A Radical Proposal for True Democracy

One thing I want to do on this show is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call democracy is not very democratic. The role of the people is confined to elections, to choosing the elites who will represent us. Landemore argues that our political thinking is stuck in “18th-century epistemologies and technologies.” It is not enough. We’ve learned much in the last few hundred years about random sampling, about the benefits of cognitively diverse groups, about the ways elections are captured by those with the most social and financial capital. Landemore wants to take what we’ve learned and build a new vision of democracy atop it — one in which we let groups of randomly selected citizens actually deliberate and govern. One in which we trust deliberation and diversity, not elections and political parties, to shape our ideas and to restrain our worst impulses. This is a challenging idea. I don’t know that it would work. But it’s a provocation worth wrestling with, particularly at this moment, when our ideas about democracy have so far outpaced the thin, corrupted ways in which we practice it. You’ve heard people say, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” Landemore’s challenge is this: What if we were a democracy? We honor those who came before us for radically reimagining who could govern, and how politics could work. But did they really discover the terminal state of democracy? Or are there bold steps left for us to take? Recommendations: Liquid Reign by Tim Reutemann The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas The Principles of Representative Government by Bernard Manin Mortelle Adèle Book Series "The Ezra Klein Show" is hiring an Associate Producer! Apply to work with us by visiting nytco.com/careers. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  Hello, welcome to Ezra Klein Show. I am Ezra Klein.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin today, a job announcement, we are looking for an associate producer. This job does require two years of audio experience. So if you have that and you'd like to be part of the show, check it out. I'm going to put the link to the job listing in our show notes in the description for this episode. But be quick on it. We're only going to keep this open for about two weeks before we make a decision.

• 0:50Ezra Klein?

  So the episode today, I've been thinking about how to introduce us. My colleague Ross Douthat, you may know him. He's argued that we live in a decadent age and decadence here is this pathology that comes from a mixture of affluence. So things are pretty good for a lot of people and lack of purpose, a lack of grand ideological goals and ambitions. And when you put those together in a society, you stagnate. You're not driving in any particular direction and there's a lot of force behind the status quo that shuts down anybody who wants to really change things. I've been thinking about this politically quite a bit. We are still running here in this country on the fumes of political ideas from the 18th century. We're trying to

• 1:31Ezra Klein?

  perfect them, to live up to them in a way they never did, sure. But for all that we've learned, all that we've seen, the form of government that we practice and even that we aspire to, hasn't really changed since the dawn of this country. Is that a function, actually, of it working so well at this point? Or is that a function of our inability now to imagine alternatives, to believe as those who came before us believed, as we honor them for believing, that the future really can be radically different than the present? One thing I want to do on the show is give space to truly radical, challenging ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imagination. And Ellen Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, she has one of those ideas. She calls it open democracy.

• 2:16Ezra Klein?

  And the premise is simple. What we call democracy, it isn't very democratic. The role of the people is confined to elections, to choosing the elites who represent us. She puts it well, that we are privileging the idea of people's consent to power over that of people's exercise of power. We, the people, we don't really, in an ongoing way, exercise power. We simply impose accountability, maybe, on those who do. So she is sketching this alternative, open democracy, that builds on the technologies of random sampling, builds on what we've learned about how diverse groups make better decisions and even brilliant individuals. And she's using all that to say, what if we actually let representative groups of citizens, randomly selected, deliberate and rule?

• 3:00Ezra Klein?

  What if we didn't invest so much in elections as some sort of ideal and partisan competition as your disciplining mechanism? What if, instead, we trusted ourselves and others like us to deliberate together and to govern? This is a challenging idea. It is a provocative idea. It is very radical in its ultimate implications. And I'm not here to say that I know it would work. I don't know that it would work. But is, I think, a challenge worth wrestling with, particularly in this moment, when our ideas about democracy have so far outpaced the thin corrupted ways in which we practice it? You've heard people say, we're a republic, not a democracy. Maybe some of you are saying that in your heads right now. But what Landemore is saying is, that's right. And look around.

• 3:44Ezra Klein?

  How is that working out at this late hour? What if, instead, we were a democracy, not just a republic? As always, my email is ezra [email protected]. I'm always interested to know who you'd like to see on the show next, or send me your guest suggestions. I do get a bunch of email from folks about advertisers on the show. I want you to know, I don't control that. There's a very strong wall between the editorial and advertising sides at the New York Times. So if you have feedback on advertising, you should direct that to the Times more broadly. They make those policies. In order to protect my ability to plan shows correctly and not think about who is our advertisers, that stuff is not checked by me, and I don't have control over it. This is how the paper works overall. So you don't need to keep telling me what you think of the advertisers. All that said, here is Alain Landemore.

• 4:33Ezra Klein?

  So I want to start in the practice of this before we get into the theory. Tell me about how Iceland designed its constitution.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  So Iceland decided to rewrite its constitution in 2010, and they decided to use a very innovative, inclusive participatory method. They started with a national forum of 950 randomly selected citizens that were tasked with coming up with the main values and ideas that they wanted to see entrenched in the new document. And then they had an election to choose 25 constitution drafters, if you will, among a pool of non-professional politicians, because they had been convinced after the 2008 crisis that they were all corrupt. So by law, they were excluded from participating in this election.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And those 25 decided to work with the larger public by publishing their drafts at regular intervals, putting them online and collecting some feedback through a crowdsourced sort of a process. And then they put the resulting proposal to a nationwide referendum. Two-thirds of the voting population approved, and then parliament killed it and never turned it into a bill.

• 5:50Ezra Klein?

  So I want to come back to parliament killing it, but I want to stay in the process by which this got drafted for a minute. So this is going to be a bigger theme throughout our whole conversation. But the key in any citizen-based process is the process of education and deliberation. Who controls that, how the experts are called in, really shapes the outcome. So how did it work here? How did this group in Iceland learn about the issues they needed to explore? How did they convene expert testimony? And how did they come to decisions?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  So they relied a lot on the work of those 950 citizens who, you know, over just the course of a day, really brainstormed about the main issues they thought were important to make salient in the new text. One of them, for example, was the idea of collective ownership of natural resources that were not already owned, officially owned.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  And then they had expert reports as well that they could rely on. And they even had two drafts of a constitutional proposal written by experts that were made available to them and that they could use as examples. And they also felt free to consult, you know, their colleagues, their friends, their just appeal to other experts, but they didn't have much of a budget. So this was really on a shoestring budget that they could do all of this.

• 7:05Ezra Klein?

  But so there wasn't a process where somebody said, I think we should have collective ownership of of public resources. And then they called in people who had studied that and studied its outcomes to try to see what the effects of it might be. This was what sounds good to the convention as it stands today made it in.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I think that that was a little bit more like that. You might say it was more amateurish than what just happened in France, for example, where the presence of experts was really central. In the Icelandic case, they were a lot more insulated from government, you know, officials, and they did their thing in their own little corner.

• 7:41Ezra Klein?

  And how do you think the final text read differently for that process? What did the convened citizens prioritize or weigh that maybe professional politicians would have left out or come to a different outcome on?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  So I think what they did first is reverse the priorities of the previous text, which was written in 1944, for example. And we know it was heavily centering the president and the judiciary. So in the new version, they placed the people and the representatives first, and in fact, the people's rights first. There was a long list of rights at the beginning. There's a preamble which emphasizes environmental issues, the right to pristine nature and clean air and, you know, things like that. So I think it's truly more a people's constitution, you know, that there were an emphasis, a greater

• 8:33Speaker 01

  emphasis on children's rights, transgender people's rights, just a sense that inclusion was a real concern, which you didn't sense in the 94, 44 constitution, and you sensed a lot less in the expert drafts.

• 8:50Ezra Klein?

  So this goes to parliament and parliament just says no?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Well, they are the ones who sort of started this whole process. But somehow, by the time the proposal came back to them for approval, the government had changed, the majority had changed, and the people who opposed the whole process were in power. And in particular, there were people who vehemently opposed the idea of Article 34, this idea of collective ownership of natural resources, because they had benefited or they were the representatives of people who had enormously benefited from exploiting natural resources for free during the 1980s, particularly the rich fishing grounds of Iceland. And they made a killing, and they were not happy that this new constitution was going to force them

• 9:37Speaker 01

  to basically pay a rent to the Icelandic nation.

• 9:41Ezra Klein?

  So did they suffer any political consequences for rejecting this citizens' proposal?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Sadly, no. I think in part because Iceland is such a tiny nation that it was wholly rescued from the financial and economic collapse by the IMF. So again, by the time this constitution was finalized and put to parliament, the larger population had kind of lost interest. They were back to a booming economy. Tourism was thriving. I think they thought that, well, at that point, it makes no difference to our lives whether we have a new constitution or not, whereas there was a moment in 2010 when they thought, well, obviously, we need to change everything.

• 10:21Ezra Klein?

  This example plays a big role in your book, but in some ways, it's as much of a failure as a success. So what do you see in it that plants the seeds of a very different way of doing government, particularly given that last part, right? I understand why there was some inspiration in watching the constitution be drafted. But given the apathy and backlash that greeted it, why do you take this as a successful process?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  First of all, every bold new experiment is likely to fail. So it's not that surprising that it didn't... Holy succeed, but I think it succeeded in creating a blueprint for a new kind of democracy. It made me believe that a new form of politics is possible. And then the question is, how do you transition from the current system within which these experiments are still, you know, happening and that are constrained by the existing structures to this new kind of democracy? This question of from here to there, I don't have a clear answer.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  What I do know, what the Icelandic lesson teaches us is that if you want to go towards a more participatory, more inclusive, more authentically democratic system, you'll have to work with the existing powers that be. I think they tried to be too purist and they tried to circumvent the system. But in the end, they were dependent on elected officials and they should have bought their goodwill in some ways. They should have worked with the system, not against it. I think that was a mistake. I think the French convention is more, somewhat more successful in that way because they did work with the system.

• 12:00Ezra Klein?

  So let's hold the French convention to the side for a minute. I want to hold also political pragmatism to the side. You have a ferocious critique of what typically gets called democracy in most countries right now. And you say something at the start of your book that I thought was really profound, which is that all the talk we're hearing now about the crisis of democracy is actually a sign of both the vitality and the betrayal of the democratic, the actual small day democratic idea. Tell me why.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Well, I think that democracy is a living ideal. And we started with a relatively minimalistic understanding of that ideal, actually. It was people's power, but in the end, it's century just meant that we get to choose our rulers once in a while, and even so, not all of us, you know, just the property, white males amongst ourselves. And slowly that ideal has expanded and we wanted more people to have that power. And then now I think we are realizing the limits of just being able to choose rulers as opposed to actually being able to choose outcomes. And over and beyond that, defining the agenda.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And deliberating about the agenda and shaping the whole discussion. My hope is that the frustrations we have with the current system is not just due to the fact that it has become more plutocratic and more oligarchic and has even strayed from the even the minimalistic initial ideal, but that people have come to want more power, that they want a more authentic form of control of other lives. And that this, you know, choice of rulers every four years, it's just not enough.

• 13:39Ezra Klein?

  I think for people who understand elections to be the be all and end all of representation, the most sacred part of a small democratic process. This is in some ways your most alien argument. So, so, so tell me more directly, what is wrong with elections? How have they misled us about what a democracy should be?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So I think the real problem is that even under ideal circumstances, let's say a perfectly egalitarian society, a society in which money plays no role. Elections rely on human choice, which is inherently discriminatory and biased towards certain traits, certain traits like charisma, eloquence, height, you know, even bracketing money and socioeconomic distinctions. So at the level of the ideals, elections operate as a principle of distinction between ordinary citizens and those fated to become a political elite of sorts. So as a result to my mind, elections systematically close off access to power to people who are too shy, too ordinary,

• 14:40Speaker 01

  too weak willed, too inarticulate, to stand out in the eyes of other citizens. And there's no amount of periodic renewal of the pool of elected representatives that can change that fundamental fact. And yet I don't see why the shy, the inarticulate, the uneducated, the invisible shouldn't have a right to shape the laws that that rule us all. So that's why, you know, the activist movement is so symbolic for me. They put on this neon jacket because they were not seen.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  And they gathered on traffic circles and demonstrated loudly because they were not heard. Those people had no chance in an electoral system. So I think that's the problem I have. Not saying we don't, we cannot keep elections now that we have them. They've served us somewhat well for the last 200 years. And I'm not saying this was not a huge accomplishment compared to what came before. Definitely. But it's just that I think we've, we've sort of reached the limits of what this system can do. Especially when it's overcome by money and partisanship. And so I think it's time to enrich or augment or even rethink our electoral systems.

• 15:52Ezra Klein?

  But, but is one question in that when you have these deliberative processes of the, of these citizens groups, would in some of those same dynamics reproduce themselves? I mean, the research it shows people listen to taller people, more eloquent people, louder people, more male people. Those hold not just in elections, those hold in corporate boardrooms, they hold in classrooms, they hold in job interview processes. So couldn't that just happen again, just under, under this system, but without the elections?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and, and it happens every time again, but that you, you need to design your citizens assemblies in such a way that you try to minimize the, the reproduction of these hegemonies. Not saying this is guaranteeing an ideal world, it's just, uh, at least by putting people who normally wouldn't even be there in the room, you give them a chance to voice their concerns, express their point of view. And it's very touching to see people, you know, there, there was this older retired woman who used to be a stutterer. And she didn't say anything for a couple of weekends. And at one point she was, everybody had to talk in turn anyway, so this was like the rule. So she said something, she expressed herself, and there was this moving sort of a.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Silence in the room, like, people were just moved, and someone, someone said, oh, you know, X, I'm not gonna say her name, you spoke, and, and it was just a beautiful moment. And, and so, of course, you will have racism, you will have sexism, the, the, the tall white guy will, will take over. But you can design and facilitate these spaces, because they're small enough, to minimize these things. And just making people present in the room will empower them in ways that they've never been empowered before.

• 17:38Ezra Klein?

  You have past work arguing that democracy is good, deliberative democracy is good, because it is a good way of making decisions, that there is a cognitive benefit to the diversity of a truly random, broad democratic process that you don't get in the kind of republics that we, that we often see. So can you talk about the advantages that process has for decision making and thinking?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yes. So the basic idea is that many minds are better and smarter than fewer minds. That's an old insight, you know, you find it in the sophist Aristotle, The Way to Condorcet, modern thinkers, deliberative democrats. And the idea is that when you, when you include everyone, you don't risk missing out on crucial arguments and information, even as you include more noise, right? You include more people with no education, no knowledge, no competence. The idea is that in a deliberative democracy, deliberation among all will cancel the noise, filter out the bad arguments, and eventually leave you with better decisions for all. And if you cannot include everyone, then the suggestion in my previous book is that you

• 18:45Speaker 01

  should take a representative sample on the basis of random selection to minimize the loss of diversity among the, the small group of deliberators. And ideally, you would also keep the deliberation among that small group of deliberators porous to information coming from the larger group, right? The idea is not just to close off the access to the rest of the population. By contrast, if you take an elected group, you condemn yourself to homogenizing your pool of deliberators and decision makers along some dimensions. And typically, it will be social, economic dimensions. But it could be psychological features, you know, elections tend to attract alpha men and women, charismatic types, slightly narcissistic types, you might say even.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And what happens when these people make decisions? They will have blind spots because they will just not consider a certain perspective because those perspectives are not there. So, you know, if you look at the American Congress right now, it's really hard to imagine that they can fully understand what it is to live on a minimum wage in a peri-urban environment, barely making ends meet. It's just not the same as having, you know, someone who represents that sort of life experience in there. I think in France, we also, I think this was beautifully demonstrated by the fuel tax that ignited the Yellow Vest movements in the fall of 2018.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Basically, you have a bunch of parliamentarians and government members who are all extremely educated, urban people who live in city centers, hardly need a car. And then they're shocked and surprised to find out that a fuel tax causes an uproar, a rebellion among peri-urban, lower-middle-class people who need their cars on a daily basis and can't afford five euros more at the pump every month. So, by contrast, you see the benefits of having more inclusive legislatures that reflect the diversity of interests, views, and perspectives of the whole country. So if you had some representatives of the Yellow Vest, sort of a sociodemographic group in parliament, then these laws wouldn't even get passed to begin with.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  You would have some other forms of solution to the question of, you know, the ecological crisis.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  So now you might say, there's a trade off between group diversity and individual competence. And when you introduce a, you know, more diverse people, you may also include not so smart or so educated people. But my work in my past book was building on, on recent results in social sciences that suggest that group intelligence is much more, I mean, or more a function of the group diversity than the individual competence of the members. So you're better off with more, one more unit of group diversity than one more unit of individual competence. So that's, that's a work of Scott Page and Liu Hong that I rely on there. But I think it, it just formalizes a basic intuition. If you exclude perspectives, you will not be able to solve the problem the best way you could.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So that, to me, that, that suggests that, you know, the whole conceit of the 18th century, this idea of a natural aristocracy who would filter and sort of improve the, the judgment of ordinary people was a mistake. We thought that we, if we put the best and brightest in one legislature, we'd have the best governance that we keep dream of. Turns out that's not the case. We would have been better off, in my mind, with a mini portrait of the people.

• 22:31Ezra Klein?

  So there's an old finding, going back to what you've said earlier about democratic decision making, that in firms, more diverse processes lead to better results, but also people don't like them. So they're, they're, they're better, but the more diversity you have in a, in a, in a system, the more upset people feel when they are engaged in it. They feel challenged, they feel pushed. It's, it's a, it's a trade off that often people don't like making. And so then something you'll hear whenever you begin bringing up, you know, governmental reforms that are working in Iceland and Switzerland, is that these are small countries, they're relatively homogeneous, they have very, very different political cultures. They have solidarity coming out of their homogeneity.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  Are these really reasonable models to look at for something like America? Like, do we have issues stemming from our diversity, our partisanship, our simple size that make this unworkable?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I think the size question is not the issue because, you know, random selection, it works at any size. So I don't, I think you're right that the issue is diversity. And in a large multicultural country like the US, maybe you think that it's really hard to bring people together. But it's not like we have a non-acrimonious, perfectly harmonious way of solving our differences right now. So honestly, it depends to what you compare the alternatives to. And in the experience we have so far of citizens' assemblies, what we observe is that people are actually very respectful of each other. They can talk to people from different sensibilities and ideological backgrounds in ways that

• 24:08Speaker 01

  don't degenerate into starting matches. In part because they come in those spaces not as representatives of an ideological or partisan camp, they come as citizen number eight or, you know, Gérard from Normandy or something. They're just, they're asked to be there as individuals, not as members of a tribe. So it sort of primes them for a different kind of engagement, I think. And in terms of, you know, examples in large-scale countries, I think now France is the example of a large multicultural country where this has been done somewhat successfully.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  You know, we are 67 million people with, you know, all kinds of ethnic minorities. And it worked really well as far as, you know, the logistics, the deliberation and the production of quality proposals. What perhaps hasn't worked so well is the articulation to the existing system, but that's a separate question. So I'm really not convinced at all by the argument that, well, you can't do this in diverse settings. Actually, Jim Fischkin already proved that you could do, you know, all kinds of experiments like this in, among Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. It just works. It's about incentives. What kind of incentives are you giving to people?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And if you incentivize them to act in respectful ways, to educate themselves, to listen to each other, then it works.

• 25:40Ezra Klein?

  So I think this is a good place to bring in the French example, because there's one version to this where deliberative citizen process replaces legislatures, which is a very big step. And then there's one where legislatures, elected politicians, who to some degree have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, take controversial issues and give them to a subsection of the public to try to solve with some structure around them, with some goals, with some agenda setting. So can you talk about the Citizen Climate Work in France?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  So the Citizens Convention for Climate in France is directly the result of the Yellow Vest Movement rebellion. To calm things down, President Macron decided to launch a great national debate that lasted around about two months in January, February, March, February, March of 2019. And one of the sort of conclusions that emerged from this, you know, large-scale brainstorming with the French nation was that people wanted a new form of governance on climate issues or ecological issues. So by June of 2019, President Macron said, okay, well, let's try a citizens convention for climate to basically offer a socially fair

• 26:56Speaker 01

  or socially acceptable solution to the problem of green gas emissions in France in a way that my fuel tax obviously, you know, couldn't do. And that's something that apparently the French people want. That's something that radical activists had been asking for some time. I think he had read Van Ruyt Brook's book Against Election, that was what advocated sort of these bodies like that. So that's how it happened. So the task was how to reduce French green gas emissions by 40% of the 1990s levels by 2030 in a spirit of social justice.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  And they had seven sessions to solve that, and by sessions, I mean, weekends. They were paid around 80 euros a day. They were selected from all over France, including the ultramarine territories on the basis of gender, education levels, geographic area, settlement, et cetera. And they were asked to come up with solutions over those seven weekends, which they did. So in June 2020, this time, they delivered 149 proposals to President Macron.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Some of which have now gone through legislative debates, direct regulatory application. And this weekend or next, actually, there's going to be an eighth concluding session where they are going to evaluate what the government has done with their proposals.

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  And what has the government done with them?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Well, depending on who you ask, you know, I think that the 150 citizens are not very happy. They think that their proposals have been considerably diluted, watered down, rendered someone toothless because and it's true, the process, you know, in parliament was subject to the the influence of very strong lobbies from, you know, airline companies, the the car industry and they and they took out a bunch of things that the the citizens really cared about. So.

• 28:59Ezra Klein?

  So this is somewhere where you'll get pushback from, I think, more traditional theorists of legislative and and party-based representative systems, which is to say that it can sound when we say there was pushback from these lobbies, like the airline industry or, you know, the retail industry or unions, that, oh, special interests are coming in and influencing the process, which of course, on some level, they are. But on the other hand, they do have knowledge of how their industries work. Those industries can be important. There is a process by which that knowledge gets aggregated. Protecting a decision-making body like that citizens council from that kind of lobbying, on the one hand, purifies it somewhat, and on the other hand, creates a certain level of ignorance. People don't always love what

• 29:43Ezra Klein?

  the experts tell people. And people often, particularly on the right, will think of the experts as a special interest of of their own, who are subject to certain cultural trends in their discipline and other things that make them not purely a bad expertise. So who do you think was representing the country here? The parliament that watered down the recommendations or the citizens who made them?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I am not going to say it was the citizens' assembly, because, you know, it's it's a first experiment of that kind. They are still in the process of building their legitimacy. And I'm not saying, and I don't think anybody is saying that lobbies and interest groups have no place in this process. But the question is, how much of an influence do they have? And if you look at, I don't know the numbers for the French parliament, but for the American Congress, we know that 78% of people in America get 6% of the interest groups in Congress. So this is not equal representation. We want equal representation in a democracy. And I think that what's happening in the French case is that these lobbies

• 30:45Speaker 01

  and these interest groups have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. And it's not as if they hadn't been heard during the convention, because the citizens consulted with over 130 experts. They knew of their arguments, and they're good arguments sometimes, and they took them into account to some degree, perhaps not enough. But you have to realize they did this over, again, seven weekends. And there might be a better design process in which lobbies and interests would come in earlier, with, you know, more time to make their case. But still, I think that right now, I think it's true of France and the US. I think our legislative process is taken over by interest groups and lobbies. And I don't think that in a way that does well for people.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  And at the end of the day, a democracy should be somewhat responsive to majority and preferences. And I don't think that's what we have right now. We have excessive responsiveness to interest groups.

• 31:43Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I think that's certainly true. Something that very much interested me about the French example here is that I've been thinking and reporting on the question of, how might you fix the impeachment process in the US? We have never had an example of a president impeached and convicted and removed from office, although you could argue Richard Nixon resigning was an example of the process working. But that happened at a very unusual low ebb of party polarization in this country. So typically what happens is you have an impeachment process. It was designed for a political system that was not going to have parties. Then we got parties. And so now you're asking members of the president's political party, whose own political fortunes are tied to the president's political success,

• 32:27Ezra Klein?

  to convict their own party leader and probably lose the next election, and it fails. And so as I've been reporting on this, I've been thinking about, well, where might you put the conviction process? Other than the Senate, where people are very cross pressured, right? You would strike members of the Senate from a normal jury for being too biased. And so one old idea is the Supreme Court, but I'm not sure that's so much better. And I don't think the Supreme Court would want that power. And then another possibly is that if you had an impeachment process start up, you would form something like a citizens' assembly, where you'd have a random sample of citizens drawn, and they would listen to the arguments from the two sides and then make a decision. I'm curious what you think of that and whether or not you think that a decision by a citizens' assembly

• 33:11Ezra Klein?

  in a matter that is so weighty would be seen as legitimate.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  You know, it's a really interesting idea. It's very reminiscent of what the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, had. Again, these large citizen juries who decided on political trials. You know, that's how Socrates got killed, though. So the precedent is probably going to scare a lot of, you know, liberals, who usually trace the fear of the tyranny of the majority to that early trial, right? So I don't know. But I do think that if you made the jury large enough, if you made the selection process quite transparent, and I think that might actually be a good idea. But I'm not sure that we have, you know, there are enough impeachment cases in our future, hopefully,

• 34:01Speaker 01

  to justify creating that institution. I'd be more interested in creating this kind of large citizens' assemblies for much more daily, urgent political questions like gun regulation. I would love to see that for gun regulation, for example.

• 34:17Ezra Klein?

  Sure. And we've had some examples of that in the US. There's one that is well known, I think, in Texas around, I believe it's energy policy. But is there a way, you think, in which open democracy of this sort could result in people feeling less empowered and not more? If I vote for a candidate and they win or they lose, at least I had some role in their selection. I voted for them and that vote theoretically at least was counted. But if a small body of 500 randomly selected citizens, and most people don't trust random selection in the way that political scientists and social scientists do. But if a small body of 500 randomly selected citizens makes a decision after a deliberative process that I really don't like, Then I feel completely alienated from that decision. I didn't vote for them. I didn't have input in it.

• 35:02Ezra Klein?

  I have no control or power over it. So would this feel so small de-democratic to the people living under its auspices?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Well, in my model of open democracy, I'm not saying the open mini-public should have the sort of deciding power on everything. I actually think a lot of these proposals that would come out of an open mini-public should be put to a referendum. And so our practice of referendum should be a lot more frequent and ordinary and a lot closer to what's being done in Switzerland, for example, so that people have a say, not over the choice of agenda setters and legislators, but over the choice of proposals that are put to them. And they could also initiate, the idea would be that they'd have the participatory rights of so-called a citizen initiative.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  They could put a proposal to a global referendum, or it could be something that the parliament would have to discuss, or these are already things that exist, again, in Switzerland, that were proposals contained in the Icelandic constitutional proposal. This is how I envisage the open democracy, right? Like, when it comes to deliberation, we can't do it en masse in the millions, so we delegate that task to a degree to a smaller subset of us that's as representative as possible of the diversity of the larger group. But then that group puts the decisions in the hands of the whole community. So it's a form of direct democracy when it comes to the decision phase.

• 36:31Ezra Klein?

  So I don't know that much about what is happening in Switzerland, to be honest. But I live in California. We have a pretty robust proposition process here. And I think the broad view is that it has been captured. Special interests get whatever they want on it, whenever they want. You know, there was just an example of the rideshare companies spending a ton of money, ton of money, to make sure the legislature couldn't make it so, say, Uber drivers were classified as as normal workers. And I think in general, it's seen as making governance in California worse, that those things end up on the books, people vote for things that sound good, then those things end up tying up future governance in bad ways. So how do you see the example of California?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the example of California is not great indeed, but I think you can't take the sort of referendum part outside of the question of the larger ecology of a functional democracy. I mean, in a democracy where money plays such a role, there's, you know, nothing that will be immune to the power of corporations. So you'd have to fix a lot of things before you can make direct democracy desirable. But it is working quite well in Switzerland. It's anchored in long-established participatory practices. Any Swiss citizen by the age of 50 has probably participated in 25 or more constitutional referendum, basically.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  So it's, you know, it's created a sense of civic engagement. It educates people. It's also, I think, the design is, you need to be careful about the design because in California, as far as I know, citizens' initiatives, you know, are sent directly to the ballot. There's no intermediary step where the legislature can somewhat modify the formulation of the proposal or there's no back and forth or there's no space for some quality control, basically. I think in Switzerland, there's much more of that.

• 38:32Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there's no deliberation as an intermediary step here.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  It has no deliberation, exactly. It's purely aggregative and so it's very problematic.

• 38:40Ezra Klein?

  How much of the work here is being done by these being citizens? And how much is being done by these being a random and representative sample? And I mean that in this way. Here is a reform that will not happen, but you can imagine conducting in America. The Senate, you know, one of our key decision-making bodies, is designed to balance and make sure there is a very equal level of representation of just something very weird, which is states. So California gets two senators. Montana gets two senators. New York gets two. Vermont gets two. Wyoming gets two. Missouri gets two. You could certainly imagine a body that said, we are going to have 100 senators, but instead of balancing them based on where we drew lines on a map,

• 39:24Ezra Klein?

  we're going to say that there need to be a proportionate number from every income strata, or from racial groups, or from religious groups. And obviously, you get into the question of how many of these are you going to do? But this is a pretty straightforward math problem on some level. And then maybe people elect representatives from within these classes, but you have to be in one to qualify. Now, I think that sounds weird when you say it, but again, we do something much, much, much weirder by the way we balance and represent states. So how much of the benefit would you get here if you kept the, well, we're trying to pick the most effective representatives of each group, but you are nevertheless trying to have representatives from each group in a way that we don't now?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  I think it would improve things. I'm not saying this is not a good idea. I just, you know, as long as they are dependent on elections, it means they're dependent, in the US especially, on money, on donors, on party affiliations of all kinds. You'd still end up with a group that's homogeneous along some dimensions, which are, again, going to be, you know, if only charisma, education levels, et cetera. And also, they feel entitled to being here in a way that when you're randomly selected, you just don't. You come in with a certain humility, I think, that is quite peculiar to these citizens' assemblies. Honestly, it's a very good question. I don't have the answer. I think that, as you said at the beginning, we don't know enough,

• 40:50Speaker 01

  and it's probably necessary to have more of these experimentations and comparative experiments.

• 41:15Ezra Klein?

  Is there a book or a movie that best imagines what a more openly democratic world might look like?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  So I really thought hard about this and I found it very hard to answer because all the sort of, you know, science fiction books I've read are dystopian and pessimistic and it seems to be much easier to envision a totalitarian fascist nightmare than an authentically democratic world and maybe there's no good plot potential in a harmonious deliberative democracy, you know, that's what I suspect. There's one book though that I cite in my book, it's called Liquid Rain. It's sort of waving together ideals from cyber democrats involving delegates, what's called a liquid democracy, you know, where you delegate your votes to other people. So it's a more aggregative vision of democracy than I would like.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  There seems to be less deliberation involved, but it's really an interesting book, so I would recommend that.

• 42:11Ezra Klein?

  What's your favorite French novel?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I find recent French novels very depressing, but the old classics are excellent. This is my favorite book. I just love the atmosphere, the friendship, the, you know, the complicated plots and you sense an author who really cares about his characters and it's heartbreaking to actually close the book at the end, so.

• 42:37Ezra Klein?

  And what book has done the most to inspire your work?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  I would have to say that for this particular vision of open democracy is probably Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, which was published in 1997. It's really the book that put on the map this question of why did elections triumph in the 18th century? Why did that become the core principle of our representative democracies and why did sort of... Disappear from the conversation sometimes in the 19th century.

• 43:12Ezra Klein?

  And then finally, what is your favorite children's book?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  So I would say all the pigeon books by Mo Williams. They're wonderful. They're so good. They're so good. The pigeon needs a bath, you know, it's hysterical. But if I were to recommend a French children's book, my daughters and I right now, we really love a series called Mortelle Adèle, Little Adele. It's about a little orange-haired girl who's super cynical, hardcore feminist, really a tough cookie, and she has a best friend with an imaginary friend and a former, you know, decapitated French revolutionary. And she has, you know, a little cat that she tortures.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  It's really like funny, very funny and adorable in some weird ways.

• 44:02Ezra Klein?

  Ellen Landemore, thank you very much.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 44:16Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roja Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact check by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.