Hélène Landemore on the Problem With Democratic Politics Today

foreignpolicy.com · Feb 15, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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In the fall of 2018, the French government passed a carbon tax, ostensibly to address environmental concerns but primarily, it seems, to close a 2 billion-euro deficit in the national budget. The move backfired spectacularly. By November, the Yellow Vests movement had emerged, named after the neon safety vests that all French motorists are required by law to keep in their vehicles and wear in case of emergencies. Protesters donned these vests both for visibility while blocking highways and occupying traffic circles across the country and as a symbol of their demand to be seen. The movement exploded, with demonstrators flooding Paris and marching on the Champs-Élysées every weekend for months. Their demands for social justice resonated, drawing support from over two-thirds of the French population at the protest’s peak. But public sympathy faded as a violent faction emerged—torching public property, looting luxury shops, and threatening to storm government ministries. In a moment of chaos, panicked officials scrambled out of windows, a dramatic turning point that shattered the movement’s image. Meanwhile, in the United States, discontent was brewing as well, arguably culminating in the right-wing populist uprising that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. On that fateful day, a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters—spurred on by the outgoing president, who refused to concede defeat—marched to the Capitol and stormed the building. The chaos ultimately left several people dead, multiple others injured, and many members of Congress terrified. Whether we label this ultimately failed invasion an attempted coup or not, the violence was as real as what had unfolded in France. For many observers, this event marked the end of U.S. exceptionalism. It exposed U.S. democracy as being just as fragile and susceptible to demagoguery as any other. To me, it revealed strikingly similar fault lines in both France and the United States, even though these political movements stemmed from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust. All around the world, similar protests have been observed in the last few decades. In Taiwan, in 2014, students started what is now known as the Sunflower Movement by occupying Parliament for three weeks to protest a free trade agreement with China and, more broadly, corruption in government and unrepresentative politics. In the United Kingdom in 2016, the Brexit vote was a more procedural way in which the masses expressed their rejection of neoliberal politics, the lack of transparency and democratic accountability of the European Union, and the disconnection of the elites behind both. In Chile in 2019, a small rise in the price of metro tickets spurred massive protests, a political revolution, and two failed attempts at rewriting the constitution. In January 2025, Serbia’s prime minister resigned, after monthslong student protests mobilized the country against corrupt politicians and democratic backsliding. Iceland, a tiny Nordic country, was the canary in the coal mine in many respects. While the bigger countries had to wait a few years for the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis to hit politically as well as economically, Iceland collapsed immediately. In 2008, as the country suddenly incurred debts totaling seven times its GDP, the political elites were ousted from power, and 36 bankers were eventually imprisoned. It being Iceland, the process was peaceful—using yogurt, bananas, and singing as weapons. But the shock waves were quite profound, leading the country to engage in a process of constitutional reform that, although it petered out after a few years, pioneered revolutionary ideas, such as the view that ordinary citizens should be involved in the writing of their own social contract. What do these events have in common? Profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites. We can call this populism—of the left or of the right—and dismiss it as an irrational, obscure force to be squelched. We can minimize the problem as the normal way democracies function and adjust to changing circumstances, accepting a permanent state of crisis as an inevitable price to pay for the freedom to choose our rulers. Or we can ask ourselves: What isn’t working in our systems that has led us to this level of dissatisfaction, instability, and, in some cases, violence? Viewed collectively—like Congress—politicians blur into sameness, and not just in appearance. In the United States, they’re overwhelmingly multimillionaires, highly educated (often lawyers), and products of private schools. Around the world, political leaders are almost always socioeconomic elites from the dominant ethnic group, and nearly all of them are men. The homogeneity of the electoral class is so pervasive that we hardly notice it anymore. It becomes striking only in certain moments, often by contrast. One such moment for me came in January 2019, a few months after the Yellow Vests movement erupted in France, during the lead up to the Great National Debate initiated by President Emmanuel Macron to quell the unrest. As a first step to rekindle national dialogue, Macron traveled across the country to meet with city mayors—France’s last well-liked politicians. His goal was to regain popularity among the mayors and, through them, the public. As I watched these events unfold from my computer in New Haven, Connecticut, one meeting particularly caught my attention: Macron’s session with about 600 mayors from my home region of Normandy, held in the small town of Grand Bourgtheroulde. For seven hours, I watched online as Macron conducted a marathon Q&A, deftly fielding questions from this critical and deeply engaged audience. More than the president’s demonstration of retail politics, what stayed with me was the visual: a supremely confident white man, surrounded by a sea of middle-aged, bearded, graying white men in glasses and dark suits. There were only a handful of women in the mix and not a person of color in sight—a perfect vignette of how patriarchal and homogenous the local hierarchies still are in France. At the local level, it suddenly became very clear to me, the same old hegemonies still prevail. I was struck in a completely different way by another image, which I ran across while researching the 2010 Icelandic constitutional process. It was a photo of the 25-member Icelandic Constitutional Council—the group tasked with drafting a new constitution after the 2008 financial crisis. Something about it just felt different. Of course, everybody in it is white—this is Iceland, after all; a small and not very multicultural country. But for one thing, almost half of the group is made up of women, who stand out in their colorful outfits. Second, in the foreground, lying almost flat on a reclining wheelchair, is Freyja Haraldsdóttir, a human rights lawyer afflicted by glass bone disease. Meanwhile, even though most of the men obviously felt obliged to wear suits and ties for this official picture, not all of them did so. The overall effect is less like a gathering of politicians and more like a group of guests at a wedding. These 25 Icelanders, beaming with pride in the picture, looked to me somehow, for lack of a better word, “normal.” Ordinary. Just like us. A look at the professions represented in that small sample also tells an interesting story: a mathematician, two pastors, a video game designer, a student, a union representative, a museum director, and a few academics, among others. In other words, none were professional politicians. How did Icelanders manage to produce such a diverse group? Their method was simple, and quite brutal: They banned politicians. They literally legislated that politicians currently in office were to be excluded from the pool of people allowed to run for election to the council. Why would politicians make such an anti-politician decision? Doesn’t that prove they can, at times, act selflessly for the greater good? In theory, yes—but only under extreme duress. In fact, in Iceland, they hardly had a choice. After the disgust generated toward the political class during the 2008 crisis, which had revealed the levels of corruption and unethical collusion between politicians and the banking world, Parliament had to take drastic measures. If the constitutional process were to have any legitimacy, the new government ushered into power at that time reasoned, it simply could not be led by politicians. It had to be entrusted to regular citizens. With this ban on politicians, Iceland took one step in the direction of what I call “politics without politicians.” Their mistake, however, was to stay with the selection mechanism of elections. After all, you can kick politicians out of an election, but you cannot prevent an election from selecting for a certain kind of person. To go further, Icelanders should have tried doing politics without elections altogether. The fact that they did not shows just how hard it is to imagine an alternative. A group of women in colorful garments, some with headscarfs and some without, stand in a line. A few women hold umbrellas over their heads to provide shade. The sky above is pale blue and cloudless. Voters queue to cast their ballots at a polling station in Darrang district, Assam state, India, on April 26, 2024.Biju Boro/AFP via Getty Images Why are elections a problem from a democratic point of view? Despite being predicated on equality of votes, they systematically produce an unequal distribution of power, which ends up producing a distorted representation of the needs and preferences of the larger population. This distorted representation in turn produces laws and policies misaligned with and sometimes even contrary to the political interests of citizens. Elections create this cascade of inequality through two