Debating Democracy

Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2012), Compulsory Voting: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016). His books have been translated twenty-four times into thirteen languages. He specializes in democratic theory and politics, philosophy, and economics. Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), which won the Spitz Prize in 2015, and Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). She researches democratic theory, constitutional theory, and political epistemology. She serves as an advisor to theFrench government on the use of citizen participation in policy-making.

Brennan, in particular, is quite good at presenting complex ideas in a straightforward, accessible way. He uses examples well to explain the real costs of giving equal power to people with unequal knowledge, as in the case of Brexit. Landemore...presents thought--provoking suggestions, such as the increased use of randomly selected citizen assemblies. Both authors, from their very different perspectives, present intriguing ideas about how people might influence decision--making other than through the representative systems Americans are used to.

• Introduction Part I: Brennan - Democracy without RomanceChapter 1. How Real Democracy Really WorksChapter 2. Is the Solution More Democracy?Chapter 3. Democracy: Less Is MoreChapter 4. Alternatives to Democracy Part II: Landemore - Let's Try Real DemocracyChapter 5. The Argument for DemocracyChapter 6. ObjectionsChapter 7. Against EpistemocraciesChapter 8. If Democracy Is Such a Smart Regime, Why Are Democracies Doing So Poorly at the Moment and How Can We Fix Them? Part III: Responses by Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore Chapter 9. A Response to BrennanChapter 10. A Response to Landemore