Hélène Landemore on Connecticut’s First Citizens’ Assembly: ‘We Are Giving Them the Keys’

Rick Harrison
Map of Connecticut as represented with mutli-colored hexagons in a honeycomb pattern

On Saturday, Yale will host the first session of the first Connecticut citizens’ assembly, convening 100 randomly selected people to deliberate over potentially new approaches for how to fund and deliver essential community services.

Hélène Landemore, professor of political science and co-leader of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies Democratic Innovations program, designed the assembly and will help supervise it. Democratic Innovations seeks to identify and test new ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance.

The assembly is a collaboration between the Connecticut Office of the State Comptroller, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the University of Connecticut Department of Political Science, and ISPS.

We spoke with Landemore on the eve of the first assembly session to ask about her thoughts on its design, purpose, and hopes for its outcomes. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

What are your expectations for how the citizens will function in the assembly?

We are trying to get the citizens to self-govern within a constitutional framework we have built for them — one partly shaped by practical constraints of time, budget, and expert availability. For the first sessions, for example, the program and the experts are already set, simply because we could not wait for their decisions. But within that framework, we aim to maximize their autonomy. It is for them to run the assembly. We are giving them the keys on day 1.

What does that mean in a practical sense?

Concretely, that means the decisions that remain to be made are theirs to make. It is not a free-for-all, but the choices are real. As the process unfolds, they will decide which experts they want to hear from again or bring in. They decide how to organize their work and how to deliver their report. In fact, one of their very first tasks on Saturday will be deciding how they want to organize and govern themselves as a body. Later they will also decide who speaks on their behalf to the media, whether they want to use AI tools in their deliberations, and whether to engage directly with the larger public.

How can randomly selected people with no governing experience run the show?

We supply scaffolding. Structure, a timeline, a bunch of actors in place to facilitate the process when the citizens arrive on Saturday. But once they arrive, we aim to maximize their autonomy.

What do you worry about the most when designing an assembly like this?

Critics often claim the citizens are easily captured and controlled by experts or interested parties. For me, it is important to minimize that risk.

Helene Landemore

Hélène Landemore

How?

One is that we diversified our organizing committee. But even more important is to minimize our role and maximize the role of the citizens. Then if they don’t like the experts we choose, they can choose their own in later sessions. The idea is we are there to help them. That’s something we can do without being accused of bias.

How did you get involved in this project?

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities invited me as an academic to help advise them, and together with the Office of the State Comptroller they asked me to design the assembly.

The purpose of the assembly is broad. They are exploring if there are ways to improve how we pay and deliver local services. How did the group decide on this topic?

When we started discussing this project last summer, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities had in mind an important but smaller topic: at-risk youth who fall into homelessness or addiction or through cracks in the education system. But there has already been a lengthy report recently done on this issue. We thought, rather than duplicating that work, let’s do something else. Many of the challenges towns face can be traced back to how we fund local services. Some towns have a lot of money, and some don’t. We need to potentially rethink the whole system. And that’s what a citizens’ assembly is uniquely positioned to help with.

Why does it work? What is it about randomly selected people coming together for a shared purpose? Why might that work better than elected officials or a government agency?

Citizens’ assemblies work because they bring together a microcosm of society. Ordinary people with diverse experiences who are not locked into partisan identities or electoral incentives. Given time, information, and a shared task, they can explore solutions politicians are often reluctant to consider — because they would be electorally penalized for doing so. They also produce judgments that typically better reflect the considered views of the broader public. This can be extremely helpful to elected officials. The power comes from combining cognitive diversity with equal political voice, in a deliberative context.

There is something about the mechanism that leads to more productive outcomes?

Yes. Once participants get to know the people across from them, the tone shifts. People listen, and disagreement becomes productive rather than performative.

What are your hopes for this assembly?

My main hope is that it goes well and that at a minimum, the citizens deliver proposals that state legislators and the public take seriously. And that it confirms that ordinary citizens are able to contribute to crafting better policies.

OK. That’s your baseline hope. Do you have higher aspirations?

Yes. I hope that the proposals get enacted and prove successful enough that we can proceed to replicating the process on many other issues across the state of Connecticut and beyond, with the hope of some form of institutionalization of citizens’ assemblies as a permanent and stable featur