Hélène Landemore

This author is one of my favourites. She did not disappoint my expectations with this book, but I think it could have been better. Particularly the first five chapters of the book were interesting. They seem to lay the groundwork for an interesting argument. With a thorough review and analysis the author catalogues the problems of elective representative democracy run by political parties (which Robert Dahl called polyarchy). The vantage point is theoretical so she does not get into the problems of any particular country. This keeps the discussion on point and suitably short. She hints that she's about to propose a different paradigm, open democracy.

But her presentation of open democracy in chapters 6-8 is a slight disappointment. If you're writing a theoretical book about a new prefix to the word "democracy", and criticizing the present state of affairs, then your proposal should be at least a little bit radical. The author just articulates the concept of "open democracy" through a few bland principles, none of which even seems to be particularly novel. I can understand that open democracy might be a multifaceted concept, but that's not an excuse for leaving it completely nebulous.

What is worse, the author has no clear opinion on how, in open democracy, recommendations from lottery-selected or self-selected groups would be instantiated as actual political decision-making. Would these deliberative groups coexist and interact with elected parliaments and political parties? Could they replace them, or is politics a full-time job? The author writes that open democracy can be implemented in many different ways, but I would have preferred at least one practical proposal for reorganizing democratic processes, speculative as it may have been. A utopian scheme is of course more than likely to be unworkable, but at least it gives food for thought and opens better pathways for criticism.

All in all this was a valuable book that I enjoyed reading, but it was too conservative and cautious to leave a lasting impression.… (mais)

This is an exciting and path-breaking book in democratic theory. The author argues at length for an epistemic justification of democratic rule, i.e. for the thesis that a multitude of voters can collectively reach better decisions than any small aristocratic minority can. Not only does she trace this line of thought through the classical works in political theory, she also provides a very thorough review of this topic as she builds and defends her argument. I can't remember any other recent books where I would have noted so many works from the bibliography for future reference.

The argument itself leans on deliberative democracy on one hand and on theories of aggregated knowledge on the other. I think it would actually have benefited from a clear separation from deliberative theory, which doesn't contribute much to epistemic questions. The aggregative part presented in chapter 6 is clearly a better basis for epistemic democratic theory. I was also disappointed in how the author handled democratic representation. The idea that representation would reproduce some of the cognitive diversity of a large group in a small one seemed very implausible to me. There's also very little discussion of the variety of political problems that democracies have to address. It seems to me that collective knowledge might be useful for resolving some problems, even complex ones, but not all of them. It would have been interesting to read the author's view on which tasks collective knowledge could be particularly suitable for.

I think this book could have been better if the author had been bolder and distanced herself more from prevailing opinion and previous research. But despite my criticism, I still think it's a very good book that could help put democratic theory on an entirely new, epistemic track, which is where it should be headed. This book points to many interesting questions that still remain unanswered along that track.… (mais)