The Future of Democracy

Do we still need representatives?

In our previous newsletter we looked at 2024 and how this might be a year of democratic reckoning. With over 60 countries contesting elections, it’s set to be a political charged year. Maybe instead of criticising what is broken, we can reimagine what ought to be.

In today’s newsletter we go deeper into the works of political scientist Hélène Landemore. See what she might have to say on the future of democracy. Before we proceed with the newsletter, here is an old podcast by her for Network Capital -

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Let’s start by considering the basic argument, Prof Landemore is proposing — according to her, there are subsets of citizens who are wiser than the collective body of citizens when it comes to making political decisions.

Landemore views political governance as fundamentally a question of problem-solving. For her, valuable governance is in its ideal form a governing body that can correctly define, understand, and respond to the collective problems that modern societies face. For her, the moral value that makes democracy better is — opinion formation after deliberation.