Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore
Yale University | YU · Department of Political Science

Ph.D. (Harvard University 2008)

About

51
Publications
36,867
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,342
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2015 - January 2016
Yale University
Position
  • Associate Professor of Political Science
August 2012 - August 2013
Stanford University
Position
  • Professor
July 2008 - December 2008
Brown University
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (51)
Preprint
Full-text available
Two substantial technological advances have reshaped the public square in recent decades: first with the advent of the internet and second with the recent introduction of large language models (LLMs). LLMs offer opportunities for a paradigm shift towards more decentralized, participatory online spaces that can be used to facilitate deliberative dia...
Preprint
Full-text available
Advanced AI systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that generative artificial intelligence may have on democratic processes. We consider the consequences of AI for citizens' ability to make informed choices about political representatives and issues (episte...
Article
Full-text available
Taking diversity seriously should mean building political institutions that are open to diversity, rather than closed to it, and cultivating civic virtues that are welcoming of diversity, rather than hostile to it. Open-mindedness, in particular to the views of one's political opponents, would seem to be such a civic virtue. This essay argues that...
Chapter
This chapter addresses problems and themes in the social sciences. Social sciences are understood specifically as sciences that have (or should have) the following minimal characteristics: their object of study is human behavior and they follow a certain number of methodological principles, including a marked effort towards analytical clarity; the...
Article
Full-text available
“Philosophy of the Social Sciences” (with Jon Elster), in Precis of Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, edited by Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay, et Mikaël Cozic, forthcoming 2017 - Originally published in French as “La Philosophie des Sciences Sociales” in Précis de Philosophie des Sciences, edited by Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay,...
Article
Full-text available
Deliberative democracy is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the current crisis of representative democracy. If deliberative democracy is necessarily representative and if representation betrays the true meaning of democracy as rule of, by, and for the people, then how can deliberative democracy retain any validity as a theory of political le...
Article
Full-text available
This paper takes stock of a recent but growing movement within the field of deliberative democracy, which normatively argues for the epistemic dimension of democratic authority and positively defends the truth-tracking properties of democratic procedures. Authors within that movement call themselves epistemic democrats, hence the recognition by man...
Article
Full-text available
The 2010-13 Icelandic constitutional process offers a unique opportunity to test the predictions of epistemic deliberative democrats (as well as some constitutional scholars) that more inclusive processes lead to better outcomes. After briefly retracing the religious history of Iceland and the steps of the recent constitutional process, the article...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the demographic characteristics, motivations, and expectations of participants in a crowdsourced off-road traffic law reform in Finland. We found that the participants were mainly educated, full-time working professional males with a strong interest in off-road traffic. Though a minority, the women participating in the process...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter attempts to answer the question, "What is a good constitution?" by looking at the case of Iceland’s “crowdsourced constitution,” which came close to becoming the new law of the land in 2013. The author considers various normative criteria by which to assess the quality of a constitution prior to its implementation and uses some of them...
Article
On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Kni...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the class...
Article
Full-text available
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature o...
Conference Paper
This paper examines participants' motivation factors and identity in crowdsourced policy-making, in which citizens collaboratively participate in online ideation and knowledge creation for policy reforms. Drawing on data from a crowdsourced law reform in Finland, this paper examines the drivers of the participants and their demographic profile. The...
Article
Full-text available
Consensus plays an ambiguous role in deliberative democracy. While it formed the horizon of early deliberative theories, many now denounce it as an empirically unachievable outcome, a logically impossible stopping rule, and a normatively undesirable ideal. Deliberative disagreement, by contrast, is celebrated not just as an empirically unavoidable...
Article
Full-text available
The idea that the crowd could ever be intelligent is a counterintuitive one. Our modern, Western faith in experts and bureaucracies is rooted in the notion that political competence is the purview of the select few. Here, as in my book Democratic Reason, I defend the opposite view: that the diverse many are often smarter than a group of select elit...
Article
Full-text available
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were...
Article
Full-text available
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule and the Condorcet winner. This result circumvents previous prohibitive lower bounds and is surprisingly stron...
Article
Full-text available
The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice. Edited by Fischer Frank and Gottweis Herbert . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 400p. $94.95 cloth, $26.95 paper. - Volume 12 Issue 2 - Hélène Landemore
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, Landemore explores one defense of political equality: that uncertainty about the nature of the political questions a polity will face require not only maximal inclusion but also egalitarian inclusion. While experts have an advantage in cataloging and quantifying known risks, there is no expertise in enumerating outcomes under uncerta...
Chapter
Full-text available
Every human group faces the problem of how to reconcile the tension between, on the one hand, the requirement of public order and the need for a coordinated and cooperative life in common with others and, on the other, the expression of individual needs, desires, and freedoms, which may sometimes conflict with each other. The Western philosophical...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper reports on a pioneering case study of a legislative process open to the direct online participation of the public. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced off-road traffic law in Finland. On the basis of our analysis of the user content generated to date and a series of interviews with key participants, we argue that the pro...
Article
Full-text available
Mutz argues that there is an inverse correlation between deliberation and participation. However, the validity of this conclusion partly depends on how one defines deliberation and participation. Mutz's definition of deliberation as “hearing the other side” or “cross-cutting exposure” is narrower than a minimal conception of deliberation with which...
Article
Full-text available
This paper argues in favor of the epistemic properties of inclusiveness in the context of democratic deliberative assemblies and derives the implications of this argument in terms of the epistemically superior mode of selection of representatives. The paper makes the general case that, all other things being equal and under some reasonable assumpti...
Article
Full-text available
Cet article presente les bases d’un argument epistemique en faveur de la democratie definie comme procedure de decision collective. Il explore egalement les implications d’un tel argument epistemique par rapport a d’autres justifications etablies de la democratie, par rapport aux explications scientifiques de ses succes empiriques, et en termes de...
Article
"Individual decision making can often be wrong due to misinformation, impulses, or biases. Collective decision making, on the other hand, can be surprisingly accurate. In Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that the very factors behind the superiority of collective decision making add up to a strong case for democracy. She shows that t...
Article
This paper argues that a new psychological theory—the argumentative theory of reasoning—provides theoretical support for the discursive, dialogical ideal of democratic deliberation. It converges, in particular, with deliberative democrats’ predictions about the positive epistemic properties of talking things out with others. The paper further consi...
Article
Full-text available
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called “investor-owned” firms remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Inequalities in decision power, s...
Book
James Madison wrote, 'Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob'. The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one. With backgrounds in economics, cognitive science, political science, law an...
Article
Full-text available
The idea of collective wisdom presented in this volume is both old and new. It is old because Aristotle is generally credited with having first taken seriously the idea that “many heads are better than one.” He himself was in fact rehearsing an argument that the Sophists were using in defense of democracy. In a much-quoted passage in the Politics,...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents the foundations of a systematic epistemic case for democracy as a collective decision-rule and explores the implications of this epistemic claim for normative justifications of democracy, scientific explanations of its empirical success, and policy reforms. As far as the epistemic case is concerned, the paper proposes an account...
Article
Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In partic...
Article
Full-text available
Talking it out with others vs. deliberation within and the law of group polarization: Some implications of the argumentative theory of reasoning for deliberative democracy. This paper argues that a new psychological theory—the argumentative theory of reasoning—provides theoretical support for the discursive, dialogical ideal of democratic deliberat...
Article
This paper proposes an interpretation of representative assemblies that strikes a conceptual middle ground between Burke's ideal of an assembly of trustees and the Anti-Federalists' ideal of a mirror image of the people. The normative appeal of this conceptual middle ground is supported by an argument emphasizing the epistemic properties of a descr...
Article
Full-text available
This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the collective political intelligence of the many. The paper hypothesizes that two main democratic mechanisms - the practice of inclusive deliberation (in its direct and indirect versions) and the institution of majority rule with universal suffrage - combine t...
Article
Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In partic...
Article
This paper uses a psychological theory of reasoning – the argumentative theory of reasoning – to support the normative appeal of the dialogical version of democratic deliberation at the heart of the deliberative democracy ideal. We use the argumentative theory of reasoning to defend democratic deliberation against two types of critique. Our main ta...
Article
This paper argues that majority rule not just a fair way to aggregate and adjudicate between diverse preferences, but also, and perhaps primarily, a predictive tool tapping the famous “wisdom of crowds.” The assumption is here that the crowd is wise not primarily because it is numerous but because of the cognitive diversity likely correlated with t...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents an argument for democracy based on the idea of collective intelligence (connecting numbers and a key ingredient of the phenomenon of collective intelligence, i.e., cognitive diversity). It also suggests different ways, positive and normative, in which this argument should matter for political scientists (particularly democratic...
Article
Full-text available
Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter is deeply ideological and conceptually confused. His book is shaped by pro-market and pro-expert biases and anti-democratic attitudes, leading to one-sided and conclusion-driven arguments. His notion that voters are rationally irrational when they hold anti-market and anti-trade beliefs is incoherent, as is...
Article
Full-text available
This article is another unapologetic contribution to `the gentle art of rational choice bashing'. The debate over rational choice theory (RCT) may appear to have tired out; yet RCT is as dominant in political sciences as ever. The reason is that critics typically take aim at the symptoms of RCT's failings, rather than their root cause: RCT's very a...

Network

Cited By