Review of Outclassed by Joan Williams

Let me review a book that I can’t recommend enough. I have pages of notes and quotes from the book which I will try to organize into something useful. Joan Williams, a law professor, has written a book titled Outclassed that was published in 2025. The main thrust of the book is to understand how the Democratic Party, and the left side of the political spectrum more broadly, came to lose touch with the American working class. 

This is a topic of central importance to me and I have written about it both on this blog and in my latest book, What Time Is It? The American political cleavage has increasingly come to represent a divide between Democratic-voting professional class workers and Republican-voting, working class voters. Consider that in 2024 Harris won the top 10% of income earners while Trump won the bottom 50%. This is the inverse of how American (and other wealthy countries) used to be divided. Rather than take this for granted, we should be asking how it happened. Similar developments have been happening in wealthy countries around the world but Williams focuses on the US.

Any time you talk about class in America you raise the question of how to think about it. Williams uses working class, or lower-middle class, to refer to Americans who are generally in manual occupations, in the middle or below on the income scale, and lack a college degree. I think we can recognize the intuitive appeal of this definition without getting bogged down in more technical debates about strict class divisions. 

First, why has the left side of the political spectrum been losing working class Americans? What started out applying to working class whites has spread to working class latinos and even some working class blacks. Our staring point should be humility and, as Williams stresses, curiosity. As she says, “we have to get curious about why people vote for far-right populists. This book is for the curious.” (9). This is especially important when so much of liberal and progressive thought and punditry is devoted to back-slapping about how crazy and deranged Trump voters are. (Good luck winning their votes back if that’s your perspective).

How has the populist right been winning the allegiance (and votes) of working class people on the US and Europe? As Williams recognizes, “far-right populism attracts lower-middle class voters holding on for dear life and worried about their future.” (14).  Consider this crazy indicative fact: around 60% of non-college whites voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, while less than 30% voted for Biden in 2020. That number shrunk in half in thirty years! And it’s a decent comparison, since both Clinton and Biden were winning candidates. 

How have the upper echelons of the professional classes been so clueless to these changes? “One thing that blocks some progressives from understanding class dynamics is that they resist the notion that they are elites.” To make the top 20% of household income you have to make around $130,000 per year or more. This income level is of course exceeded by oligarchs and superstar professionals like corporate lawyers. But most of the people in this top 20% have more mundane professional class jobs. Denial that you are in this professional class elite or the other side, obnoxiously embracing it and looking down on those who are less educated, are both strategies designed to lose.

On page 20 Williams summarizes how for decades nobody spoke to those who are struggling economically, are economically populist and left leaning, but culturally conservative. The new far right populists do this. She also says in the US the current polarized political battle is increasingly between the professional classes and the struggling middle (or working classes). I cover this in detail in What Time Is It?, and it is a development that was just starting to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, covered in prescient detail in Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (another book I cannot recommend enough).

Over the past few decades, “the US economy polarized into jobs at the bottom and jobs at the top, with workers formerly in middle-class jobs falling into low-paid dead-end service jobs: the Walmart greeter or the McDonald’s cashier…” meanwhile “the upper-middle class did well. Wages have increased by 83 percent for college graduates since 1989, but hardly at all for noncollege grads.” (29). It should not be confusing that there is now a populist revolt against the professional classes, as I discussed in What Time Is It?, drawing on Daniel Bell’s earlier work. Populists on the left, like myself, have been screaming this for years. 

Why, then, did it seemingly take so long for the rural revolt and the populist upheaval to arrive? The neoliberal era takes off in the 1970s and 1980s, the economic splits between knowledge workers and manual workers begin cleaving even earlier. But, ss Michael McQuarrie rightly pointed out, the “civic associations, labor unions, and political institutions unraveled long after the industrialization itself.” (41, Williams is quoting McQuarrie). The neoliberal economic assault devastated places economically first, and then the other mediating institutions unraveled. This all took time. The slow-moving, decades-long neoliberal devastation of the working class then exploded with the twin hammer-blow of open trade with China in the 2000s and the Great Recession in 2008. These were the final pieces that broke the back of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus.

These developments hit manual workers much harder than knowledge workers, contributing to their increasing distance from one another. The professional classes are isolated from the working classes and this “fosters a social myopia that makes it increasingly difficult for the college-educated academics and policy-makers to see how distinctive a working-class understanding of the world is.” (This is Williams quoting Michele Lamont on p. 57).

In blunt terms, “Americans who did not graduate from college have lost status, recognition, and social honor in recent decades.” (59-60). Continuing with this, “lower-middle-class people lack both economic capital and also cultural capital—tastes socially defined as “classy.” Instead, they value social ties (social capital) and character (moral capital).” (60). The Democratic Party and professional class liberals have generally ignored or inadequately addressed these developments.  In Williams’ words, “the far right has put a lot of time and effort into connecting with noncollege grads. The rest of us need to learn how.” (57). 

Let’s tour through the rest of Outclassed by touching on a few recurring themes. 

Masculinity

Democrats, liberals, the professional classes—you name it—don’t know how to talk about gender to working class people. As Williams recognizes, working class men tend to have a strong sense of masculinity. Contrary to so much discourse on the contemporary left, this is not inherently problematic. After all, there are many different understandings of what it means to be a man. 

Williams suggests that there are four traditional components of “mature manhood” in working class culture—being a breadwinner, owning a home, being a father, and being a husband. Note, only the first value is patriarchal. The other three are reasonable, and nearly universal, aspirations for not just working class but all American men. Professional class men can generally take for granted their ability to achieve the latter three and to share breadwinner status with their high-achieving wife or husband.

Thanks to decades of neoliberalism, however, “all four components of mature manhood—breadwinner status, homeownership, fatherhood, and marriage—are becoming increasingly unattainable [for working class men]. In response, men double down on aspects of masculinity they can attain—like voting for Mr. Macho.” (81).

Professional class liberals fail to understand this point and thus fail to speak effectively to working class men (and women who also care about these values). “It’s a recipe for resentment to have college-educated elites (whose men still hold traditionally masculine jobs) tell blue-collar men that the solution to their families’ gutted-by-neoliberalism economic prospects is for men to take the low-wage, feminine-coded jobs.” (86). Yes, it should be obvious that telling men who used to be, or aspire to be, respected manual workers that they should take minimum wage housecleaning jobs is not a winning proposition. 

These types of jobs, usually held by women of color, absolutely suck. Americans won’t become more equal by having more men fall into these terrible jobs. Rather, jobs like housecleaning and caring for the elderly must become much better in terms of pay and conditions or be automated. 

Let me summarize, albeit too briefly, Williams on gender and masculinity: “Because masculinity is a cherished identity for most men (and many women), the only way to fight toxic masculinities is with alternative, honorable masculinities.” (234). There has been some recognition of these points, in books likes Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man, Richard Reeves’ research on the struggles facing young men in America today, and even in leftist outlets like Jacobin. This is all to the good.

I should also mention from personal experience that struggling with insecure employment, let alone failing to get employment, in your area of training is devastating to your self-esteem. We derive internal satisfaction, as well as deeply important social esteem and self-respect, from succeeding at a task we put ourselves to. When academia spits you out into a low-status, insecure adjunct job it grants you affinities with manual workers struggling to get by on insecure, trade-threatened jobs. Successful professionals by definition don’t understand this. Again, there is nothing inherently sexist about any of this.

Neoliberal economics

Williams generally takes for granted, as do I, that the background for these developments is the decades-long destruction of the American working class by neoliberal policies. She cites some truly mind-blowing stats, like the fact that median household income in most counties in Ohio and Michigan is lower today than it was in 1980. Not stagnant—lower. “And as if to highlight how capitalism run amok fuels all this, opioid deaths skyrocketed particularly in areas with high loss of employment since 2000.” (92). The ongoing horrors of the opioid epidemic, and related after-effects of neoliberalism, are well documented in Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, which should be required reading for all Americans.

Culture plays a role here too. As Williams notes, “blue collar whites…tend to attribute poverty to moral failings—their own as well as others.” (92). This internalization of failure hits hard. You need some way to explain why things are falling apart in rural and small town America. Professional class discourse, focused on race and gender, can’t explain the struggles of working class white families, who by definition aren’t oppressed in this class-clueless worldview.

The problem is that “a society that understands race but not class as structural exacerbates the hidden injuries of class.” (93). People in these struggling rural communities were blaming themselves, Democrats offered them little in the way of answers, then Trump comes in and blames immigrants, China, and other elites. Is it a wonder people latched onto this?

In simple terms, as Williams says, “if people are upset, it’s because they’ve gotten screwed.” (94). This is the answer of the populist left, the one that makes sense of the times. The identity-focused liberals and complacent centrists that make up much of the professional classes continue to struggle, even in 2026, to grasp this simple point. Patting yourselves on the back and calling MAGA deplorable is much easier than carefully assessing the confluence of factors over the past few decades that brought us to this point. 

Attaining the American Dream

Most Americans, of all races, aspire to some version of the American Dream. On this point Williams relates the following anecdote: “All they want is a three-bedroom, two-bath cinderblock house,” said a friend from Atlanta, but after the 2008 Recession, “they can’t get one.” The key for Democrats in the US and for leftists abroad is to signal incessantly—and deliver—on the modest expectations of noncollege grads.” (161).

Why are Americans flocking to states like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Arizona, or Nevada? It’s not politics driving this move to southern and sunbelt states, it’s the cost of living. These are places where middle-class people believe they can achieve the American Dream, unlike California or New York. The suburbs of Washington, DC, where I spent most of my childhood, have gone in my lifetime from an affordable middle-class haven to a sprawling metropolis for the top ten percent.

Consider again those markers of adulthood. Men want them but women do too. Look at this stunning data—in 1960, 77% of women and 65% of men had all the main parts of adulthood by age 30: “they had finished school, become financially independent, left home, married, and had a child.” In 2000, 46% of women and 31% of men had. The male number shrunk in half! No wonder so many people, especially men, don’t think things are working for them. Again, without a specific strategy to address men, they will drift to the right, where they find many politicians and commentators eagerly offering them an explanation for their woes. The left-liberal discourse of toxic masculinity and male privilege, so predominant in professional class circles over the past decade, has only succeeded in driving Gen Z men into the arms of the right.

As we can see, part of Williams’ story, which I agree with, is that professional class left-liberal discourse doesn’t know how to talk to struggling men. They won’t win back the working classes until they figure this out. The story of America’s struggling working class applies to men and women of all races. But as Williams recognizes, a key part of the story concerns the recent struggles of men. I’m tinkering with a follow up essay that will address the need for those on the left to address the challenges facing men.

Concluding

Williams gives us this wonderful summation in her concluding chapter: “The Far Right’s formula has been to listen and then provide an explanation for the flood of pain and frustration it hears. I firmly believe it’s the wrong explanation, but here’s the point: you can’t fight a vivid and compelling explanation without an alternative explanation.” (259).

The populist left, a la Bernie Sanders, has been attempting this for the past decade. It will take some version of this universal, economic-focused left politics to reconnect with America’s struggling, multi-racial working class.

Review of Let the People Rule by John G. Matsusaka

John G. Matsusaka is a professor at USC and in his book Let the People Rule he offers a series of arguments for direct democracy, specifically the claim that the expanded use of referenda is a powerful solution to the problems of representative democracy and elite dominance. Since this overlaps heavily with arguments that I and others have made it is worth taking a closer look at Matsusaka’s claims.

Let the People Rule focuses primarily on the US and Europe. This is understandable, as many longstanding democracies in these areas did experience various populist shocks and developments from 2016-2020 (when his book was published). Their underlying causes and developments may be related to one another but also fairly different from that seen in Latin America, for instance.

Matsusaka identifies two main explanations for the rise of populism in the older representative democracies of the world, what he calls the economic view and the cultural view. He argues that economic and cultural explanations each have some support but that decline in trust in government is a long running trend which can’t be explained just by appealing to recent economic problems or surges in immigration. True, but recent developments may have accelerated, or supercharged, these slow, long-term trends. For instance, the normalization of trade relations with China and China’s entry to the WTO led to the loss of many good US jobs, particularly in manufacturing. This, combined with the Great Recession, may have been the (big) needle that finally broke the camel’s back. (I make an argument along these lines in What Time Is It?, my newest book).

How can we respond to this loss of legitimacy? Matsusaka claims that we should take the populist claim itself seriously: government has become less responsive to citizens and more responsive to elites. This is caused in part by the growth of a large, complex administrative state. The best solution? Let citizens directly vote on policies via referenda.

In his words, “referendum voters are more thoughtful and sophisticated than most people realize,” (10).  Yes, a thousand times yes! Mainstream critiques of referenda found in the media, among politicians, and within academia, are frequently shallow and unconvincing. In so far as Matsusaka is pro-referenda, he doesn’t have to work hard to convince me. I’m less certain that referenda will have all the other salutary impacts that he hopes for. But I strongly support them nevertheless.

Problems with his account of the administrative state

One problem is that while Matsusaka recognizes that the administrative state has become more complex, he doesn’t grapple with the impact of decades of neoliberalism on American communities and industries. Thus, in Chapter One the story about American history that Matsusaka tells sounds fairly right wing. The chapter opens with an Alito quote and its story resembles that told by famous free market thinkers like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. No one denies that the American state grew dramatically during the 20th century—but his tone at times suggests that this hurt American democracy. This claim is much less persuasive to me. The many government agencies he envisions were created by acts of Congress. They were standard fair for a representative democracy. They weren’t enacted by some distant tyranny. We might also ask how referenda would apply or help here? Would you hold referenda on whether to create an EPA? On specific regulations? Matsusaka needs more details on the how and why.

In his words, “we have come to call this immense government bureaucracy with lawmaking power the administrative state. It is the central feature of modern government in every advanced democracy.” (18). This is not how I would frame things but I strongly agree with Matsusaka’s lament that Congress has delegated much formal and informal decision-making authority to the executive branch and its agencies. I share much of this concern, regarding trade policy, war-making, and foreign policy in general. (I am currently reading Why Congress by Philip Wallach, which makes this important point in great detail. Wallach, Matsusaka, and I all prefer a powerful representative congress to a strong executive. Where we differ is that Matsusaka and I also prefer the people acting directly to a representative assembly. Wallach has the opposite view.) The challenge for those of us who would like to see Congress reclaim much of its power, institutional identity and prestige, not to mention its spine, is that this multi-decades long development was in effect a deliberate abdication of power by Congress. They gave it away and ultimately they will need to take some of it back. (see p. 25). On a related note, Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, in their Partisan Nation, explain how the incentives for national political behavior have changed dramatically in recent decades, making such a congressional reclamation project that much more difficult. 

Page 22 points out that executive branch enforcement of policy can change dramatically after a change in office, without any corresponding change in public opinion. This is true but strikes me as an unavoidable feature of electoral politics. People run for office on platforms and then attempt to enact them when in office. Small changes in voter turnout lead to big changes in policy, depending on whether the right or left is elected. How is this avoided? It is here that referenda could offer a better alternative: by directly reflecting the desire of citizens on specific issues, referenda could ensure durable policy that doesn’t whiplash between left and right as the parties see-saw in and out of power.

Some key points to summarize Matsusaka: the executive branch is defined by big, distant, faceless agencies; the presidency often acts without consulting with Congress or the people; the courts increasingly make policy; and Congress increasingly either delegates power to the executive branch or votes on policy without consideration for what constituents want. There is plenty of truth to each of these charges.

In summary, Matsusaka’s critique of the administrative state at times sounds more like Sowell, Buchanan, or Alito than a centrist, let alone leftist, critique. There are leftist critiques of bureaucracy, however, from political theorists like Wolin, Brown, and Pateman, as well as other feminists, anarchists, and those concerned with racism or mass incarceration. So, is Matsusaka a right-wing or conservative critic of big government arguing that we should turn to direct democracy as an alternative? It is not at all clear that he is a conservative, let alone a market evangelist. This is because his critique doesn’t really gel with Sowell et al. due to the fact that they want to take key decisions out of the people’s hands and give them to the market, whereas Matsusaka wants to let people directly decide, through the political process, on key issues of governance. He wants to take power out of the federal and state government’s hands and give it to the people. I would argue he’s kind of doing his own thing ideologically, borrowing from both left and right. It makes for an interesting combination.

Why Referenda

Let’s delve more fully into his positive case for direct democracy via referenda. Chapter Five presents evidence that American voters want to participate in referenda. Chapters Seven and Eight then cover the history and use of referenda in various US states and in countries around the world. They are a common, and often salutary, piece in the democratic toolkit. Matsusaka offers as an example the country Uruguay and suggests that part of Uruguay’s success as a thriving democracy is its use of referenda and the connection between popular opinion and government policy.

This last point is important, because although I support referenda in principle and am happy to see their use worldwide, up to this point the book has provided relatively little evidence that referenda will help address the author’s concerns. So, what positive arguments for increased use of referenda does Matsusaka make?

He suggests that, first, we could introduce advisory national referenda in the US. This would not require a constitutional amendment. Binding referenda, transferring lawmaking power to ordinary citizens at the national level, would. So the binding option might be desirable but it would be much harder to achieve. The challenge, of course, is that we don’t know what impact, if any, advisory referenda would have on American politics, laws, and populist sentiments. 

Matsusaka argues that “if the people have more control over decisions, they will not feel that policy is controlled by elites.” (136). I’m sure this is broadly speaking true but what impact will advisory referenda have in giving people control? This part is less clear. As purely advisory mechanisms, they will not directly empower people. The broader cultural impact they could have is less certain. It might be big, it might not, depending on how it impacts the relation between citizens and elected officials. Thus, the case for merely advisory referenda feels weak.

Matsusaka is at pains to demonstrate that the use of referenda is not worse than policy-making by conventional elected representatives. He is correct. For instance, he recognizes that, while referenda may not foster or be preceded by good public deliberation, neither is legislation passed by conventional representative bodies. Similar claims that referenda are captured, or at least unduly influenced by money, are also unpersuasive. The standard process of electing representatives is horribly riven with the monetary influence of oligarchs. There is no evidence that referenda would be worse. 

In his words, “the bottom line: although voters appear to operate with limited substantive information about government, politics, and policy, this does not necessarily prevent them from voting in a way that reflects their values and interests.” (175). I generally agree with his chapter Fourteen summary on the competence of voters and the value of direct participation. Hélène Landemore offers a similar argument in Politics Without Politicians, discussed below in my previous review. I also make a case for the competence and collective intelligence of the citizenry in Democratic Knowledge: Why There Are No Political Experts and Does Democracy Have a Future?

The biggest strength of Let the People Rule is that Matsusaka demonstrates that the standard arguments against direct democracy, both empirical and theoretical, are deeply flawed. He also provides substantial evidence that, at least in California, referenda are generally much more harmful to corporate interests than laws passed by the legislature. All the empirical evidence suggests that special interests, especially big business, exercise more power over the standard legislative process than over the referenda and initiative process. (Chapter Fifteen). So this standard critique of direct democracy, which I would hear all the time while living in California, is exposed as shallow and ungrounded.

The final chapter presents a nice summary of Let the People Rule: “direct democracy promises to bring policies into greater alignment with majority preferences, to diminish the influence of special interest groups, and to reduce political polarization by allowing the centrist majority to override the partisan extremes.” (236-237). This is, in brief, his case for the positive value of referenda.

Matsusaka concludes by saying that populism is not a passing fad but a response to a real loss of political power among ordinary people. (I generally agree). We must address it rather than hoping it will blow over or clinging to flawed past practices. Th best answer is to give ordinary people more power. Agreed, again. Matsusaka shows how dramatically expanding the use of referenda, where citizens vote directly on proposed legislation, is one way to do this.

Review of Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore, a political theorist who writes frequently on democracy, has a new book titled Politics Without Politicians. It is in many ways the culmination and popularization of her previous work on democratic theory and practice, all of which argues in favor of the wisdom and capability of ordinary citizens. In this new book she forcefully makes the case that the problems facing many representative democracies of the world would best be addressed through giving power to randomly selected groups of citizens. That is the main thesis of the book, which I will expand on below.

But first, why does she think this? Right away, Landemore says that, after thinking about democracy and resisting this conclusion for a decade, she has finally admitted “electoral politics is beyond repair. But democracy isn’t.” (1). Her book thus begins by listing common problems facing government in America and other wealthy democracies—most specifically, the continued dominance by discredited elites and the persistent unpopularity of our elected leaders.

Some commentators claim that the people are the source of these current problems and that the solution is less democracy. On this score, she mentions Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy and Garett Jones’ 10% Less Democracy. (Other books advocating this perspective include Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter and, less radically, Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, I would add).

Landemore, correctly, goes in the other direction. If the problem is economic and political elites, the solution is more democracy, not less. So what would it mean to have politics without politicians? Won’t anyone who gets involved in a leadership or decision-making role become a politician (with all the negative connotations this entails—out of touch, elitist, corrupt) over time?

To answer this question, how should we define these two categories? For Landemore, “ordinary citizens are those who are not professionally involved in politics.” On the other hand,“politicians, by definition, hold professional political responsibilities that set them apart from the rest of us.” (33).

How can we get ordinary citizens involved in politics without turning them into politicians? Again, as will be detailed below, the answer for Landemore is bringing citizens into political decision-making through temporary bodies of randomly selected citizens. But first let’s step back and ask again why we might want this.

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” While Buckley was a conservative, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal, right or left, in this particular quote. What it embodies, rather, is a democratic attitude and this is why Landemore mentions it. As she says, “a large, random sample of the population might not be such a bad mix of people. In fact, it could be both more democratic and more effective to be governed by them than by a group of Harvard academics.” (5).

(It is also a litmus test for your political gut. Do you instinctively agree with the Buckley quote, as Landemore and I both do? Or do you recoil and feel the opposite way? Answers to this question also cut across conventional political cleavages.)

A random selection of citizens would be more democratic, sure. But why might it be more effective? First, Landemore points to the “problems with existing representative systems. Ordinary citizens are peripheral to them, convened now and again for the purpose of selecting representatives but kept at bay most of the time.” (8). Landemore’s alternative, citizen-led approach, “consists…of a vision of politics centering deliberative processes—ordinary people talking to one another with the goal of coming to a joint decision that works for most.” (9).

She thus envisions a form of democracy where “politics is neither a job nor a chore. It is instead a civic duty…” (11). Her vision also “centers on deliberative assemblies of citizens appointed through civic lotteries.” (11). Below I will consider some of the strengths and weaknesses of lottery versus a self-selection approach to participatory politics. For now note that her approach avoids the creation of a new political class because people will be randomly selected to deliberate and decide on certain issues before returning to their day-to-day lives. In the world of citizen lotteries there would be no professional class of politicians just as there is no professional class of jurors in the United States.

Another piece of evidence for widespread democratic discontent lies in the many protests in democratic countries around the world in the past decade-plus, especially in the oldest representative democracies. “The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.” (29). Again, the defining feature in many of the longstanding representative democracies of the world is “profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites.” (30). This connects with my claim, in Does Democracy Have a Future?, that the 21st century will be defined not by emerging democracies and how they consolidate, but by systemic problems facing the longstanding, consolidated democracies of the world.

Landmore argues that our biggest problem is “how we select our ruling class. The issue isn’t just governance—it’s electoral representation and the professional class of politicians it perpetuates.” (30). The problem with politicians lies not with who they are as individuals but instead with their existence as a group that, by running for elections, fundraising, and holding office for a long time, “stay in power so long that they become a class of their own.” (23).

Drawing on Bernard Manin, Landemore argues that elections are oligarchic, not fundamentally democratic. They lead to the selection of a distinct class of people, politicians, who have political power and get to make the laws that bind us all. The truly democratic mechanism, going back to Ancient Athens, is to either have everyone directly vote on the laws (what we now call direct democracy) or to randomly select a subset of citizens (often called sortition or lot), as we do for jury duty.

This would be the most effective way to reverse the depressing currently reality documented by scholars like Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, whose “empirical studies suggest that true power lies with the smaller, wealthier part of the population, and that electoral democracies are, indeed, plutocracies.” (57).

The Virtues of Lottery

Landemore runs through various reasons why electoral politics haven’t been working very well. Ultimately, she argues, it is due to how we select our leaders. Her basic suggestion seems to be that we can revitalize democracy through a combination of direct referenda votes on some issues and jury-style randomly selected mini-publics to decide others.

“…what we can learn, or relearn, from the Greeks is that political expertise is also acquired on the job. The less we give people an opportunity to participate the less capable they are. The more we ask of them, the more they learn.” (86). Landemore is here articulating one of the basic principles of participatory democracy. I couldn’t agree more.

What happened to selecting citizens by lottery? In Ancient Athens, while key policies were decided in an open vote among all citizens, key offices were filled via random selection, aka lottery. They also filled their large juries with a lottery of random citizens, as we still do today. However, using lot outside of jury duty disappeared “sometime between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century” (89). This is deeply disappointing, because lot is the best embodiment of political equality: “random selection has the merit of giving everyone the exact same mathematical chance of occupying a position of power.” (104).

Landmore also cites the diversity trumps ability theorem. This is the idea that, at least where there are correct answers, a diverse group of people will perform better than a homogenous group of highly capable people. Why? Because, with greater diversity, “everyone contributes a different perspective, piece of information, or argument to the political question of the common good, whereas even the smartest few are likely to miss elements of the big picture.” (112). 

In other words, groups of highly trained elites tend to be similar—they have the same prejudices, the same experiences, and the same blindspots. For a real world example think of the brilliant yet clueless people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who dragged us into the Vietnam War. Whereas lot, by using random selection, best embodies the promise of diversity. “Lot’s instrumental value for collective intelligence comes from its ability to reproduce at small scale the cognitive diversity present in the larger group.” (113). A lot, in other words, produces a microcosm of the wisdom embodied in the millions of ordinary citizens that populate a democracy.

A key part of Landemore’s argument for the power of random citizens lies in the evidence she marshals concerning the positive impact of deliberative polls and other mini-publics. There are multiple examples to draw from, including the Irish citizens council on abortion as well as a French council on climate change.

Consider the French Citizen’s Convention for Climate, which ran from 2019 to 2020. President Macron’s proposed fuel tax (to address climate change) spurred the Yellow Vest movement, a widespread set of protests that crossed conventional political lines. In turn, the government set up this convention on climate, composed of 150 randomly selected citizens, with the goal of producing a better policy to address climate change. It was a 9 month process over seven weekends with a $6 million budget. Over the course of this time the citizens produced more than 100 proposals for addressing climate change, none of which involved a fuel tax. This convention revealed that ordinary citizens could come up with a range of proposals for addressing climate change that were far more popular (and innovative) than what conventional politicians could think of.

Landemore says that when given the power to initiate and formulate laws (or sufficiently law-like proposals) these random citizen participants are “citizen legislators.” They aren’t just offering recommendations like an advisory committee. Rather, citizen legislators are a “specific subset of citizen representatives: their function is to formulate legislative proposals and to draft laws. The term “citizen” signals that these actors are laypeople—not professional politicians or members of a demographically distinct elite.” (133).

Furthermore, Landemore reports on the openness, new connections, and even “civic love” that were forged during these extended sessions of citizen participation. As she says, “somewhere between the first and third sessions, the participants had clearly bonded, forming a genuine connection.” (156). Something similar can happen among jurors if they find themselves with the civic privilege and responsibility of serving on a multi-day trial.

Such citizen assemblies demonstrate that citizens can be effective deliberators and decision-makers. “And one of the reasons why they succeed in solving problems, often precisely where politicians fail, is because they bond and learn to care for one another, and even to love one another.” (171). Her account offers considerable detail on what worked and didn’t work in the assemblies where she was involved as an observer but I won’t cover more of that here.

What are some concerns with Landemore’s account?

Will participation in these citizen assemblies be a waste of time? As Landemore rightly notes, “there is no point in convening a citizens’ assembly if its recommendations will only be ignored.” Agreed. She goes on to say “at the very least, there should be a credible commitment up front to seriously consider the conclusions of the citizens’ assembly—and, ideally, a clear and convincing explanation afterward of how the commissioning body plans to respond to them.” (198).

To be blunt, this simply isn’t good enough. This is where we need a dose of participatory democracy as defined by Carole Pateman, where people have the right to make binding decisions in government.

However, at later points in the book, Landemore strikes a more radical tone, suggesting that legally empowered random assemblies should be combined with legal referenda to create a politics without politicians. Doing so would, if institutionalized, move far beyond the sort of citizens’ advisory boards that she gestured at in the previous quote. To be meaningfully democratic, face-to-face groups of citizens, whether self-selected as in participatory budgeting or randomly selected by lot as in Landemore’s examples, must be empowered to make binding decisions. Take again the example of a jury—the jury listens, then deliberates, then makes a binding decision on the defendant’s guilt. To do less would be undemocratic and a waste of time.

As Landemore rightly asks, “what should legitimacy—and specifically democratic legitimacy—mean and require in the twenty-first century?” (250). Would randomly selected assemblies, and their resulting decisions, have legitimacy? Unlike direct and participatory democracy, where every citizen can, if they wish, vote on a policy, or representative democracy, where every citizen can vote on who to represent them, assemblies selected by lot would not involve everyone. Every citizen would be eligible, as with jury duty. And, as with jury duty, only a small subset would actually be randomly selected to serve on any given issue. First, this entails a predictive question: would people see these bodies as legitimate? If not, why not? Second, a normative question: should we consider them so? 

The virtues of randomly selected bodies of citizens are that, like juries, they are made up of a representative sample of ordinary people, not elites. They embody, as Landemore points out, political equality in a manner that elections do not. Is this enough to overcome the concern that not everyone gets to participate? Maybe. Perhaps their legitimacy rests firmly enough on the fact that all are eligible to participate, i.e. we are all in the random lottery selection.

There are tough trade offs here. The kind of face-to-face, participatory democracy envisioned by Pateman is open to all but faces self-selection issues: will the people who show up be similar to, or care about, the issues that a majority does? When participatory budgeting works well the answer has been “yes.” But there are plenty of examples of local government, especially concerning housing, where a small coterie of wealthy activists dominate the proceedings. I personally feel the pull of both types of face-to-face democracy.

The fact that selecting assemblies by lot (whatever their specific power) makes them a true cross-section of citizens is a strong argument in their favor. I’ll leave Landemore with the last words: “Randomly selected citizens’ assemblies produce ideas and proposals that are more aligned with the preferences of the larger population and draw on a more diverse pool of views and information than those of elected assemblies. As a result, their proposals are likely to be better and more likely to be accepted by the public than those of elected assemblies.” (255).

For further reading I can heartily recommend Landemore’s Open Democracy, a more academic but still accessible presentation of these issues as well as her co-authored book Debating Democracy, in which she debates libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy.