Civic love

The standard argument for citizens’ assemblies is epistemic: a diverse group of ordinary people, deliberating well, reaches wiser decisions than a narrow elite (see the epistemic case for democracy). True — but Hélène Landemore, after actually sitting in the room, came to think it misses the most important part.

What she didn’t expect

Landemore came to this work as a self-described hyper-rationalist, trained to bracket emotion and focus on the analytically tractable. Then she observed the French climate convention. Across its sessions she watched strangers — divided by age, class, ideology — move from cautious, timid, and skeptical to hugging, joking, and speaking openly of affection. Participants used the language of love, not tepid respect: “I fell in love with him on day one”; “we became a family born of chance and necessity.” One man simply said he felt loved — embraced for exactly who he was — and that it “gave him wings.”

The strong claim

This isn’t a sentimental footnote.

Note

Landemore’s claim is that the bonding is the precondition for everything else: you only get the collective-intelligence benefits if you trigger the relational connection first. Trust is the bond that opens minds and hearts enough for genuine reasoning to happen.

Several things follow:

• The “wasted” early hours — the awkward introductions, the conversations that go in circles — aren’t waste. They build the trust the hard deliberation later depends on. (Researchers call this group building, and find it a key predictor of a group’s ability to grapple with complexity.)
• It explains why these rooms produce debates — on a 28-hour work week, on end-of-life care — that stay curious and open to changing one’s mind, instead of collapsing into the usual invective.
• And it’s a warning about scale: strip out the human, relational dimension (fully asynchronous text, or AI standing in for people) and you risk losing the very thing that makes deliberation transformative.

It also helps to remove the layer of identity people usually carry into politics — they arrive not as delegates of a party, business, or group, but as humans who happen to share a place. That’s what lets them move.

Sources

• Hélène Landemore — DemocracyNext (2026): youtube.com/watch?v=sgFUtZCgAqI. See also her Politics Without Politicians (2026), ch. 7.
• Simon Niemeyer, Francesco Veri, John S. Dryzek & André Bächtiger, “How Deliberation Happens: Enabling Deliberative Reason,” American Political Science Review (2024) — the empirical source for group building as the key enabler of a group’s reasoning under complexity: doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000023
• Hugh Pope, “Of Civic Love and the Beauty of the Lot” (2026) — a review of Landemore’s Politics without Politicians that foregrounds the bonds formed in sortition assemblies: hughpope.substack.com