For the first time since representative democracy became the “only game in town,” its foundational structure is being put into question. Given the current state of affairs—in which we have degrees of wealth concentration similar to prerevolutionary France, and the super-rich and their corporations are the biggest polluters, profiting from the depredation of natural resources in a planet at the brink of climate catastrophe—it is safe to say that representative governments, as well as international structures, have failed to secure the welfare of the masses. Despite the democratic rhetoric undergirding the system, the evidence shows that the interests of the most powerful in every society have been better served than those of the majority. And even in advanced democracies, where there is general welfare because elites are kept from exploiting, extracting, and polluting within their borders, elites are still part of the transnational oligarchy who keep their dirty business in “developing” countries.
Open Democracy, the latest book by political theorist Hélène Landemore, who has spent a decade writing on collective wisdom and popular rule, is bold in its criticism of representative democracy—at times poking holes into the democratic veil covering up de facto oligarchic structures, and at others stripping the current orders altogether from their democratic credentials. Instead of shying away from directing devastating blows to an elitist order clothed in democratic idealism, Landemore engages head-on with the prevailing elitism in which ordinary citizens ought not to directly participate in law and policy making. Her critique of representative democracy, which frames the book, is strong, persuasive, and constructive, setting it apart from most “crisis of democracy” literature, which tends to blame the systemic failures of representative orders on external causes. For Landemore, because representative democracy has elections as a premise, it is flawed from its conception. She seeks to resolve this “design mistake” by expanding the meaning of representation to incorporate a new democratic institution: the mini-public.
Whereas in her previous book Democratic Reason (2013) Landemore explored the epistemic strand of democratic theory, searching for a firm normative ground for deliberative democracy, Open Democracy is the culmination of an empirically based, inductive analysis of recent democratic experiments in tune with her theory of democracy. This alone makes the book a tour de force and a must read for those interested in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. Among the many virtues of Open Democracy, I highlight three: its clear and analytical comparison between representative democracy and her preferred model of open democracy, the detailed description of the case studies of constitution making in Iceland and crisis-solving mechanisms in France, and the new criteria proposed to judge the “goodness” of different democratic orders, based on the number of entrenched rights and participatory mechanisms.
In what follows I assess the contributions and shortcomings of Landemore’s institutional proposal from the perspective of the etymological meaning of democracy as “people’s power” that is endorsed at the beginning of the book. In doing so, I focus on what I think is an important weakness: its lack of analytical distinction between nonbinding and extractivist mechanisms of participation and binding and empowering modes. Although Landemore certainly describes the difference between consultative and mandating mechanisms when discussing direct versus open democracy, she does not dwell on the implications of conceiving nonbinding mechanisms as “people’s power.”
Open Democracy begins with a critical analysis of representative democracy informed by democratic institutions and practices in Ancient Athens. In a persuasive manner, it argues that political representation was also present in Athenian democracy, albeit in a different way—not tied to elections, as in our representative orders, but rather to lottocratic institutions open to all. In the first chapters, the book offers a useful critical literature review of the “crisis of representative democracy,” engaging with the various definitions of democracy as an ideal and in practice. Rejecting the premise that “democratic representation must be electoral” (p. 36), which has “linked legitimacy to consent … at the ballot box” (p. 41), Landemore decides to follow “the road not taken” and embrace a new paradigm from which she can innovate toward “democratic forms of representation through which power is made open to all on equal terms” (p. 11). Instead of understanding electoral representation as a “modern solution to the problem of size,” she recognizes varied “more or less democratic forms of representation” (p. 56) that are judged on their accessibility and inclusiveness—what she calls “democraticity”— rather than on their responsiveness, accountability, or the degree of power they confer to ordinary people.
Severing the unnecessary ties between representation and elections, Landemore successfully reconceptualizes democracy as open and connected to the “general accessibility of power to ordinary citizens” (p. 11) through lottocratic and self-selected methods of power allocation. This new paradigm rests on five principles —participation rights, deliberation, majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency— which are materialized in the “open mini-public” as a “large, all-purpose, randomly selected assembly” that has the faculty of “agenda-setting and law-making of some kind” and is “connected via crowdsourcing platforms … to the larger population” (p. 13). The most interesting and potentially radical of the principles proposed is the principle of “participation rights” that would ensure “access of ordinary citizens to agenda-setting power rather than just allow citizens to consent to power or protect citizens from power” (p. 136). However, despite the emphasis on “rights as power” reminiscent of the realist and materialist interpretations developed by Hobbes and Spinoza, Landemore chooses to include nonbinding, indirect citizens’ initiatives as part of the new set of participation rights (to initiate law and repeal it, as well as lottocratic institutions) without analyzing the repercussions of lumping together the prerogative to merely suggest topics in the agenda with the right to actually set it and force government to follow its direction. The “right to suggest with the possibility of being dismissed” does not seem stricto sensus a form of power.
Open Democracy develops this nonbinding aspect of participatory rights by proposing a mini-public to supplement electoral representation. The legitimacy of this lottocratic institution would not stem from individual votes but rather from stratified random sampling through which “at least in theory, everyone is able to participate” (p. 95). Even if open mechanisms are “as likely as electoral representation to suffer from important biases” stemming from material conditions (p. 97), lottocratic and self-selection methods are in comparison objectively more democratic in terms of their access and inclusiveness because elections are controlled by parties as gatekeepers; thus, lottocratic methods are more successful than elections in making “the people” present by proxy. Landemore makes a convincing case, from an epistemic point of view, for incorporating open institutions, through which ordinary people can deliberate, as a complement to traditional representative institutions staffed through elections. She also skillfully responds to common objections based on popular incompetence, risk of capture, and the lack of accountability of mini-publics.
It seems clear that the “cognitive diversity” gathered in an open mini-public and directed to resolve specific problems would be a huge improvement over representative democracy—if the results of these deliberations were binding through popular ratification. As the cases of Iceland and France show, however, if the results of popular deliberation need to be approved by representative institutions and are thus dependent on the goodwill of officeholders, they tend to be dismissed. Without the obligation to be put to a binding popular vote, the deliberative benefits of these consultative instances are bound to be marginal—for example, only 10% of the online contributions in the Icelandic crowdsourcing platform proved causally influential (p. 172). Consequently, when taken from the point of view of influence over government, spending “time on a crowdsourcing platform helping a mini-public come up with relevant information and arguments” on an issue that might not make a difference after all does not seem very different from “wasting hours in line waiting to vote” or “marching for half a day” to protest government policies (p. 206). Without institutional “teeth,” the greatly needed cognitive diversity that open mini-publics contribute would remain subordinated to the hegemonic oligarchic logic thriving within representative institutions.
Even though the democratic experiments in Iceland and France failed to produce desirable outputs because of the unwillingness of the political class to cooperate, Landemore maintains the supremacy of electoral institutions when dictating law and policy. Open mini-publics are to remain consultative organs, only able to influence the agenda-setting process instead of forcing the government to follow a specific direction by putting their decisions, “without filter,” to a referendum. Even if open democracy is certainly compatible with direct democratic mechanisms, such as the right of the people to directly initiate law, the model does not openly consider them as necessary components of the new democratic paradigm in which electoral and open democracy would coexist. However, given the degree of oligarchic control over electoral democracy, the chances of nonbinding lottocratic institutions resolving the crises of inequality and climate change seem slim. Reinventing popular rule for the twenty-first century demands not only mechanisms to allow ordinary people to pitch in with ideas before a vote is taken, but also should give them the power to make decisions and force a popular vote whenever representative institutions have been unwilling to protect and promote the welfare of the masses.
In this moment of crisis, it is necessary to take a step back and critically review the structures and rules that have allowed the system to yield so much inequality, oppression, and pollution. Open Democracy offers a strong argument to question the mantra that representative democracies qualify as democracies because elections are the main procedure for allocating political power. For Landemore there is nothing strictly democratic about elections, and therefore we need to look elsewhere to find other kinds of democratic representation, such as the one achieved through mini-publics. However, even if deliberative lottocratic experiments are a much-needed innovation for bringing cognitive diversity and “common sense” into elitist politics, they cannot produce the domino effect toward stronger democracy, as Landemore envisions, because they are still subordinated to elected representatives: they simply lack the power to impose reform. Consequently, despite its merits in diagnosing the crisis and offering democratic institutional innovations, the book does not embrace giving binding power to the people and thus does not give us a secure path to radical transformation. For democracy to be really open, it is not enough to have new deliberative spaces open to all via sortition; decision-making power also needs to be equally distributed. Only if recommendations by mini-publics on law and policy were binding after a popular vote would the dominoes really fall, inaugurating a new regime in which the people can exercise power and effectively force government to put limits to oligarchy and build a more just, egalitarian, and greener society.
