Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century

by Hélène Landemore

Open Democracy envisions what true government by mass leadership could look like.--Nathan Heller, New Yorker
How a new model of democracy that opens up power to ordinary citizens could strengthen inclusiveness, responsiveness, and accountability in modern societies



To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people--with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections--are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens.

H�l�ne Landemore favors the ideal of "representing and being represented in turn" over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Landemore recommends centering political institutions around the "open mini-public"--a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. She also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency.

Open Democracy demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Science

272 pages, Hardcover

Published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Ostap · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reinventing the Wheel

During the last few years I've read a number of books and articles on how our Western democratic system is failing us, and how we can change it. Many of the books have good and insightful analytical parts, but when it comes to reform proposals, it's always a damp squib.

This book, unlike the most, is really trying to propose a meaningful change, but it's still a missed chance. The author is fighting straw men and trying to reinvent the wheel.

The author spends more than half of the book on totally unnecessary arguments about terminology. She's trying to prove that the conventional description of direct democracy is wrong, and the direct democracy of the days of yore is actually a specific form of representative democracy, though this form is totally different from representative democracy we're using today. In doing so she invents her own extravagant definition of direct democracy, used by no serious researcher whatsoever.

It serves for nothing except for boring and occasionally confusing the reader.

Also, Landemore clearly doesn't understand - or worse, intentionally misrepresents - the alternative democracy systems, both real and theoretical.

Here's several examples (scroll down if you don't care):

- She misrepresents Rousseau, accusing him of not wishing the people to set legislative agenda, though she doesn't even try to demonstrate that Rousseau wanted to delegate it to anyone else but the people.

- She misrepresents the Athenian system, or at the very least picks the descriptions that fit her narrative, disregarding the rest. She overstates the role of Boule, making it look like it introduced the laws (in fact, every citizen could introduce a law, and Boule "controlled legislative agenda" in the same way election commissions control election agenda). She diminishes the role of Assembly, making the stunning claim that People's Assembly was a "mere rubber-­stamping institution". She writes that this claim is based on works of Josiah Ober. I read Ober and I suspect that he would be shocked to hear such a statement, though I have to reread 2 of his works she's specifically referring to. But even if he indeed wrote something to this effect, most reputable historians would emphatically disagree.

- Also, she cites Hansen (whom I unfortunately didn't read), claiming that Athens used red rope to keep extra people out of the Assembly. Red rope is mentioned only in Aristophanes’ Acharnians and could be a fictional comic device. But even if it actually existed, Aristophane claims exactly the opposite to what Landemore does - in his play the red rope is used to herd reluctant citizens _into_ the Assembly, not to keep them out.

- Not less stunning is that, while writing on direct democracy, she totally ignores Switzerland, as if it didn't exist. She names it, to be sure, but writes about it next to nothing. And when she occasionally does, it makes matters even worse. Sometimes it looks totally absurd - for example, she writes "Referendums, like most elections, are typically meant to involve all, or at least a majority, of eligible citizens and indeed are not seen as very legitimate if less than half of the population shows up on the voting day". Literally in the next sentence she supports her claim with a reference to Swiss direct democratic assemblies. But in Switzerland there's no minimum participation requirement for referendums! Referendums are valid even when 1% of the population took part in it, average turnout is near 40% and only rarely does it reach 50%.

Judging by that and other remarks, Landemore doesn't understand the Swiss system and doesn't really know how it works, which is quite strange - I'd expect from an author submitting a proposal for participatory democracy reform to study at least the basics of the only participatory democracy system existing today ― and right next to her home country.

Etc.

Chapters 2 to 5 of this book are not worth reading: they are both boring and often factually incorrect. If you want to know what Landemore proposes in lieu of the failed electoral democracy, you should skip straight to Chapter 6.

This second part of the book is better than the first one. But it doesn't contain any revelation to those at least partly familiar with democratic systems of Ancient Athens and modern Switzerland.

In Chapter 6 Landemore finally presents her own concepts of Open Democracy. Essentially, it's the same old Athenian democracy, only much less thought-out, somewhat abridged and supplemented with the possibility to delegate your voice - probably not such a good idea if you don't want widespread vote-buying.

She presents citizen initiatives and right of referral as something new and still undeveloped, but they have been widely used both in Ancient Athens and in today's Switzerland and several US states.

Also, her requirement that democracy should be _visibly_ deliberative - as by people deliberating on political matters in specially assigned time and place - seems to me totally unnecessary. People can very well deliberate on political topics in bars, in the workplace, while making barbecue with their friends, or watching their kids playing in the park. Today they can also deliberate on social networks. Finally, they can always deliberate in their minds, reading and listening to pro- and contra- arguments. The society can be democratic without any need for all its citizens to go to some special place once a month or whatever to discuss the laws in person, talking over each other.

I assume that the author either wants to be seen as an inventor and tries to prove the old ideas are wrong by misrepresenting them and then repacking the exact same ideas under a new name as her own ones. Or she just didn't give herself the trouble to study the existing alternative democratic systems, both historical and modern.

All that said, I basically agree with her concept, though I don't think it goes far enough.

The biggest flaw in that regard is this:

99.99% of the book is concentrated on the legislative branch. But the executive branch is not less and may be much more important in the current democracy decline. Unfortunately, virtually every author writing about democracy reforms has a huge blind spot when it comes to the executive. Landemore is no exception.

Here's a quote from the book:

"Since it is hard, in par­tic­ular, to imagine an alternative way of selecting the head of the executive power without some form of elections, parties would likely remain an ele­ment of the demo­cratic landscape even in an open democracy"

Hard to believe, in the time when the executive constantly violates democratic principles and becomes more and more authoritarian, Landemore, who writes about the crisis of democratic representation, is happy to leave the executive as it is!

Yet another evidence of her disregard of Athenian and Swiss practices - both societies didn't have any heads of executive power to speak of, and lived quite happily without them. The Swiss one still does.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the Icelandic constitutional experiment and is quite interesting, though I wish it were better structured.

In Chapter 8 Landemore convincingly refutes the claims that direct democracy (or open democracy, as she prefers to call it) is not viable in big non-homogeneous societies.

In Chapter 9 she reflects on the possibility of direct democracy across state borders or even independent of them. It's not a congruent concept but a collection of more or less random thoughts, although some of them are interesting.

To sum it up

If you're not a professional political scientist, sociologist or economist, who wants to be in touch with current democracy discussion, I'd recommend you to skip this book altogether. There are better options.

If you want to understand why the current electoral system is actually not democratic, you'd do better by reading Against Elections by Van Reybrouck.

And if you want to find out about alternatives, read any book on Athenian democracy (Democracy’s Beginning: The Athenian Story by Thomas N. Mitchell is a great choice) and the great series of articles on the Swiss Political System on LessWrong.com.

[Chris O'Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, academic read but extremely interesting! The author turns the idea of election-based representative government as the closest we can come to "real" democracy on its head - and offers a compelling alternative framework that has the benefit of applicability in varying degrees to existing regimes.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw some of this work presented before this book came out and was really excited for it. A large part of the book's originality lies in its claims about representation--there is no direct democracy, every democracy (even those significantly smaller than nation states) cannot completely eschew representation. This provincializes elections as just one mode amongst others. This is paired with a thick redefinition of inclusiveness and equality: inclusiveness refers not only to the lack of exclusion based on inherited socially recognized traits, but also to developed traits such as public speaking ability and specialist knowledge and equality comes to mean a chance to actually rule, where ruling means to meaningfully affect a decision-making process, which can happen at multiple stages leading up to a policy choice. On these two reconceived traits, elections perform rather poorly in comparison, certainly, to lottocratic representation and, arguably, when set next to self-selected and liquid forms of representation.

But while Landemore addresses many specific objections--to feasibility, possible illiberalism, etc.--I found myself wanting more engagement with more theoretically basic contentions. For example, there is little engagement with recent work asserting the virtues of partisanship, which is dismissed here as largely an unfortunate outcome of the dominance of electoral representation. Especially when much of political science now agrees that partisanship lies deep in affective identification, why would we not expect parties to organize themselves to affect and win over the population which will then be randomly selected to mini publics? I suspect that Landemore's concrete examples don't adequately reflect how parties would treat and react to more substantively empowered lottocratic bodies. I'm also unclear where open democracy stands in relation to an agonistic account of social movement democracy. At times, Open Democracy seems to harbor a critique of social movement democracy as a largely undemocratic reaction to the frustrations of electoral democracy, yet at other moments social movements are treated as a possible, though imperfect, site for self-selected representation.

My less scholarly and more political concerns have to do with the book's treatment of capitalism, class, and the state. We encounter a largely instrumental view of the state as captured by elites via elections. But capitalism as a life-altering, world-creating force does not operate via the state in such an obvious way. The subject hailed by Open Democracy, class neutral and committed to democratic process, would seem to condone capitalism's power to form lives and blind to its construction of the private sphere. Landemore plans to work on workplace democracy, but firms seem to be subject to this treatment because of their statelike characteristics, rather than their fundamental facilitation of exploitation. There is a tendency I sense in the book to put elites at ease, to win them to open democracy, rather than, like plebeian accounts, construct an oppositional force which could make change. Part of the openness of open democracy is an openness to its implementation from below and above. Is this reformist timeline compatible with a response to the twin crises of climate change and the global erosion of labor power via consistently low market demand?

I have more questions and critiques (the latter chapters, for instance, don't seem to follow smoothly from the initial theoretically key portions) but Open Democracy succeeds in its task of providing the elements for a democratic paradigm shift. Landemore makes one of the most cogent cases for the power of democracy to renew itself and provide a meaningful sense to the rule of the many in a moment where many despair of such possibilities and cling to liberalism rather than the tradition of ruling and being ruled in turn.

[Floris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the principles of Open Democracy, the problems it addresses, and the ways it could be implemented. Rather than proposing a blueprint for an Open-Democratic political system, Landemore instead lays the foundation for how such a system might be designed and implemented. Ultimately there is no single best way of implementing Open Democracy. But, as she argues, any version of it will probably include some "open mini-public" - all-purpose, randomly selected group of citizens open to the input of the wider public, with the idea of (politically) empowering ordinary citizens (218). Any Open Democracy will also be fundamentally deliberative, operate under a majoritarian principle, involve democratic representation, and be transparent (Chapter 6). By themselves these are pretty vague terms. But Landemore very articulately guides you through each of them, explaining their theoretical and historical meanings, how they are currently put into practice (spoiler: not very well in most cases) in modern-day democracies, and how they can be used to modify the democracies of the future. Her discussion of the latter involves looking at a few (mainly European) case studies, including the Citizen’ Convention on Climate Change in France, Iceland’s citizen’s assemblies, and the ‘liquid democracy’ of Germany’s Pirate Party, as potential role-models for future projects. The book overall is very clearly structured, and therefore relatively accessible for what remains a pretty abstract topic.

There are several aspects of this work that particularly appealed to me. One of these is her starting premise, namely that we should look away from the US (or even the EU) for hope and change in political structures. Change in political structures, she argues, will most likely happen first at the margins (i.e. smaller countries/systems) compared to the "ocean liners" of global politics. Another excellent feature of her work is the clarity of her definitions, particularly of those terms which have become so ubiquitous that we often forget their meaning. These include terms like “sovereignty”, “representation”, “transparency”, “empowering”, and so forth. Rather than being pedantic, Landemore uses her definitions to reveal core contradictions or misunderstandings inherent in these terms and how they are implemented in democracies today. A personal favourite: what do we mean by “consent” in the context of political “legitimacy”? Why do we think it is normal for a body of elected politicians to claim legitimate authority on behalf of a group of people when at best a majority of these people voted them in? “By what kind of alchemy does the consent of some turn into authorization of all?" (84).

The discussion of definitions and deconstructing of our political vocabulary is perhaps the most useful aspect of this book. But if I were to recommend just one chapter, it would be Chapter 8, which addresses the objections to an ‘open-democratic’ political system. It is in this chapter that Landemore discusses worries about practical feasibility, the quality of law-making if random groups of citizens are involved, etc. For any sceptic of Open Democracy, this is a great place to start. It’s also where you’ll learn why she suggests it may be easier to transition to Open Democracy in a country than in a western democracy like the United States!

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book which proposed a much more integrated approach to democracy as a solution to the "crisis of democracy" currently existing under liberal representative democracy. Landemore argues that direct democracy is not feasible--even showing that classical Athens, the paradigmatic example of direct democracy, itself incorporated representative elements regardless of whether the Athenians thought of it that way. But she also shows that there are many ways in which ordinary people could be much more thoroughly in control of every part of the legislative process. She argues that in order to have something approximating a meaningful democracy, people must be able to provide input in every element of the legislative process, from setting the agenda through drafting/shaping legislation, to actually passing the laws.

One big problem Landemore identifies is that it would not be feasible to have all of the people involved in all of the legislation, because it would create a nation of nothing but political actors. However, she advocates lottocratic systems and self-selected groups to work through the processes of representing the citizenry's interests. Governing bodies (e.g., parliaments, senates, etc.) would be chosen by lottery of citizens who are eligible and have agreed to potentially serve--and those lotteries would ideally be balanced somehow to give a representative cross-section of the population--which would theoretically ensure that every citizen has equal potential access to power, and with sufficient frequency of rotation every citizen would likely get the chance to serve at least once. She also advocates for self-selected groups, particularly using digital media to expand access, because this would bring together (potentially) a variety of voices to work through issues while also being open to anyone who wanted to join the conversation and present ideas or arguments.

There's much more to the argument, and Landemore does lay out some additional potential structures drawn from democratic experiments like the Icelandic constitutional drafting process, citizens' juries, etc.

[Giorgio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and mind-opening in many regards. Unfortunately the style is too academic to reach a wide audience (as it would deserve), and the continuous and relentless repetition of ideas doesn't make reading easier.

I would also have expected more forward-looking application ideas to technology (e.g. blockchain), but I guess that would the topic for another book.
All in all, the emancipation from electoral democracy is an idea that needs to be disseminated widely, and the opportunities brought by rotating lottocratic assemblies and radical transparency deserve praise, too.

The key point though – having recently read Brennan, recommended by enthusiastic fan boys of epistocracy, an ever-growing club – is the value of democracy (or democraticity) per se. Landemore gives it for granted, considered an axiom in her presuppositions, but that's the biggest hurdle, I find, to actually make people open up to disruptive new ways to express their "vote", or rather to deliberate, see and be seen.

It's a bit sad that we have to settle on the idea that dictatorships are currently the best positioned regimes to try something new and more democratic, and we are left with what we have because we are unable to imagine (or risk) something better.

Another big near-miss of Open Democracy is what I sense could be the most spectacular opportunity for it: the European Union. At the moment, nobody cares about that parliament, a massive amount of money is spent to make citizens "feel" represented, and very little is achieved, despite the naive positive mood of the whole environment radiating from Bruxelles and Strasbourg. Sounds to me as the perfect spot to introduce mini-publics with some authority and the most diverse prerogatives. Or at least to discuss the hypothetical possibility, but this was completely left out from the book, unfortunately.

In conclusion, I would go for a AI-summarized version of this book if you can find it :) But I'm glad I supported it by paying full price! And looking forward for the upcoming evolutions.

[Ross Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stylistically this book is very much of the "here's what I'll say, I say it, this is what I said" format, which is a little clunky, but the ideas are important. Landemore challenges the notion that electing leaders is the best way to run a democracy, and points to examples where small sets of randomly chosen individuals working directly on legislation have been effective.

The idea is that sortition or lottery selection of representatives, avoids the problems we see in systems where representatives are elected, notably the capture of those representatives by parties or special interests and by inviduals seeking power for themselves.

The author does not make specific suggestions about a system, but rather argues that is can work and has worked in the past. It seems to me that the present system is failing and we need to look at alternatives like this one if we're going to maintain our democracy.

[Aidan Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent, thought-provoking read.

The author explores the arguments for implementing forms of what she defines as “open democracy”, which she feels would better deliver on the promise of providing people with input into political decisions compared to the mainstream models of “representative democracy”.

At the core of her ideas for open democracy are approaches to identifying people through forms of random selection to engage in deliberative democracy. She argues this could address increasing concerns relating to the legitimacy of representative systems, and further that it would lead to better decisions being made.

She concedes significant challenges with implementation, but reviews examples such exercises in Iceland and France, as motivational examples.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking rethink of the political sphere, lacking extension into the economic sphere.

In reading Open Democracy, the author challenges the modern conception of “democracy”. Effectively reconstructs, through philosophy and real world examples, an alternative model of democracy in a synthesis of ancient and modern forms, and proved through normative and empirical analysis. The result is a more Open Democratic form that could break the current hierarchical nature of liberal democracy. The only gap in the examination is the impact of political economy, where the class divisions of the firm and society as a totality would engage to destroy the aforementioned project.

[Theodore · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books about democracy. The author understands the core principles of what democracy means and has meant since prehistory to ancient Athens to today. This is both a theoretical and practical account of how we can have democracy in the West today. The path has always been clear but this book makes it clear for today.

[Peer · Rating 2 out of 5]

interesting but bit disappointing one sided solution for open democracy. I miss an analyses of the root cause why current democracies are struggling. The theory of open democracy is just that, a theory. the problem is that Landemore presents it as a solution. While reading a feeling of something is not right in the theory kept bothering me.

[Christophe Bousquet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book showing a diverse range of democratic innovations, inspired by history (from the origins of democracy till today) and by real study cases (Iceland, France...).
Get ready for the 21st-century democracies!

[Marcin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A interesting take on democratic representation and direct democracy. The author builds on her own and others experience with deliberative democracy (practice and theory), making thought provoking observations on the practice of democracy.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not have the time or energy to review this.

[Andrew Cramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a little out there for sure, and definitely a little bit optimistic, especially in light of the last ten years. Yet I think it's certainly worth considering, if only, at the very least, to reason out counterarguments or compromises.

[Peter Vegel · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an eye-opener! I highly recommend this to everyone who thinks democracy can be better than the thing we ended up with, and are looking for concrete examples of what a better democracy could look like.

This is also a great follow-up after reading the more polemical Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. This book provides a more thorough exploration of the concepts addressed there.