Hélène Landemore on the Problem With Democratic Politics Today

In the fall of 2018, the French government passed a carbon tax, ostensibly to address environmental concerns but primarily, it seems, to close a 2 billion-euro deficit in the national budget. The move backfired spectacularly. By November, the Yellow Vests movement had emerged, named after the neon safety vests that all French motorists are required by law to keep in their vehicles and wear in case of emergencies. Protesters donned these vests both for visibility while blocking highways and occupying traffic circles across the country and as a symbol of their demand to be seen. The movement exploded, with demonstrators flooding Paris and marching on the Champs-Élysées every weekend for months. Their demands for social justice resonated, drawing support from over two-thirds of the French population at the protest’s peak. But public sympathy faded as a violent faction emerged—torching public property, looting luxury shops, and threatening to storm government ministries. In a moment of chaos, panicked officials scrambled out of windows, a dramatic turning point that shattered the movement’s image.

Meanwhile, in the United States, discontent was brewing as well, arguably culminating in the right-wing populist uprising that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. On that fateful day, a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters—spurred on by the outgoing president, who refused to concede defeat—marched to the Capitol and stormed the building. The chaos ultimately left several people dead, multiple others injured, and many members of Congress terrified. Whether we label this ultimately failed invasion an attempted coup or not, the violence was as real as what had unfolded in France. For many observers, this event marked the end of U.S. exceptionalism. It exposed U.S. democracy as being just as fragile and susceptible to demagoguery as any other. To me, it revealed strikingly similar fault lines in both France and the United States, even though these political movements stemmed from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.

Meanwhile, in the United States, discontent was brewing as well, arguably culminating in the right-wing populist uprising that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. On that fateful day, a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters—spurred on by the outgoing president, who refused to concede defeat—marched to the Capitol and stormed the building. The chaos ultimately left several people dead, multiple others injured, and many members of Congress terrified. Whether we label this ultimately failed invasion an attempted coup or not, the violence was as real as what had unfolded in France. For many observers, this event marked the end of U.S. exceptionalism. It exposed U.S. democracy as being just as fragile and susceptible to demagoguery as any other. To me, it revealed strikingly similar fault lines in both France and the United States, even though these political movements stemmed from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.

All around the world, similar protests have been observed in the last few decades. In Taiwan, in 2014, students started what is now known as the Sunflower Movement by occupying Parliament for three weeks to protest a free trade agreement with China and, more broadly, corruption in government and unrepresentative politics. In the United Kingdom in 2016, the Brexit vote was a more procedural way in which the masses expressed their rejection of neoliberal politics, the lack of transparency and democratic accountability of the European Union, and the disconnection of the elites behind both. In Chile in 2019, a small rise in the price of metro tickets spurred massive protests, a political revolution, and two failed attempts at rewriting the constitution. In January 2025, Serbia’s prime minister resigned, after monthslong student protests mobilized the country against corrupt politicians and democratic backsliding.

Iceland, a tiny Nordic country, was the canary in the coal mine in many respects. While the bigger countries had to wait a few years for the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis to hit politically as well as economically, Iceland collapsed immediately. In 2008, as the country suddenly incurred debts totaling seven times its GDP, the political elites were ousted from power, and 36 bankers were eventually imprisoned. It being Iceland, the process was peaceful—using yogurt, bananas, and singing as weapons. But the shock waves were quite profound, leading the country to engage in a process of constitutional reform that, although it petered out after a few years, pioneered revolutionary ideas, such as the view that ordinary citizens should be involved in the writing of their own social contract.

What do these events have in common? Profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites. We can call this populism—of the left or of the right—and dismiss it as an irrational, obscure force to be squelched. We can minimize the problem as the normal way democracies function and adjust to changing circumstances, accepting a permanent state of crisis as an inevitable price to pay for the freedom to choose our rulers. Or we can ask ourselves: What isn’t working in our systems that has led us to this level of dissatisfaction, instability, and, in some cases, violence?

The homogeneity of the electoral class is so pervasive that we hardly notice it anymore. It becomes striking only in certain moments, often by contrast. One such moment for me came in January 2019, a few months after the Yellow Vests movement erupted in France, during the lead up to the Great National Debate initiated by President Emmanuel Macron to quell the unrest. As a first step to rekindle national dialogue, Macron traveled across the country to meet with city mayors—France’s last well-liked politicians. His goal was to regain popularity among the mayors and, through them, the public. As I watched these events unfold from my computer in New Haven, Connecticut, one meeting particularly caught my attention: Macron’s session with about 600 mayors from my home region of Normandy, held in the small town of Grand Bourgtheroulde. For seven hours, I watched online as Macron conducted a marathon Q&A, deftly fielding questions from this critical and deeply engaged audience.

More than the president’s demonstration of retail politics, what stayed with me was the visual: a supremely confident white man, surrounded by a sea of middle-aged, bearded, graying white men in glasses and dark suits. There were only a handful of women in the mix and not a person of color in sight—a perfect vignette of how patriarchal and homogenous the local hierarchies still are in France.  At the local level, it suddenly became very clear to me, the same old hegemonies still prevail.

I was struck in a completely different way by another image, which I ran across while researching the 2010 Icelandic constitutional process. It was a photo of the 25-member Icelandic Constitutional Council—the group tasked with drafting a new constitution after the 2008 financial crisis. Something about it just felt different. Of course, everybody in it is white—this is Iceland, after all; a small and not very multicultural country. But for one thing, almost half of the group is made up of women, who stand out in their colorful outfits. Second, in the foreground, lying almost flat on a reclining wheelchair, is Freyja Haraldsdóttir, a human rights lawyer afflicted by glass bone disease. Meanwhile, even though most of the men obviously felt obliged to wear suits and ties for this official picture, not all of them did so. The overall effect is less like a gathering of politicians and more like a group of guests at a wedding. These 25 Icelanders, beaming with pride in the picture, looked to me somehow, for lack of a better word, “normal.” Ordinary. Just like us. A look at the professions represented in that small sample also tells an interesting story: a mathematician, two pastors, a video game designer, a student, a union representative, a museum director, and a few academics, among others. In other words, none were professional politicians.

How did Icelanders manage to produce such a diverse group? Their method was simple, and quite brutal: They banned politicians. They literally legislated that politicians currently in office were to be excluded from the pool of people allowed to run for election to the council. Why would politicians make such an anti-politician decision? Doesn’t that prove they can, at times, act selflessly for the greater good? In theory, yes—but only under extreme duress. In fact, in Iceland, they hardly had a choice. After the disgust generated toward the political class during the 2008 crisis, which had revealed the levels of corruption and unethical collusion between politicians and the banking world, Parliament had to take drastic measures. If the constitutional process were to have any legitimacy, the new government ushered into power at that time reasoned, it simply could not be led by politicians. It had to be entrusted to regular citizens.

With this ban on politicians, Iceland took one step in the direction of what I call “politics without politicians.” Their mistake, however, was to stay with the selection mechanism of elections. After all, you can kick politicians out of an election, but you cannot prevent an election from selecting for a certain kind of person. To go further, Icelanders should have tried doing politics without elections altogether. The fact that they did not shows just how hard it is to imagine an alternative.

Voters queue to cast their ballots at a polling station in Darrang district, Assam state, India, on April 26, 2024.Biju Boro/AFP via Getty Images

Elections create this cascade of inequality through two mechanisms: one, the self-selection of the people seeking power; the other, human choice as a mechanism to identify who should be sent to power among that self-selected pool. Both mechanisms end up narrowing the kind of people who can access power to a small portion of the population. The combination of those two factors creates a political class that is homogenous along too many dimensions to govern well and justly.

That there is self-selection in electoral politics is undeniable. Electoral politics attracts certain types of people and repels others. The problem is not just that elections will attract people with such traits (even though there are no good reasons to think that such traits are optimal for successful governing) but that the overrepresentation of such people will dissuade other types of people—the unambitious, the selfless, and the accommodating—from running. In other words, the electoral selection mechanism, by itself, and quite apart from the additional difficulties of electoral competition, will dissuade many capable and talented citizens from seeking office in the first place. Among the first to self-select out of that dog-eat-dog competition are going to be women, but so are, more generally, those I call the shy.

As political scientist Brian Klaas acknowledges, this problem is more general: “There is always self-selection bias with power. Whether it’s trigger-happy police officers or power-hungry tyrants in homeowner’s associations, power tends to draw in people who want to control others for the sake of it.” Attracting the power-hungry may be problematic. But what is even more problematic for Klaas is that power may also attract the corruptible. Indeed, the more corruptible people are, the more they tend to be drawn to jobs where corruption is likely to exist. To be sure, not all electoral democracies suffer from high degrees of corruption, but the stakes of power are such that the possibility of corruption is much more likely in the job of politician than it is, say, in the job of kindergarten teacher or nurse.

Let us now turn to the second problem with elections. From among the pool of self-selected people, elections then rely on human choice: first, the choice of party hierarchies that select viable candidates; and second, the choice of voters.

We could generously imagine that merit is randomly distributed in parties and that tracking it does not tend, in practice, to homogenize along gender, class, race, or other dimensions (cough, cough). But even in party-less elections—or assuming we could, for instance, introduce quotas for underrepresented categories—the real selection process at the end of the day is voters’ choice and judgment. And relying on voters’ choice has inegalitarian implications, as it both systematically excludes the shy and tends to produce oligarchies.

We all instinctively know that electoral politics is oligarchic—but what we fail to grasp is that this isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. The politicians we elect are a tiny, unrepresentative elite, exceptional in some ways—but not always in positive ways. And they know they are exceptional. That’s why every campaign is a sales pitch, with candidates presenting themselves as being uniquely extraordinary, as if that’s a virtue rather than a warning sign. “Vote for me because I’m the best/I’m right/I alone can save the country/I alone know X or Y/I alone can speak for you.” This appeal to exceptionality is the rule of elections. François Hollande, the only president of France who tried to sell himself as “normal” once in power—though he was nothing like it—failed to be reelected. The U.S. equivalent was probably Jimmy Carter. Voters do not usually like or choose “normal” or “ordinary.”

Somehow, we persist in believing that this oligarchic dimension is merely an unfortunate by-product of preexisting inequalities—inequalities rooted in historical realities and socioeconomic forces. According to this view, the homogeneity of the political class is not a result of the mechanisms of human choice itself but rather the lingering legacy of past hierarchies. Surely, as we democratize our systems—expanding suffrage, removing wealth requirements for candidates, and encouraging broader participation from the working class, women, and minorities of all kinds—parliaments and local hierarchies will eventually come to reflect the diversity of the populations they serve. Isn’t that exactly what we’ve seen over the past century in countries like the United States, France, and Germany? And look at Sweden, showing us what the future, or at least the potential, of electoral democracy looks like!

Former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven greets supporters at an election rally in Linkoping, Sweden on Sept. 8, 2018. Anders Wiklund/AFP via Getty Images

In the Swedish parliament, political scientists have found representation across social backgrounds to be “extraordinarily even,” with nearly 30 percent of legislators lacking a college degree—a stark contrast to the United States, where 95 percent of legislators are college-educated, despite only one-third of Americans holding a degree. Consider Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s prime minister from 2014 to 2021, a former welder without a college education. Remarkably, politicians in the Swedish parliament without degrees perform just as effectively as their more formally educated counterparts, demonstrating that true representation doesn’t require a diploma. So, no worries, it’s just a matter of time and will! Sweden is the future. Voters are perfectly capable of choosing in a way that spreads offices and positions of power from the top to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and among all possible human types.

Except that’s not really true. All that these examples from progressive Scandinavia prove is that in the best possible circumstances—where the right to run for election is universal, money plays less of a role, economic inequalities are moderate, the citizenry is educated, and so on—we can get professional politicians to look a bit more like a phenotypical portrait of the larger citizenry they serve. We can achieve a slightly less inegalitarian distribution of offices and positions of power across the citizenry. But consider that to get gender parity, even Scandinavian countries had to constrain individual choice, forcing parties to promote female candidates by implementing strict quotas.

As a result, elections are bound to generate an inegalitarian distribution of power that is not empirically contingent but structural. So even assuming ideal conditions, which are never found in real life, not even in Scandinavian countries, elections will send to power an unrepresentative group of people over-sampling certain traits, including those that are associated with being a confident elite, and under-sampling the shy.

Am I suggesting that giving people a choice of representatives is a bad thing? No. It is plainly an improvement over rulers imposed by tradition or force. At best, however, it yields a liberal oligarchy: the rule of the few, legitimized and constrained by popular consent. That arrangement is preferable to its alternatives, but it falls short of genuine democracy—and therefore of the quality of governance we should reasonably expect from it. The alternative is not to abandon representation, but to reconfigure it.

From Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule by Hélène Landemore, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Hélène Landemore.