Democratic Renewal in an Age of Polarization and AI

Join us for a keynote address of the Bicentennial Academic Symposium given by Professor Landemore:

Politics Without Politicians: Democratic Renewal in an Age of Polarization and AI

Representative democracy is buckling under pressures its architects never anticipated: entrenched polarization, eroding institutional trust, and now the arrival of AI systems poised to reshape governance itself. This talk argues that the fragilities of our representative democracies are systemic and structural, not contingent, and make them unfit to handle the new challenges ahead. Drawing on the case for citizen rule developed in "Politics Without Politicians" (2026), I show how lottery-based assemblies that deliberate and legislate, paired with large-scale referenda on periodic programs and select controversial questions, offer a principled, scalable alternative to rule by professional politicians. I then turn to a more urgent frontier: AI governance, where decisions with world-wide consequence are currently being made by a handful of corporate actors with no democratic mandate. Building on recent work proposing a global deliberative architecture for AI oversight, I argue that the same logic that justifies citizen assemblies domestically demands a democratic answer at the global level, before that architecture is built by default, by those with the least incentive to include the rest of us.

Free copies of Professor Landemore's book will be available at the talk while supplies last and her keynote address will be followed by a reception and book signing. All are welcome. 

Learn more about other events at the Symposium here: Democracy: Past, Present, and Future schedule