Review of Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, xviii + 243 pp.

Open Democracy is a bold exploration of how we can move beyond a purely electoral conception of democratic representation. Using normative democratic theory and real-world examples of innovations in citizen representation, Hélène Landemore argues for a vision of democracy that is more faithful to popular rule, more likely to tap into democratic reason, and more stable and durable than electoral democracy. The book begins with the all-too-familiar observation that “democracy is in crisis, or so we are incessantly told” (xiii). The symptoms of this crisis include a decline in voter turnout, the decline of parties as vehicles for mass participation, polarization, extremism, and populism (26–27). Landemore seeks to answer two important questions about this so-called crisis of democracy: How did we get here, and how do we get out? On the first question, Landemore provides a simple answer: representative democracy—characterized by electoral representation—has failed to deliver on the democratic promise of popular rule. On the second question, Landemore develops an ambitious proposal for an ‘open democracy’ which will bring power back to the people through novel (that is, non-electoral) forms of democratic representation based on random and self-selection. After an introductory chapter, Landemore develops her claim that the crisis of democracy can be traced to representative democracy being designed on the basis of electoral premises. The crisis that we face, she argues, is not merely the result of external shocks such as globalization, technological change, or the rise of economic inequalities brought about by capitalism. After all, we see that representative democracies are not completely powerless in the face of these challenges. More fundamen-