Hélène Landemore is Full Professor of Political Science at Yale University. After studying at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sciences-Po in Paris, she completed a doctorate in political science at Harvard University in 2008. She is the author of Hume. Probabilité et Choix Raisonnable (PUF: 2004), Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press 2013; winner of the David and Elaine Spitz Award 2015 for best book in democratic/liberal theory published two years earlier), Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century (PUP 2020), and Debating Democracy (with Jason Brennan, Oxford University Press 2021). She is the co-editor of two edited volumes (Collective Wisdom with Jon Elster and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory with Lucy Bernholz and Rob Reich). She has published articles in democratic theory, constitutional theory, and political epistemology. You can find out more about her work at www.helenelandemore.com
This paper argues in favor of the epistemic properties of inclusiveness in the context of democra... more 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 assumptions, more is smarter. When applied to deliberative assemblies of representatives, where there is an upper limit to the number of people that can be included in the group, the argument translates into a defense of a specific selection mode of participants: random selection.
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for par... more 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 strong: even if the number of ideas is as large as the number of participants, each participant will only have to make a logarithmic number of comparisons, an exponential improvement over the linear number of comparisons previously needed. We demonstrate the approach in an experiment in Finland's recent off-road traffic law reform, observing that the total number of comparisons needed to achieve a fixed \epsilon approximation is linear in the number of ideas and that the constant is not large. Finally, we note a few other experimental observations which support the use of voting rules for aggregation. First, we observe that rating, one of t...
Talking it out with others vs. deliberation within and the law of group polarization: Some implic... more 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 deliberation. It converges, in particular, with deliberative democrats’ predictions about the positive epistemic properties of talking things out with others. The paper further considers two influential objections to democratic deliberation: first, that “deliberation within” rather than deliberation with others carries most of the burden in terms of changing people’s minds; and second, that the so-called “law of group polarization” casts serious doubts on the value of democratic deliberation and, more generally, the ideal of deliberative democracy.
This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In ... more This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In the crowdsourcing experiment, the public was invited to contribute to the law-reform process by sharing their knowledge and ideas for a better policy. This article introduces a normative design framework of five principles for crowdsourced policymaking: inclusiveness, accountability, transparency, modularity, and synthesis. Inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency are overarching principles for crowdsourced policymaking. Modularity and synthesis support these overarching principles and are instrumental in achieving the main goals of crowdsourced policymaking, namely, an efficient search for knowledge and democratic deliberation among the participants. These principles apply to both the design of the process and the medium that the process takes place in, i.e., the technology facilitating crowdsourcing. This article analyzes the design of the crowdsourced off-road traffic law exper...
Jon Elster is a Norwegian-born social scientist and political theorist, currently Robert K. Merto... more Jon Elster is a Norwegian-born social scientist and political theorist, currently Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Columbia in New York. From 2005 to 2011, he was also professeur titulaire at the College de France in Paris, where he held the chair “Rationality and Social Sciences” (formerly held by Pierre Bourdieu). He previously taught at the University of Oslo and the University of Chicago. Elster's work spans a vast array of topics, with a focus on human rationality. He has made important contributions to many fields, including political theory, political science, social science, and political psychology. His work is generally informed by a broad acquaintance with many more disciplines, such as economics, game theory, psychology, philosophy, and literature. This entry gives a sample of some of his main positions on different topics. Keywords: collective action; constitutionalism; democratic theory; functionalism; political science; social choice theory
tracing the reception of elements of Weber’s oeuvre, not just by American sociologists-to-be but ... more tracing the reception of elements of Weber’s oeuvre, not just by American sociologists-to-be but also by various sectors of the German university world in the years following his death. It is here that Derman’s account of Weber’s Rezeptiongeschichte comes into its own and offers new, and often startling, information. Weber may not have been all things to all people, but there is a parade of surprises concerning his appropriation in his native land in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Soon-to-be Nazis like Otto Koellreutter bristled at Weber’s description of the state as a mere Betrieb, while more famous figures like Carl Schmitt deployed Weber in his own war against statutory positivism, even as he argued that the notion of the state as Betrieb precisely captured the depoliticalization of liberal-capitalist-technological society (pp. 106–9). While for the most part the Nazis had little use for Weber (whose political activities after the war aligned him securely with the struggle for parliamentary democracy), the occasional sympathetic Nazi reader—like Karl Wilhelm Rath at the University of Göttingen—could praise Weber’s clearing away of the old illusions—the “death of God”—as the prelude not to a world of subjective, existential decision making (which god should I follow?) but to the birth of a new order of “concrete” duties and community, one in which all talk of competing values and “warring gods” would look positively quaint and oh-so-nineteenth century (pp. 71–74). Derman is also exceedingly good at disentangling the various strands of Weber’s anti-utopianism, and the reasons why each of them has had a significant afterlife. First, there is the stoic, disillusioned Weber—the heroic individualist who so impressed Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Troelsch, and Karl Mannheim. Second, there is the “temperate anti-utopianism” of the thinker who famously insisted (in “Science as a Vocation”) on the need for passion, a sense of proportion, and personal responsibility for consequences. This Weber was attractive to both Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin, and seemed to provide a path forward in a world where the stage for meaningful individual political action had become extremely constricted. Finally, there is the “hot anti-utopianism” of Weber the proto-existentialist, the Weber who railed against intellectual and political opponents, and whose ultimate values were deeply personal ones, in extreme tension with all supposed “universal” values. This Weber, in Derman’s account, was most evident to those who knew him well— such as the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose entire conception of Existenzphilosophie borrowed heavily from the model of personal authenticity provided by Weber. Derman concludes his study with the unlikely career of the notion of “charisma” (literally, “gift of grace”), a Greek term that Weber lifted from the New Testament in order to characterize rulers whose personal qualities inspire virtually unquestioning devotion in their followers. In his later writings, he offered charismatic leadership as an alternative to the suffocating “rule of officialdom” that he (increasingly) saw as the fate of the modern, administered world. But as Derman points out, the term did not immediately catch on in a German academic context still ruled by more “holistic” conceptions of state and society. It was only with the rise of fascism in Italy, and the contributions of people like Roberto Michels, that charisma made its way into political sociology for good, winding up, postwar, as part of the American political vernacular. The strange story of the sea change undergone by “charisma” is alone worth the price of admission to Derman’s study. Like the rest of the book, it leaves one with an enhanced understanding of the contingencies, misunderstandings, and institutional vagaries that Weber encountered on his posthumous road to canonization.
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on politica... more 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 Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity.
This paper argues in favor of the epistemic properties of inclusiveness in the context of democra... more 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 assumptions, more is smarter. When applied to deliberative assemblies of representatives, where there is an upper limit to the number of people that can be included in the group, the argument translates into a defense of a specific selection mode of participants: random selection.
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for par... more 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 strong: even if the number of ideas is as large as the number of participants, each participant will only have to make a logarithmic number of comparisons, an exponential improvement over the linear number of comparisons previously needed. We demonstrate the approach in an experiment in Finland's recent off-road traffic law reform, observing that the total number of comparisons needed to achieve a fixed \epsilon approximation is linear in the number of ideas and that the constant is not large. Finally, we note a few other experimental observations which support the use of voting rules for aggregation. First, we observe that rating, one of t...
Talking it out with others vs. deliberation within and the law of group polarization: Some implic... more 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 deliberation. It converges, in particular, with deliberative democrats’ predictions about the positive epistemic properties of talking things out with others. The paper further considers two influential objections to democratic deliberation: first, that “deliberation within” rather than deliberation with others carries most of the burden in terms of changing people’s minds; and second, that the so-called “law of group polarization” casts serious doubts on the value of democratic deliberation and, more generally, the ideal of deliberative democracy.
This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In ... more This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In the crowdsourcing experiment, the public was invited to contribute to the law-reform process by sharing their knowledge and ideas for a better policy. This article introduces a normative design framework of five principles for crowdsourced policymaking: inclusiveness, accountability, transparency, modularity, and synthesis. Inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency are overarching principles for crowdsourced policymaking. Modularity and synthesis support these overarching principles and are instrumental in achieving the main goals of crowdsourced policymaking, namely, an efficient search for knowledge and democratic deliberation among the participants. These principles apply to both the design of the process and the medium that the process takes place in, i.e., the technology facilitating crowdsourcing. This article analyzes the design of the crowdsourced off-road traffic law exper...
Jon Elster is a Norwegian-born social scientist and political theorist, currently Robert K. Merto... more Jon Elster is a Norwegian-born social scientist and political theorist, currently Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Columbia in New York. From 2005 to 2011, he was also professeur titulaire at the College de France in Paris, where he held the chair “Rationality and Social Sciences” (formerly held by Pierre Bourdieu). He previously taught at the University of Oslo and the University of Chicago. Elster's work spans a vast array of topics, with a focus on human rationality. He has made important contributions to many fields, including political theory, political science, social science, and political psychology. His work is generally informed by a broad acquaintance with many more disciplines, such as economics, game theory, psychology, philosophy, and literature. This entry gives a sample of some of his main positions on different topics. Keywords: collective action; constitutionalism; democratic theory; functionalism; political science; social choice theory
tracing the reception of elements of Weber’s oeuvre, not just by American sociologists-to-be but ... more tracing the reception of elements of Weber’s oeuvre, not just by American sociologists-to-be but also by various sectors of the German university world in the years following his death. It is here that Derman’s account of Weber’s Rezeptiongeschichte comes into its own and offers new, and often startling, information. Weber may not have been all things to all people, but there is a parade of surprises concerning his appropriation in his native land in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Soon-to-be Nazis like Otto Koellreutter bristled at Weber’s description of the state as a mere Betrieb, while more famous figures like Carl Schmitt deployed Weber in his own war against statutory positivism, even as he argued that the notion of the state as Betrieb precisely captured the depoliticalization of liberal-capitalist-technological society (pp. 106–9). While for the most part the Nazis had little use for Weber (whose political activities after the war aligned him securely with the struggle for parliamentary democracy), the occasional sympathetic Nazi reader—like Karl Wilhelm Rath at the University of Göttingen—could praise Weber’s clearing away of the old illusions—the “death of God”—as the prelude not to a world of subjective, existential decision making (which god should I follow?) but to the birth of a new order of “concrete” duties and community, one in which all talk of competing values and “warring gods” would look positively quaint and oh-so-nineteenth century (pp. 71–74). Derman is also exceedingly good at disentangling the various strands of Weber’s anti-utopianism, and the reasons why each of them has had a significant afterlife. First, there is the stoic, disillusioned Weber—the heroic individualist who so impressed Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Troelsch, and Karl Mannheim. Second, there is the “temperate anti-utopianism” of the thinker who famously insisted (in “Science as a Vocation”) on the need for passion, a sense of proportion, and personal responsibility for consequences. This Weber was attractive to both Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin, and seemed to provide a path forward in a world where the stage for meaningful individual political action had become extremely constricted. Finally, there is the “hot anti-utopianism” of Weber the proto-existentialist, the Weber who railed against intellectual and political opponents, and whose ultimate values were deeply personal ones, in extreme tension with all supposed “universal” values. This Weber, in Derman’s account, was most evident to those who knew him well— such as the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose entire conception of Existenzphilosophie borrowed heavily from the model of personal authenticity provided by Weber. Derman concludes his study with the unlikely career of the notion of “charisma” (literally, “gift of grace”), a Greek term that Weber lifted from the New Testament in order to characterize rulers whose personal qualities inspire virtually unquestioning devotion in their followers. In his later writings, he offered charismatic leadership as an alternative to the suffocating “rule of officialdom” that he (increasingly) saw as the fate of the modern, administered world. But as Derman points out, the term did not immediately catch on in a German academic context still ruled by more “holistic” conceptions of state and society. It was only with the rise of fascism in Italy, and the contributions of people like Roberto Michels, that charisma made its way into political sociology for good, winding up, postwar, as part of the American political vernacular. The strange story of the sea change undergone by “charisma” is alone worth the price of admission to Derman’s study. Like the rest of the book, it leaves one with an enhanced understanding of the contingencies, misunderstandings, and institutional vagaries that Weber encountered on his posthumous road to canonization.
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on politica... more 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 Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity.
This paper presents the foundations of a systematic epistemic case for democracy as a collective ... more 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 based on the concept of “democratic reason,” or the collective intelligence of the people in politics. The paper argues that, counter-intuitively, democratic reason is more a function of the cognitive diversity of the individuals taking part in the decision than of their individual ability. As an account of democracy’s epistemic benefits, the argument from democratic reason supplements procedural accounts based on fairness and equality to provide a complete functionalist explanation of democracy. Finally, the argument supports policy reforms increasing citizens’ participation in the collective decision-process.
Forthcoming in Ruth Chang and Amia Srinivasan (eds) Conversations in Philosophy, Law and Politics, Oxford University Press 2024, 2024
A core problem in deliberative democracy is the tension between two seemingly equally important c... more A core problem in deliberative democracy is the tension between two seemingly equally important conditions of democratic legitimacy: deliberation, on the one hand, and mass participation, on the other. Might artificial intelligence help bring quality deliberation to the masses? The answer is a qualified yes. The chapter first examines the conundrum in deliberative democracy around the trade-off between deliberation and mass participation by returning to the seminal debate between Joshua Cohen and Jürgen Habermas. It then turns to an analysis of the 2019 French Great National Debate, a low-tech attempt to involve millions of French citizens in a two-month-long structured exercise of collective deliberation. Building on the shortcomings of this process, the chapter then considers two different visions for an algorithm-powered form of mass deliberation-Mass Online Deliberation (MOD), on the one hand, and Many Rotating Mini-publics (MRMs), on the other-theorizing various ways artificial intelligence could play a role in them. To the extent that artificial intelligence makes the possibility of either vision more likely to come to fruition, it carries with it the promise of deliberation at the very large scale.
Democratic experiments in Iceland evoked international interest, in particular, the work of the C... more Democratic experiments in Iceland evoked international interest, in particular, the work of the Constitutional Council, which in the period from April to July of 2011 wrote a complete draft of a new Constitution for Iceland and submitted it to Parliament as a constitutional bill. In the book scholars from Iceland, the United States, Italy and France discuss these innovations and explore the lessons that may be drawn from the Icelandic experience in current debates on democracy.
“Philosophy of the Social Sciences” (with Jon Elster), in Precis of Philosophy of Science, Oxford... more “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, et Mikaël Cozic Paris: Vuibert, 2011
This paper attempts to answer the question, "What is a good constitution?" by looking at the case... more This paper 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 paper considers various normative criteria by which to assess the quality of a constitution prior to its implementation and uses some of them to evaluate the Icelandic proposal in their light. In order to set a plausible benchmark, the paper also compares the Icelandic constitutional proposal with three other texts: the original 1944 constitution, and two expert-written proposals that served as templates for the members of the Constitutional Council. The idea is to evaluate the quality of a constitution, prior to its implementation, by reference to ex-ante, substantive criteria that are both sufficiently demanding and realistic in terms of what is feasible at any given time.
This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the coll... more 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 their epistemic properties to maximize the chances that the group pick the “better” political answer within a given context and a set of values. The paper further argues that under the conditions of a liberal society, characterized among other things by sufficient cognitive diversity, these two mechanisms give democracy an epistemic edge over versions of the rule of the few.
Every human group faces the problem of how to reconcile the tension between, on the one hand, the... more 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 tradition has typically conceptualized this tension as one between the collective goal of political order and the individual value of freedom as " negative liberty, " which may or may not support a right of revolt against an order perceived as unjust. The point of this essay is to explore a set of moments or conceptual breakthroughs within this Western tradition that demonstrate one way of partially resolving the tension. In this paper I am thus interested in exploring the concepts of order and harmony versus spontaneity and revolt from within the Western tradition, with which I am most familiar, in an effort to start a dialogue between two apparently different—some would say incommensurate—philosophical worldviews. I will take the contrasts and nuanced relationships between these four concepts as the starting point of a larger reflection about the difficulty of conceptualizing social life as harmonious without silencing individual voices or blocking the possibility of change. 169 I will more specifically attempt to identify moments in Western thought that have allowed for a transformation in the Western understanding of political
Cet article présente les bases d’un argument épistémique en
faveur de la démocratie définie comme... more Cet article présente les bases d’un argument épistémique en faveur de la démocratie définie comme procédure de décision collective. Il explore également les implications d’un tel argument épistémique par rapport à d’autres justifications établies de la démocratie, par rapport aux explications scientifiques de ses succès empiriques, et en termes de politiques publiques à mener. En ce qui concerne l’argument épistémique proprement dit, il repose sur le concept de « raison démocratique », autrement dit l’intelligence collective des individus dans le domaine politique, et propose, de manière contre-intuitive, que la raison démocratique est davantage tributaire de la diversitécognitive des individus qui prennent par aux décisions que de leurs aptitudes personnelles. De manière générale, l’argument de la raison démocratique complète les arguments procéduraux basés sur l’équité et l’égalité pour offrir une explication fonctionnaliste complète de la démocratie. Pour finir, cet article défend l’idée de réformes institutionnelles favorisant la participation citoyenne dans le processus de prise de décision collective.
Publications of the Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland, Helsinki. 1/2014., Jan 1, 2014
The Ministry of the Environment and the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Parliament initia... more The Ministry of the Environment and the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Parliament initiated a crowdsourced off-road traffic law reform in Finland in 2013. About 700 Finns participated in the law-reform process online by sharing their ideas, knowledge and perspectives about off-road traffic. The participants shared about 500 ideas, 4,000 comments and 19,000 votes in the crowdsourcing process.
This paper considers some implications of a new psychological theory of reasoning for the normati... more This paper considers some implications of a new psychological theory of reasoning for the normative ideal at the heart of deliberative democracy. The paper argues that this new 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 considers two influential objections to democratic deliberation. The first is the claim that “deliberation within” rather than deliberation with others carries most of the burden in terms of changing people’s minds. The other is the claim that the so-called “law of group polarization” casts serious doubts on the value of democratic deliberation and, more generally, the ideal of deliberative democracy
A conversation with Ioannis Papadopoulos from the University of Lausanne about the meaning and ch... more A conversation with Ioannis Papadopoulos from the University of Lausanne about the meaning and challenges of democracy in the 21st century. Moderator: José Gomes André Lisbon, Portugal, October 7, 2016.
A talk in French I gave at the Université Laval in Québec on Feb. 25, 2016 about the concept of t... more A talk in French I gave at the Université Laval in Québec on Feb. 25, 2016 about the concept of the "democratic enterprise."
A talk about my work on Iceland, Finland, and workplace democracy (Yale McMillan Center, April 9,... more A talk about my work on Iceland, Finland, and workplace democracy (Yale McMillan Center, April 9, 2014)
extreme partijen en de steeds lagere opkomst bij verkiezingen.' 'Het volk heeft vijftig jaar lang... more extreme partijen en de steeds lagere opkomst bij verkiezingen.' 'Het volk heeft vijftig jaar lang mensen naar de macht gestemd die wel vaarden bij de globalisering, tegen het eigen belang in. De taart werd groter, maar steeds ongelijker verdeeld.' Geen enkel politiek systeem in de geschie denis heeft zoveel welvaart voortgebracht als onze liberale democratie.
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- Originally published in French as “La Philosophie des Sciences Sociales” in Précis de Philosophie des Sciences, edited by Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay, et Mikaël Cozic Paris: Vuibert, 2011
faveur de la démocratie définie comme procédure de décision collective. Il
explore également les implications d’un tel argument épistémique par rapport à d’autres justifications établies de la démocratie, par rapport aux explications scientifiques de ses succès empiriques, et en termes de politiques publiques à mener. En ce qui concerne l’argument épistémique proprement dit, il repose sur le concept de « raison démocratique », autrement dit l’intelligence collective des individus dans le domaine politique, et propose, de manière contre-intuitive, que la raison démocratique est davantage tributaire de la diversitécognitive des
individus qui prennent par aux décisions que de leurs aptitudes personnelles. De manière générale, l’argument de la raison démocratique complète les arguments procéduraux basés sur l’équité et l’égalité pour offrir une explication fonctionnaliste complète de la démocratie. Pour finir, cet article défend l’idée de réformes institutionnelles favorisant la participation citoyenne dans le processus de prise de décision collective.
Moderator: José Gomes André
Lisbon, Portugal, October 7, 2016.