Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore is the Damon Wells ‘58 Professor of Political Science at Yale University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Philosophy, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI. Her work spans democratic theory and collective intelligence, with a growing focus on AI governance. She is interested in normative questions such as what makes collective decisions both legitimate and reliable, what forms of non-electoral representation can claim democratic authority, the place of experts in a democracy, and what democratic oversight of artificial intelligence should look like when its effects cross borders and outpace existing institutions. She is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (2013), Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (2020), and, most recently, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (2026). Beyond her scholarship, she has advised and designed citizens’ assemblies, including as Director of Design of the 2026 Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly on Property Taxes.