A Movement That’s Quietly Reshaping Democracy For The Better

May 15, 2022 7:42 AM

Imagine you receive an invitation one day from your mayor, inviting you to serve as a member of your city’s newly established permanent Citizens’ Assembly. "You will be one of 100 others like you — people who are not politicians or even necessarily party members. All of you were drawn by lot through a fair and random process called a civic lottery. ... Important decisions have been shaped by everyday people about 10-year, $5 billion strategic plans, 30-year infrastructure investment strategies, tackling online hate speech and harassment, taking preventative action against increased flood risks, improving air quality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and many other issues."
posted by NotLost (26 comments total)

I meant to italicize the post, as all the text was from the article.
posted by NotLost at 7:42 AM on May 15, 2022

Wow, it's whiplash Sunday on MetaFilter. Thanks for keeping hope alive. The doomy posts are certainly important, too, but without good news like this, I think I'd flush my phone down the toilet, and that would cause all kinds of other problems.
posted by rikschell at 7:57 AM on May 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

There was a UK citizens assembly on climate change. The jury is still out on its success.
posted by rednikki at 8:37 AM on May 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of the whole "anyone who wants to hold an office absolutely shouldn't be allowed to" idea.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:42 AM on May 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

This kind of sounds like jury duty.
posted by heatherlogan at 8:46 AM on May 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think Citizens' Assemblies are wonderful - for example the one in Ireland which was crucial in changing the constitution to legalise abortion. They are almost uniquely able to overcome the way that government a and legislatures are distorted by career politics and party politics.

However, they only work if the country (both the population generally and the politicians) is committed beforehand to taking their deliberations and recommendations seriously: which is why I strongly disagree with any campaign group or party using the term Citizens Assembly (or Jury) for their own discussion projects, no matter how well-intentioned.
posted by vincebowdren at 8:58 AM on May 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

There was one of these in British Columbia to consider and select an electoral reform proposal to put to the public by referendum. It was closely studied by the political science department at the University of British Columbia. It had what I think is a significant and important effect in terms of legitimacy and voter trust of the process, as described in this academic article:

"In 2005, voters focused on the Citizens‘ Assembly as
much or even more than they focused on the substantive question. When citizens paid attention to
the Citizens‘ Assembly, they trusted it, when then inclined them to vote yes. They treated the
BCCA as what political scientists call a ―trusted information proxy.‖ Even though citizens did not
fully understand electoral systems or the STV proposal, they followed the lead of their fellow
citizens who had put time, effort, and intelligence into constructing an alternative for British
Columbia. In 2009, however, the memory of the Citizens‘ Assembly had faded, and was replaced
with a divisive public debate, in which each side sought to increase distrust of the other side. It is
likely that voters, lacking a trusted information proxy and failing to invest in knowledge of a
somewhat arcane topic, voted conservatively, when they bothered to vote at all."
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:31 AM on May 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

Yes, agree with vincebowdren they're only a thing if they're real. By which I mean the outputs are going to be taken seriously by the relevant government.

The thing that I liked the most about the citizens assembly on abortion in Ireland was that the split of views at the end of the process was close to the referendum result.
posted by plonkee at 10:02 AM on May 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

A previously about electoral reform in Canada led me to this video, in which they argue that citizens assemblies are better than referendums for many things.
posted by clawsoon at 10:12 AM on May 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was on a citizens' assembly (my identity drawn by lot), and it was pretty amazing. This was ten years ago, or something, but just recently I met a person who had been through the same process in a different region, and he had the same positive experience. We should definitely do this more.
posted by mumimor at 11:51 AM on May 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Having people become familiar with an issue and have genuine deliberative interactions with those different with them is much better than referendums, in my opinion. They got a majority in the subsequent referendum in BC, but they made the requirements higher than that. It takes a lot of resources and planning to do well though. Much better to have people follow the lead of fellow citizens than of politicians with a vested interest in a particular outcome.
posted by lookoutbelow at 12:25 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

A mefite whose name I don't remember was very high on the idea sortition.
posted by NotLost at 12:37 PM on May 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

they really have not yet publicly begun to discuss the PhoneSewerPocaplyse in depth at all.

Nobody can really predict the outcome of increasing the uptake of that kind of powerful organizing and coordination tech by the sewer alligators, but I suspect it won't be good.
posted by flabdablet at 12:46 PM on May 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

"A mefite whose name I don't remember was very high on the idea sortition."

That would be Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon. I've tried to summon them back, but no dice so far. #shrug_emoji
posted by kaibutsu at 2:37 PM on May 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is an idea we are looking into at my university to try and get some idea of acceptable change in the short and medium term. Like most institutions we declared a climate emergency a couple of three years ago but justifying change upwards is hard, and I'm hoping this is a route to doing so.
posted by biffa at 3:54 PM on May 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I miss RNTP.
posted by Reverend John at 7:17 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

One more thought - people should be paid reasonably to participate in these. Otherwise it's biased to those with extra time and money on their hands, which is bad.
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:36 PM on May 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

lookoutbelow: I attended a talk by a panel of folks who had been part of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly and they spoke very positively about their experiences. They were all people who had had very little political education or experience and spoke glowingly about the process. It was clear they had found it empowering and they all had a lot of confidence in the conclusions they were able to draw after learning from the process.

The idea of more Citizens’ Assemblies is very heartening.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:34 PM on May 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Anything that moves us in the direction of direct democracy is a good thing, IMO, though I agree with a few other posters here that these aren't going to mean much if they're not vested with actual decisionmaking power.

For a libertarian socialist take on the citizen's assembly, I'd recommend reading about political philosopher and social ecologist Murray Bookchin's theory of Communalism. He wrote a lot of fascinating stuff about how geographically oriented citizen's assemblies (as in, an assembly for a street, or for a neighborhood or even a town) could arise within the US without any input or authority from the state, and start addressing local issues to the best of their ability (such as coordinating mutual aid, shoveling snow, fixing potholes, that kind of thing).

As more of these assemblies crop up around the country, they could "confederate", collaborating with each other when needed to address issues wider than their immediate localities. In time, the theory goes, these assemblies could earn themselves legitimacy and favor from locals and the wider culture by fixing problems that the state cannot or will not address. Eventually, as the assemblies' power grows, it's likely that friction will begin developing between them and the state. Bookchin's hope is that this tension would grow gradually enough that by the time the state was ready to really crack down, the assemblies would have enough popular support that they would be able to hold their own, perhaps eventually shifting the direction of the entire country.

I haven't read as much of Bookchin's work as I'd like yet, so I apologize if I've gotten some details wrong! But I think it's a compelling idea. So did the Kurds in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, who are currently successfully running their own version of Communalism, heavily influenced by Bookchin's writings.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:12 PM on May 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

This sounds great in theory, but ultimately it sounds like it lives or dies at the whim of those who already have power. To take a prosaic example, Toronto is cited in the article as an example, but Toronto hasn't renewed the mandate of the panel since 2019. It's currently "on pause" pending review. Who knows when it will be back.

I am pessimistic because good systems require people operating in bad systems to grow and nurture good systems, and as the lack of progress on issues like electoral reform suggest, people already in power under bad systems have massive incentives to keep bad systems in place.
posted by chrominance at 10:11 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

As Yale Professor Hélène Landemore argues, the idea of “representing and being represented in turn” supports a new, non-electoral understanding of democratic representation. The principle idea of deliberative democracy — a political theory largely inspired by Jürgen Habermas — is that political decisions should be the result of fair and reasonable discussion and debate among citizens who form a collective judgement.

previously :P

Politics Without Politicians - "The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can't the people do the governing?"

Continuous elections - "What I do favor is an idea called 'lottery voting' or 'random ballot'. I really encourage you to read the first link, a very readable academic note by Akhil Reed Amar which introduced the idea. You should also read this essay by David MacIver (ht Bill Mill). In a nutshell, everybody votes in the way they currently do for their preferred candidate. Then we throw the ballots in a big hat, and draw the winner like a bingo hall door prize.[2] You'd never want to use lottery voting to elect a President. Who knows who you might pick? It'd be totally random. But for a large legislature, lottery voting will predictably yield proportional representation along whatever axes or characteristics are salient to voters, not just formal political parties. Further, lottery voting is immune to gerrymandering, and every vote always has equal influence."[1]

Mass representative democracy - "Imagine what an online direct democracy might look like. All of us would be the legislature... That's untenable."[2,3]

So we’d have to design a kind of stochastic parliament, where people’s proposals would initially go to very tiny fractions of “the legislature”. These random samples would constitute ad hoc “committees”, and each citizen would be responsible for serious deliberation on the proposals that come before them in this way, but each participant would field only a modest number of such proposals. Following deliberation and potentially modification at this stage, these ad hoc committees would vote to promote or kill the proposal. If they promote, the same procedure would recur but with a larger sample, and less scope for deliberation and modification. The number of such proposals that could be promoted to higher levels of review would be limited and so competitively rationed: only those gathering the most support would gain scarce “slots” compelling the broad polity to review them. Finally, the tournament-winning, most promoted proposals would get plenary up or down votes, like a vote on the House floor.

You can imagine this kind of thing, but it would do little to address the problems we invented representative democracy to solve. To function well, our citizenry would have to be extraordinarily engaged and informed, and it would take up all of their time. It would be like permanent jury duty.

But what if we elected representatives to participate in this kind of mass-democracy framework? Instead of electing one per 800,000 or one per 80,000, what if we self-affiliated into groups of common interest of no more than, say, 1000 souls, for whom personal, physical “town meetings” could be regularly arranged? Obviously, not everyone would wish to attend all of these meetings, but everyone could if they wished. With no more than 1000 constituents, an elected could become at least acquainted with her full constituency. She could be accessible and available to them all. She could maintain direct relationships with a substantial fraction of the people she represents, and be motivated and held to account by those relationships, by gratitude and shame experienced personally rather than by abstract shifts in what some consultant claims the polls say.

Instead of a few hundred Congresspeople, we’d have 250,000 representatives whose full-time job it would be to stay and live among and interact with their constituents, and participate in the online legislature. There would be no Congressional offices in Washington, no risk of going native among colleagues who become much closer than constituents. At a municipal level, there would be no councilmen or supervisors at City Hall. In my San Francisco, there would be roughly 800 legislators and any of us who cared to would know our representative and interact with her as much or as little as we pleased.

This proposal recognizes that the hard part of being a representative, or at least what ought to be the hard part, is not fundraising, rising through committees, learning the personalities and peccadillos of influential colleagues so that you can “legislate effectively”. The hard part of being a representative is representing. The problem we should devote ourselves to is the challenge of making one person’s voice become a capable stand-in for many others’ necessarily absent. The legitimacy of our entire system of government depends upon this thin reed, the quality of the bond between elected and constituency. When that bond becomes as attenuated and deflected as it has under current institutions, “democracy” fails to confer very much legitimacy at all, or to be effective at serving the interests of the people on whose behalf it claims to rule...

So “expand the House” from 435 to, um, 250,000, and put it online. Obviously, this is an idea that can’t be put into immediate practice at a national level. We have a lot to learn before we’ll trust large-scale stochastic deliberative assemblies to resolve political questions with extraordinarily high stakes. However, it is a vision that we should be working towards.

posted by kliuless at 10:32 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Echoing others that these things are a great idea in theory, but will mostly fall down because they exist to pay lip service to direct democracy and nothing more. Having these bodies enshrined in legislation is a step in the right direction, of course and there's a balance needed to ensure decisions proposed by such bodies are actually feasible, so they shouldn't have direct authority to legislate. The key thing is to ensure governments have to seriously consider the outputs and be accountable for not implementing or even for implementing recommendations. It's a tough balance to find, but worth the effort. A long road ahead before we see this get much traction, though, I fear.
posted by dg at 2:32 AM on May 16, 2022

Direct democracy is nice, but for now I'd just be happy if citizens assemblies could be used as leverage to keep representative bodies functional. For example, the U.S. Senate's filibuster should be amended so that any failure to achieve cloture hands the legislation off as-is to a randomly empaneled citizens assembly who will research and debate the bill for three months before giving an up/down vote which will be the final decision for the entire Senate.

Then the decision of whether or not to filibuster a bill becomes a riskier proposition. Maybe the panel will agree and vote "no", or maybe they'll vote "yes". More importantly, filibustering would also remove any ability to change the final bill in the Senate (the House would still be free to change stuff, but then that would be new legislation taken up by the Senate) so it introduces new stakes to the negotiations and (hopefully) provides a disincentive to be the one Senator who keeps abdicating the Senate's responsibility because presumably everyone wants to have a hand in the process.

Of course the implementation is always the hardest part. Getting a randomly empaneled citizens assembly where the selection process hasn't been manipulated is difficult and non-trivial.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:44 AM on May 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

There are things that these can solve. How to prioritize limited budget for public expenditure, what murals to paint, what colors to paint things like street lights and informational signs. What local history to emphasize.

But anything more important than that, actual elected are abdicating responsibility so they can be endlessly elected without anything that someone can point to that they dislike, which is cheap.

Also, how on earth can you manage 100 people? Senators get paid - it's a job, it's not a thing you do on the side. No way that you can really take the input of 100 people. And since 16 is the oldest, anyone younger gets no say.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:48 AM on May 16, 2022

I just realized that some independent redistricting commissions have some of these traits.

Redistricting bodies vary a lot. But California's does use random drawing for part of the selection process. And the bodies are focused on one issue, each iteration exists for a defined period, but they are set to come about every redistricting cycle.
posted by NotLost at 7:57 AM on May 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think a problem with American-style bicameralism is that over time, there's effectively become very little real difference between the two legislative houses. The concept of a citizens' assembly or legislative jury seems to achieve much more successfully what the House of Representatives was intended to, while the institutions of the Senate have become increasingly antidemocratic over time. I think both election and sortition are valuable ways to get representative democracy working, if done correctly, and bicameralism on this basis would be a better model for government. This would be in addition to, not instead of, the more issue-specific and transitory citizens' assemblies described in the article.

Also, the voting rules for the elected body need to be changed to some form of approval vote model.
posted by biogeo at 11:24 AM on May 17, 2022 [2 favorites]