Investor assemblies
Most of the power in modern societies isn’t only in governments. Pension funds and investment funds steer trillions, and the decisions they make — what to finance, how to vote company shares — are often more consequential than much of what assemblies deliberate about. Yet ordinary people have almost no say in how that capital is governed. Hélène Landemore, with economists Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales, has proposed extending sortition and deliberation into that world: investor assemblies.
The idea
Section titled “The idea”Today, fund managers cast votes on behalf of millions of investors — the “pass-through” problem, where your money has a voice but you don’t, and that voice is assumed to want nothing but maximum profit. An investor assembly flips that: a randomly-selected, deliberating panel of a fund’s or company’s shareholders surfaces what investors actually think — including their pro-social preferences on climate, labour, or animal welfare — and feeds it into decisions at the fund, company, or industry level.
Why it matters for citizens
Section titled “Why it matters for citizens”- Pension funds especially. Everyone is enrolled, often with no choice and no exit — so it’s not really a “shareholder” club of the wealthy, it’s the public’s money. That makes it a natural, even urgent, place to apply deliberative methods.
- It widens the franchise of economic life. It treats the people whose savings are at stake as citizens of the economy, not just consumers of returns.
Because investors’ time is scarce, Landemore is more open here than elsewhere to lighter-weight formats — more online, more AI-mediated — to lower the barrier to entry, while keeping the deliberation real.
Sources
Section titled “Sources”- Oliver Hart, Luigi Zingales & Hélène Landemore — How To Implement Shareholder Democracy (Stigler Center, 2025).
- Hélène Landemore — DemocracyNext (2026): youtube.com/watch?v=sgFUtZCgAqI.