No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.
If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power. If you think it sounds like maddening whimsy, ill-suited to the seriousness of the times we are living through – well, we’ll come to that later. But first, to the argument that politics is so broken as to be beyond repair, and that scrapping electoral representation is the best way of fixing it.
Landemore now lectures at Yale but was born and raised in France, and has worked closely with two citizens’ assemblies set up by Emmanuel Macron following the gilets jaunes street protests of 2018, ostensibly triggered by rising fuel tax. (The first was challenged to produce better solutions for tackling the climate crisis if they didn’t like Macron’s, while the second considered assisted dying, an issue on which British politics is not currently covering itself in glory.) But she also examines examples from Iceland after the banking crash, Belgian local government and the widely praised Irish assembly convened to lead the country through the process of legalising abortion, which gave voters ownership of a sensitive decision in a way that bound everyone to it.
The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.
The continued rise of the French far right during this period suggests bringing the public into decisions once made by elites isn’t in itself a magic antidote to the lure of populism. But it’s easy to see a workable model here for taking the partisan heat out of issues British politicians have become visibly afraid of tackling, from social care reform to trans rights or even immigration, and for teaching the art of disagreeing civilly. There’s something deeply appealing, too, about the idea of giving people time to explore complex, nuanced issues properly, rather than herding them into snap judgments under the pressure of an election campaign littered with half truths. Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished.
The author favours – at least at what she calls “a theoretical level”, though there is no point in political theories that cannot work on the ground – a form of lottocracy, where groups of ordinary people are selected at random to form a parliament. They would serve for two years before being sent back to – well, what exactly? Are their employers meant to keep their jobs open? What if, having discovered they’re unexpectedly good at running the country, they don’t want to go back to working at Tesco? Perhaps all this is beneath the theoretical level, though there is some musing about how any born leaders that emerge from this process could be “organically” elevated, perhaps to an overseeing executive board exercising similar powers to a head of state.
What if they screw up so badly that a furious nation wants them out? Democracy’s greatest safeguard is the right to remove rotten rulers at the ballot box, but instead Landemore proposes a constant rolling programme of referendums on major issues to ensure the lottocrats are doing what the people want. (Try selling that to anyone who lived through the Scottish independence referendum, followed by the Brexit one.) It remains unclear, meanwhile, to what extent reluctant winners of golden tickets would be forcibly conscripted into power or allowed to opt out.
But perhaps the biggest flaw in the thesis is the mismatch between the knotty ethical problems she describes citizens’ assemblies resolving and the threats Britain faces now: autocracy abroad, rising extremism at home, economic stagnation fuelling both. Issues of social change – abortion or same-sex marriage in Ireland, say, or climate action in France – absolutely do lend themselves to the wisdom of crowds given years to properly unpick an issue. Waking up to discover that Donald Trump has annexed Greenland, your budget has caused a run on the pound or that a killer pandemic has broken out do not. In a crisis, this country rarely finds that it has had enough of experts or experience.
Landemore is right that politics can be frustrating, disappointing, downright unedifying: that it’s prone to corruption, elite groupthink, privileging what a handful of very rich people want over what the masses want, and attracting overconfident alpha types who talk over more thoughtful people.
But these aren’t things you can abolish just by abolishing professionals and hoping their amateur replacements don’t develop all the same vices under the same pressures and temptations. (Why wouldn’t vested interests lobby a people’s parliament, just as they lobby the professional kind? What stops power going to the heads of citizen MPs plucked from obscurity to run the country, and turning the revolution sour? Did George Orwell write Animal Farm for nothing?)
The biggest flaw in any political system is ultimately people – those in power but also sometimes the ones who voted for them – and unfortunately they’re the one non-negotiable. Of course it’s tempting, given the state of the world today, to think anyone could do better than this lot. But this book doesn’t make me want to risk finding out the hard way.
• Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Civilian Rule by Hélène Landemore is published by Allen Lane (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
