A Plurality Atlas

Who is Hélène Landemore?

A political scientist at Yale University who studies and advocates a democracy in which ordinary citizens chosen by lot, rather than elected politicians, discuss things carefully and decide. Together with Audrey Tang, she has proposed using citizens' assemblies (gatherings of citizens chosen by lot) to govern AI.

Politics is done by politicians chosen in elections. That is what most people think. Hélène Landemore has argued that it is wiser, and more democratic, to have ordinary citizens chosen by lot discuss things carefully and decide. Recently, she has been extending this idea to the governance of AI.

In short

Hélène Landemore is a French-born professor of political science at Yale University. She argues that having a diverse group of citizens chosen by lottery (sortition) take time to discuss (deliberate) and decide is wiser, and more democratic, than leaving things to politicians chosen in elections [1][2]. She has observed efforts such as France's Citizens' Convention on Climate from the inside, and in recent years has proposed ways to use AI to scale discussion up to large numbers of people, and ways for citizens to govern AI itself [1][3].

Connection with Plurality

Her name does not appear in the book. Landemore's name is not in the text or footnotes of the English, Japanese or Traditional Chinese editions of Plurality. The connections are her collaboration with the co-author Audrey Tang, and the theme of scaling up discussion with technology that chapter 5-4 of the book, "Augmented Deliberation", takes up.

Co-writing with Tang. In September 2026, Landemore and Tang published a co-authored essay in Noema. The two see the race to develop frontier AI (the most advanced AI) as the kind of problem in which everyone would gain by cooperating, but fear of others breaking ranks prevents cooperation. Preventing others from breaking ranks requires mechanisms for verification and "witnesses" everyone can trust. So they propose creating a permanent "Global Citizens' Assembly on AI" of 1,000 people chosen by lot from around the world, to help set the goals and limits of powerful AI and to receive reports on whether companies are keeping within those limits [2]. According to the same essay, an earlier version of this proposal appeared in Fortune in 2023 [2]. → Alignment Assemblies

Cited in the 6-Pack of Care. Under "Look for absences", in the first principle, "attentiveness", of Tang and colleagues' 6-Pack of Care, which states that "Missing voices are evidence", the text cites an interview about Landemore's book [4].

Joint research. With Tang, Aviv Ovadya, Divya Siddarth and others, she co-authored the 2024 survey "AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares" [5]. In 2023, she was listed as an adviser to OpenAI's "Democratic Inputs to AI" grant program [6].

Someone who has watched the practice up close. According to English Wikipedia, Landemore studied Iceland's constitutional reform (2010–13, an attempt to draft a constitution by gathering citizens' opinions online) and directly observed France's Citizens' Convention on Climate (2019–20) [1]. In 2022 she was appointed to the steering committee of a French citizens' convention on end-of-life care [7].

Key ideas

Democratic reason. The wisdom of a group arises less from how capable each individual is than from the diversity of their ways of thinking. So a large number of people can make wiser judgments than a few experts. In this way, Landemore argued that democracy tends to arrive at right answers [8].

Open democracy. Elections give power to a small elite, Landemore says, so they are more aristocratic than democratic. Instead, she proposed a system in which citizens chosen by lot take turns representing and being represented [1][9].

Politics without politicians. In her 2026 book Politics Without Politicians, she sets out for a general audience a vision of replacing elected legislators with citizens chosen by lot [10].

Scaling discussion up with AI. The "quality" of discussion and "participation" by large numbers usually pull against each other. Landemore asks whether AI can bridge that gap [11]. In an August 2026 piece for Noema, she proposed using the AI services that hundreds of millions of people already use to put questions about AI to people, and drawing up a "global constitution for AI" in three stages: worldwide opinion-gathering through AI, a global online discussion facilitated by AI, and national and global citizens' assemblies [3]. → The debate over AI's future

Further reading

  1. Landemore and Tang, "Let The People Set The Pace Of Frontier AI" (English, essay, Noema 2026-09-23) — https://www.noemamag.com/let-the-people-decide-the-pace-of-frontier-ai
  2. The New Yorker, "Politics Without Politicians" (English, profile, 2020) — https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/politics-without-politicians
  3. ReThinking with Adam Grant, "Taking politicians out of politics" (English, podcast transcript, 2026) — https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant/taking-politicians-out-of-politics-with-helene-landemore-transcript
  4. "Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and Why It Matters" (English, paper, 2012, CC BY) — https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.129
  5. "How To Give Everyday People A Say In AI Governance" (English, essay, Noema 2026-08-04) — https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-give-everyday-people-a-say-in-ai-governance

Sources

  1. English Wikipedia, "Hélène Landemore" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Landemore ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
  2. Landemore and Tang, "Let The People Set The Pace Of Frontier AI" (Noema, 2026-09-23) — https://www.noemamag.com/let-the-people-decide-the-pace-of-frontier-ai
  3. Hélène Landemore, "How To Give Everyday People A Say In AI Governance" (Noema, 2026-08-04) — https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-give-everyday-people-a-say-in-ai-governance
  4. civic.ai, "Pack 1: Attentiveness" — https://civic.ai/1/ ［CC0］
  5. "AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares" (2024) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09988 ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
  6. OpenAI, "Democratic Inputs to AI" (2023-05-25) — https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/
  7. Yale News, "Yale's Landemore helps guide France's unique citizens' convention" (2022-11-29) — https://news.yale.edu/2022/11/29/yales-landemore-helps-guide-frances-unique-citizens-convention
  8. Hélène Landemore, "Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and Why It Matters" (2012) — https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.129 ［CC BY 4.0］
  9. Response to the "Symposium on Open Democracy" (2022) — https://doi.org/10.16997/10.16997/jdd.1213 ［CC BY 4.0］
  10. ReThinking with Adam Grant, "Taking politicians out of politics" (2026-02-10) — https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant/taking-politicians-out-of-politics-with-helene-landemore-transcript
  11. Stanford HAI, "Can AI Bring Deliberation to the Masses?" (2022) — https://hai.stanford.edu/events/helene-landemore-can-ai-bring-deliberation-masses
Related: What is Augmented Deliberation? ・ What are Alignment Assemblies? ・ What is Civic AI? ・ What is the 6-Pack of Care? ・ What is the AI futures debate (AI 2027 and others)? ・ Who is Audrey Tang? ・ Who is Aviv Ovadya? ・ Who is Divya Siddarth?

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