Power to the (shy) people: why citizen assemblies could replace career politicians

Whether you are a carpenter, lawyer, a stay-at-home mum or a student, whether you are wealthy or poor, old or young, male or female, you should all play a part in the practice of politics.

There is only one category of person that should not: politicians.

This is the central argument of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (Allen Lane; 2026), the latest book from Hélène Landemore, a Franco-American Yale lecturer who has been living in the US for 25 years.

Her claim is that the current system of electoral politics is beyond repair, but democracy is not and can be fixed.

She proposes, for example, that leaders be elected by civic lotteries as temporary stewards of the common good, not career politicians with vested interests.

She says the decision-making process in our current democratic system tends to select people based on the confidence they project which, in the US, sees a disproportionate number of wealthy, white, Ivy-league educated men in power.

Prof Landemore, instead, calls for the rise of the shy – people with a natural tendency to withdraw and whose voices too often remain unheard.

“I think I still am [shy], to some extent,” she told The Connexion.

It may seem surprising, in view of her impressive CV. “I was the textbook example of a student shielding doubts and insecurities behind diplomas,” she said.

She studied at grandes écoles Sciences Po and École Normale Supérieure, however she still experienced failure and rejection three times at the agrégation, a prestigious French teaching qualification. 

She then went to Harvard as a PhD philosophy student and became a professor at Yale. 

She has since given regular lectures on representative and participatory democracy and written five books on democracy and political science.

Part of her academic journey mirrors my own. I repeatedly failed entry exams for Sciences Po and journalism schools until one accepted me. It sent me to the US, where success followed.

Prof Landemore points to the Con­vention Citoyenne pour le Climat as an example of the kind of citizens’ democracy she champions. It consisted of 150 randomly-selected people who successfully produced a detailed programme of ideas to combat climate change. 

However, President Macron’s promise that its ideas would be imple­mented directly, put to referendums or sent to parliament, was watered down with only a portion of them eventually being adopted, often in a modified form. An example is the  law against short domestic flights where an equivalent train link exists. 

The New Yorker profiled you in 2020 in an article titled ‘Politics Without Politicians’. Was it your source of inspiration?

I could not find a better one than this brilliant intuition from Nathan Heller, its author. He is a former stutterer who fits the profile of the shy person I discuss. I believe he must have recognised himself in ideas I had explored in earlier books.

Your book begins with: “To my younger self and all the other shy people out there.” Was the young Hélène shy?

Absolutely. I felt trapped inside myself, with a sense of pressure and emptiness. I saw the shy person locked in her shell. I still am, to some extent. I have reflexes from my former shyness. I turn bright red when things destabilise me. When I look at my daughters, I wonder if it is genetic.

Your name ‘Landemore’ may come from ‘land’ and ‘moor’ – perhaps that tells us something about your genetics?

My father found that a shoemaker in London was named Landemore, dating back to the 16th Century. That is the oldest trace we have. There is a ruined castle in Wales called Landimore, and the maison de la chapelle de Landemore in Angers. It is a bit strange. 

 Our ancestors either came from England or northern Europe. There are many blond people in my family. 

In France, this is very localised in Normandy, from which I inherited my cultural background: a certain brutality, frankness and directness.

You embody academic excellence to an extent  which is almost intimidating. How could you have been shy?

My identity is that of a very assertive author. It reeks of academia. But titles also serve to mask insecurity.

I was a classic example of someone who shields themselves behind degrees, projecting as much authority as possible to protect myself. 

Behind degrees often lie people who have no real sense of what life is about.

We live in a democracy that is tailored to a particular type of profile. How does this selection process work?

It is two-fold. First, it comes from the electoral process, which selects people who already have immense self-confidence, understand the codes, express themselves well, want power and enjoy it. Then comes the ‘restricted’ choice of voting, because not everyone votes. 

It is a very biased process that favours those who exude self-confidence. 

These two filters create a distribution of power that concentrates it in the hands of a very small, homogeneous group in terms of education, psychological type, aspirations and ambitions. This, de facto, eliminates the shy.

We have reached a point where an 18-year-old decides to make politics their career and spends 40 years raising funds, collecting votes and manufacturing compromises. 

Is this the best way to build a collective and solve our problems? 

I do not think so. We should return to a conception of politics as an amateur activity. It should be integrated into our daily lives.

Let us take the Citizens’ Convention in which you participated. Did this form of participatory democracy work?

What came out of it was really good, given the constraints – a tight schedule of eight weekends and the novelty of the process. Many ideas raised were excellent and commonsensical, such as the notion of ecocide. 

If Exxon destroys the environment, it should be sent to jail because it is, indeed, a crime against the environment.

Emmanuel Macron vetoed it, I suspect, because France could not be the one to implement that law for fear of alienating French companies in the market. It would have meant shooting oneself in the foot. Here lies the biggest issue with the Citizens’ Convention. Some ideas were supranational. If implemented on a worldwide scale, Exxon would be under much more pressure.

You mention the role of Facebook in the Icelandic case in 2012 [when the authorities there interacted with the public via social media to gather ideas for a new constitution]. Social networks were seen as tools to liberalise speech, even sparking the Arab Spring revolts. What is your view of their role now?

I saw them as something that demystified other people, that broke down all the signals that guarantee a form of authority, hierarchy and stability in society – diplomas, clothing, etc.

With Facebook, everyone was somewhat the same. Everything was public, open and accessible. 

 We have recreated all these barriers mainly because societies cannot live without them, I believe.

The Arab Spring period made visible an Iranian youth with the same aspirations as French or American youth. It is not at all a cultu­ral destiny to want everyone to be veiled and oppressed. It enabled that visibility.

Why are they problematic today? Because there is no regulation.

Technology is not something inherently good or bad; it is determined by our political choices, which have been, for 50 years, terrible. Absolute rubbish.

Your next book will be on the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. Are you not afraid of repeating the same cycle of hopes and disappointments?

I have learned from my mistakes. These tools are neither good nor bad except in relation to the political system in which they operate. That is what I should have understood earlier. We could easily imagine guardrails. What if engineers and users were given more power to regulate them, for instance?

I did not anticipate the enormous degradation of our democratic institutions. In 2008, I thought we lived in semi-functional democracies.

Would you call them democracies today?

The US is a plutocratic polyarchy, meaning that political decision-making is influenced in multiple ways by very wealthy people. Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and France – just to name a few – are still sufficiently democratic.

Critics say ordinary citizens lack the expertise needed to tackle complex issues such as climate change or public finances. How do you respond to that concern?

This concern gets the evidence backwards. Decades of research on collective intelligence show that diverse groups of ordinary citizens, given time and good information, often reach more sophisticated and durable judgments than narrow expert panels — precisely because they bring different life experience rather than a single disciplinary lens.

That's what we saw when the Irish Citizens' Assembly tackled abortion and marriage equality, what the French Citizens' Convention showed on climate policy, and what we're testing directly in Connecticut on property taxes and school funding.

What critics miss is that no assembly asks citizens to invent expertise from nothing. Members spend their first sessions hearing from economists, public finance specialists, and practitioners. But experts in these assemblies are on tap, not on top. What citizens bring isn't technical knowledge; it's judgment about trade-offs and values that no technocrat can supply on their behalf.

The real question was never whether ordinary people can do an economist's job. It's whether they can weigh fairness, growth, and community priorities responsibly when given the same information legislators have. The evidence says yes.

Some of the gilets jaunes protesters called Emmanuel Macron a dictator... 

It is like saying Trump is a fascist or similar to Hitler. You have to see what is happening in Iran. Two people were killed by ICE in Minnesota – it is tragic, I do not deny the issue – but proportionally it is not the same. People in France are very dissatisfied, for good reasons, but the system is still relatively functional.

A reader called me a reluctant populist. I agree, to some extent. There are moments when I feel a certain frustration with the elitism of the system. 

The reality is that we are still governed by the rule of law. 

There is not that much corruption in France; you cannot exaggerate. Go and tell Serbian people that France is a corrupt country.

In France, only Le Monde and the communist L’Humanité seem to grant you interviews. Why?

Le Monde, undoubtedly because it is an academic newspaper. L’Humanité, perhaps because I grew up in a communist environment and absorbed the discourse, the way of expressing myself.

Do you seek to challenge capitalism?

I am in favour of markets. Forget rationing and central planning, please. I do not address the question of capitalism in the book because it would complicate things. I only question the political status quo. I hate Marxist jargon.

There is a certain radicalism in your work. Maybe that appeals to L’Humanité?

Radical in the Athenian sense, meaning we are all equal and should have a
voice. My focus is on who should be given a voice. It must necessarily be both politically and economically democratic, not about abolishing markets, property or family and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. I am very conservative on these issues.

Do you take part in representative democracy in the US?

My husband and I have long fought for the installation of a zebra crossing in our neighbourhood to slow down traffic. It took us 10 years, but we did it. 

I will organise a citizens’ assembly on property tax in Connecticut in the coming weeks. 

One hundred people will be selected through a lottery system. Your readers could definitely do that in France.

Could you have developed this line of thought in France?

No. It is the product of my whole journey. Listen, I do consider myself French, but France is a country that does not encourage risk-taking. There is a fear of risk, a kind of timidity instilled from childhood. In the US, there is still the idea that the sky is the limit. The sky in Normandy is very low, and there are many clouds. I have a genuine question for you: why have none of my books ever been translated in France?

I still feel as though I am being rejected. Every one of my attempts to return has ended in failure.