you how “We the People” take back democracy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hélène Landemore is a political theorist and the Damon Wells '58 Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Her work explores the foundations and future of democracy, with a particular focus on participatory and deliberative innovations. She is the author of Open Democracy, a widely influential book that has shaped global debates about citizen participation and democratic legitimacy.

A sought-after speaker and adviser, Landemore has worked with governments, NGOs, and reformers around the world—from France and Finland to Chile and Taiwan. Her research has been featured in The New Yorker, Financial Times, and The Nation, on The Ezra Klein Show, and at the Aspen Festival of Ideas as well as the Athens Democracy Forum. She has written for the Boston Review, Slate, The Washington Post, Project Syndicate, Foreign Policy, l’Humanité, Libération, and Le Monde.

Originally from Normandy, France, she holds a PhD from Harvard University and degrees from the École Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po Paris. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and two daughters.

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One
Fixing a Broken System

I've got both good and bad news. The bad news: Electoral politics is beyond repair. The good news: Democracy isn't. We can fix it.

The rest of this book is about the good news. But to get there, we first need to start with the failure of electoral politics. Believe me, it gives me no pleasure to see myself converging on a conclusion associated with the populists of the left and the right. Yet the populists have a point: A system based on electoral representation is no longer-if it ever was-capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.

Consider that the United States Congress currently holds a 15 percent approval rating and has consistently hovered well below 50 percent, on average, for decades. Is it because voters can never be satisfied or because Congress consistently does a subpar job?

Consider that in three of the world's so-called most advanced democracies-the United States, the United Kingdom, and France-over two thirds of the population think their governing elites are corrupt. (In my native country of France, this figure reached 74 percent in 2025!) In both the United States and France, large majorities think their political system needs drastic changes. Sixty-three percent of Americans express little confidence in the future of the US political system, and 56 percent of the French want a Sixth Republic.

Consider that in recent high-stakes elections, the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections in the United States, voters seem to be rejecting the status quo as much as choosing outcomes.

Consider that when the media cover politics they talk only about the horse race, the scandals, the strategizing, the posturing, and rarely-at best superficially-the substance of issues. Consider that when political scientists crunch the numbers, they find that the preferences of rich people shape policy outcomes and law substantially more than those of the majority do.

We could blame these problems on external factors and forces, such as globalization, capitalism, and the fast-paced changes brought by new technologies, foreign threats, or immigration-all of which undeniably make the job of governing at the scale of a nation-state quite difficult. And politicians are naturally the first to place the blame for their failed policies and the persistent "crisis of democracy" on these external factors.

But excuses can go only so far. Chronic underperformance and widespread dissatisfaction with the system-along with a growing retreat from it-should make one thing clear: There's a fundamental problem with the system itself. While electoral representation may have made sense two centuries ago, in a vastly different context and for very different populations, it's no longer up to the task, especially in modern societies of educated citizens with access to information.

I've reached this conclusion after a decade or more of resisting it. Like many people, I initially blamed empirical, external factors for the increasingly glaring inefficiencies and injustices of the system. My thinking was remedial: How can we improve the system without fundamentally changing it? For example, what if we got rid of money in politics or at least engaged in campaign finance reforms that leveled the playing field? What if we reached out more aggressively to minorities, women, and those on low incomes so they are given greater opportunities to run for elections, in the hope that we then have a greater diversity of profiles in government? What if we introduced strict term limits to prevent power entrenchment and expand further the pool of decision-makers? Or what if we did more to educate voters? For if they were better informed, they would care more, and democracy would yield better and more legitimate results. Surely, my thinking was, we have the politicians we deserve. The problem must be us, not them.

But this line of thinking, as it turns out, is flawed. Worse, it shifts the blame onto the victims-the ordinary citizens, especially those who've given up on a failing system. The next step down that slippery slope is often something like this: How about, as the political philosopher Jason Brennan suggests, we disenfranchise those who can't be bothered to learn the basics of politics, or "correct" their votes to better align with the preferences of the educated? What's so wrong with disenfranchising, say, 5 percent of the population, i.e., those who can't pass a basic civics test? Or how about "10 percent less democracy" and that much more of a role for experts, as the economist Garett Jones has recently argued? From these "solutions," it's a short hop and a skip to dictatorship of the (supposedly) knowledgeable.

A question arises: Why do most of us continue to adhere blindly to democracy as we know it and struggle to envision alternatives? The answer is quite simple. It's inherently challenging to imagine a future that diverges from our current reality and to move from what is to what should be. In my experience teaching political philosophy to undergraduates, I've observed that many struggle with the distinction between descriptive statements (what is) and normative statements (what ought to be). People often assume the future both will and should resemble the past, partly because the present is heavily influenced by it. Yet, as the philosopher David Hume famously argued, moral conclusions cannot be derived from purely factual statements or observations. In other words, you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is."

Additionally, the people currently in power are seemingly incapable of seeing the problems and the need for reform in a system that has worked so well for them. Not unlike many among the "boomer generation," who blame their kids and grandkids for failing to have a stable job, a house, and a couple of kids by age thirty, as they themselves so successfully did, our current elites (also mostly boomers) do not for a minute suspect that they might be part of the problem. And so, when people complain, they try to shame the rest of us into thinking that it's our fault because we don't vote often or well enough. Meanwhile, young people have figured it out. They no longer expect much from periodic elections and party competition. For them, life-changing politics-of climate, social justice, and other topics of urgent importance-happens elsewhere. Unfortunately, they are largely right, and this book is mostly for them.

If you picked up this book, young or not, chances are you already agree-at least in part-with its diagnosis. But the title might have you scratching your head. Politics without politicians? What does that even mean? Sure, politicians are often bad-but aren't they a necessary evil? Politics is a job, after all. In large, complex industrial societies, surely we need professionals to run the show? If not politicians, then who? And isn't politics itself what creates politicians? Even if we got rid of all the shady characters we grudgingly vote for every few years, wouldn't their replacements-whether ordinary citizens or experts-inevitably become politicians too? You can remove politicians from politics, but politics, by its nature, seems destined to turn anyone with power into a politician.

And anyway, what do we even mean by "politician"?

I try to answer these questions and more in this book. But the gist of it can be summarized by a famous quip by the American conservative author and journalist William F. Buckley Jr. In a 1961 Esquire magazine interview, Buckley said: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty."

On the surface, this quote seems like a lighthearted jab at Harvard elites-an easy target, especially coming from someone who went to Yale. Most people read Buckley's remark ironically: Surely, the idea...

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Verlag
Thesis
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593713982
ISBN 13 
9780593713983
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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