Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule
- Hélène Landemore
- Date
- Monday 22 June 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Spui Campus
Spui 5
2511 BL The Hague - Room
- 3b.38
In this talk, Hélène Landemore will argue that random selection of ordinary citizens – also called civic lotteries or sortition – should replace elections as a way of realising the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity in parliamentary assemblies. This democratic argument can be added to the instrumental advantages sortition has when it comes to reducing political corruption and making better use of collective wisdom.
The democratic argument comes in different versions. One version combines the ideals of Ancient Athenian democracy, where selection by lot was central to political life, with a Tocquevillian perspective on juries, understood as “modes of popular sovereignty”, in which ordinary citizens exercise real authority and thereby develop judgement and a shared sense of political responsibility. A second version focuses on equality: it holds that, in contrast to elections, sortition distributes the opportunity to govern more evenly across the citizenry. Equality is thus treated not as symbolic inclusion, but as an institutional feature of political selection.
A third version of the democratic argument contends that electoral systems encourage adversarial identity formation, whereas sortition reduces zero-sum competition and fosters cross-cutting trust, mutual recognition, and even what Landemore calls civic love among citizens who might otherwise remain politically estranged.
The talk ends by addressing objections concerning accountability, competence, and continuity, proposing hybrid institutional designs that combine sortition-based bodies with elected or appointed mechanisms as a pragmatic transition from existing democratic arrangements.
The talk is organised as a collaboration between the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs and the Leiden Law School within the new Trust in Polarised Times research network.
Discussants: Elise Rouméas (Groningen), Wim Voermans (Leiden), Matt Longo (Leiden)
Chair: Andrei Poama (Leiden)