What's next for deliberative democracy?
Journalist and new democrat Hugh Pope attended the annual conference of the ‘Democracy R&D’ network in Vancouver, Canada, in September 2024. Here is his report, along with a link to ideas for the future of citizens’ assemblies.
"Inspiring and magical"
“Inspiring”. “Magical”. “Achieving consensus”. Such words are rarely applied to a policy-making process. But praise for citizens' assemblies was on many people’s lips during a recent week of trainings, workshops and events in British Columbia on the progress of deliberative & participatory democracy. Held in the Canadian province in September, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the modern world's first randomly selected citizens’ assembly, held in Vancouver in 2004.
Since that little-heralded event, perhaps 1,000 citizens' assemblies have now been held all over the world. Most have been held in the past few years and the number is rising fast, particularly in local politics. The deliberative movement's main network, Democracy R&D, which started out with a conference of 30 people in Madrid in 2018, attracted 200 practitioners and experts to Vancouver for its conference this year.
Symbolising the enthusiasm, Leonora Camner, chief executive of Democracy Beyond Elections, boasted a new tattoo in the form of a kleroterion, a machine used in ancient Athens to assign citizens to policy-making committees.
Citizens' assemblies propose solutions
Today, citizens' assemblies are an evolving technique for taking hard decisions in the public common interest. Also known as civic assemblies or citizens’ juries, they bring together between 30 and 200 participants chosen by lot from the relevant community or country. Usually meeting for several days over a number of weeks, the citizens first get to know each other, learn from experts about the challenge at hand, deliberate among themselves and then propose solutions. They are thus much more heterogenous than, say, elected parliaments, which are dominated by charismatic, relatively wealthy people like party politicians or lawyers. Yet citizens' assemblies routinely adopt suggestions that achieve consensus, which usually means over 80% approval.
“People who profess to be helping are not. [This electoral system,] it's a European construct and it’s falling apart,” said Shane Pointe, a Canadian Indigenous leader who came to bless the opening of the Democracy R&D conference in the name of his ancestors. "We need to take action, my friends from round the world! We need to spread the word that we need to participate. We are the sacred medicine that is going to help us heal democracy.”
"It changed the world"
The recommendations of that first 2004 British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on voting reform won 57% support in a province-wide referendum – a notable success, even if it fell short of the 60% needed to change the law that day. "It was a global first," Peter MacLeod, the doyen of Canadian deliberative democracy activists, told an anniversary reunion of participants. "It may not have succeeded [in British Columbia], but it still changed the world."
MacLeod remembered how Irish academic David Farrell attended the 2004 assembly to brief participants on Ireland’s voting system, but went home convinced that actually random selection might be the future. This led directly to the Irish citizens’ assemblies that in the 2010s broke the country’s political logjams on same-sex marriage and abortion.
Antidote to public frustration
The week of democracy meetings in British Columbia showcased more evidence of deliberative democracy's potential to act as an antidote to public frustrations: alienation from partisan politicians, domineering parties, bad decision-making and anger about the poor performance of electoral systems in delivering efficient government.
“Polarisation was the first thing to fall,” remembered Shoni Field (pictured on the right of the second row above), addressing fellow alumni of that first Vancouver assembly in the same downtown building where they met in 2004. She remembered how at first she and other members didn’t believe they would be able to achieve consensus. But “finding things in common was much easier than expected. We got to feel confident and connected … like magic.”
"Design something new!”
Politicians have not yet handed decision-making powers to such assemblies, but they have become readier to commit to serious discussion of their recommendations. In Canada, some 50 citizens' assemblies have taken place since 2004, many of them local, like one that began in September on B.C.'s Vancouver Island. The mayors of Vancouver Island's two main municipalities, Victoria and Saanich, welcomed 48 randomly selected citizens who will deliberate on a long-stalled plan to merge or not to merge (pictured below).
“Few people get the chance to do what you’re doing. Design something new!” the mayor of Victoria, Marianne Alto, told participants at the opening meeting. Her counterpart from Saanich, Dean Murdock, was equally encouraging. “You are bringing your lived experience and representing the community. Our commitment is to put your recommendations in front of the voters,” he pledged.
It is still early days for deliberative democracy. A week of discussions among these new democrats revealed several lines of debate and innovation, from techniques of random selection to formulating an overall theory of change.
Find out where politicians are feeling pain
For instance, few of the advocates for deliberative democracy gathered in British Columbia publicly advocate that random selection should completely replace elections in selecting most decision-making bodies, as was the case during the glory days of ancient Athens. But there is no clear end point, either.
“I want evolution, not revolution! Trying to change everything at once would lead to chaos. At a time when our democracies are already under extreme pressure, nobody wants that," said Emily Jenke, joint chief of Australian assembly organizers democracyco. Zakia Elvang, managing partner at Danish advisory group "We Do Democracy", later pointed out that the goal should be to find out where elected politicians are feeling pain and to do something about it. “Inviting citizens in should help politicians, not be a threat to them,” she said.
Advocates of deliberative democracy more ambitious
The few people who do envisage a world run by random selected bodies - a process also called sortition or lottocracy - generally acknowledge that it could take a century or more to achieve. As my late father Maurice Pope pointed out in his The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, elections themselves took centuries to emerge. Universal suffrage was a long-unexpected result of the gradual displacement the discredited rule of kings, popes and nobles.
Still, advocates of deliberative democracy have become more ambitious in recent years. For instance, discussion of citizens' assemblies has now eclipsed the attention once given to the early innovation of participatory budgeting, which emerged in the 1990s to give citizens a role in advising government entities on spending a small part of their annual outlays.
How can sortition work better?
Even in today's all-digital age, a surprising first hurdle to random selection is getting access to complete lists of citizens to choose from. Some countries allow access to at least rolls of voters; in others, organisers of civic assemblies have to contract the job out to public opinion researchers or pollsters, which can be expensive.
Typically, only about 2%-5% of the citizens who are randomly selected respond positively to their invitation to serve in assemblies. A second round of random selection from this pool (known as stratification) makes sure that the final choice of assembly members reflects the demographics of the community, for instance balancing gender, age, location, language, education, and economic status.
Unequal participation opportunities
However, assemblies are therefore biased towards the kind of people willing to say “yes" to such invitations. Also, these selection criteria lower the individual chances of acceptance to personality types who say “yes” most often. In European-populated countries, for instance, this means a low personal chance of attending for older, educated, better-off white men.
The only real solution to full representativity - as proposed by some, including my late father in his book - is to make attendance mandatory, as with service in court juries. This is unlikely for now, at least until sortition becomes far better known and widely accepted.
Steps to better mini-publics
In the meantime, participants in Democracy R&D suggested a number of steps:
- Do more research on what makes people opt in to join assemblies, and then act to persuade people who are randomly selected to decide to accept. Facilitators from Germany’s Es Geht Los, for instance, go door to door to persuade those chosen by the computer to join assemblies and have raised acceptance rates to as high as 25%.
- Avoid putting too many criteria into the stratification (for instance relating to education or wealth), since motivated citizens may try to manipulate the system with false answers to get into the assembly. A sensible maximum is about six criteria.
- Create a large number of possible, stratified assemblies from the pool of acceptances by candidates, then choose one of them from a hat. This makes the final selection of any single individual fairer. The German parliament did something like this with the final selection of its new Citizens’ Assemblies. MIT professor Bailey Finnigan (speaking to audience above) also designed a scientific algorithm to even out an individual’s chances of selection – which she charmingly called the “Goldilocks" method.
- Absent mandatory service on citizens’ assemblies, build up as comprehensive a list as possible of all people in a community who in principle agree to join a future assembly that can then be used by all citizens' assembly or jury organisers.
Can AI help deliberative democracy?
According to some participants, AI could plausibly open to multitudes of people the deliberative democracy that today is only available to smaller groups. Enthusiasts imagined that highly trained bots could do facilitation, allow participants to interrogate in-house databases of expert briefings more easily, transcribe conversations or synthesize conclusions from hundreds of transcripts at once. Indeed, a first fully tech-enhanced experiment is already under way in Oregon in the Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness.
Sceptics about the role of AI worried that the essence of the magic of citizens’ assemblies is in the human contact, trust and civic love that is so much more easily built up face-to-face.
Can citizens’ assemblies be institutionalised?
For some deliberative democracy non-profits, institutionalisation is the way forward. A start has been made, with some success, in Belgium's German-community parliament, the municipality of Paris, a climate assembly for the Brussels region and a new Europe-wide body on the future of the EU. Each experiment is different, but a basic principle so far is that one randomly selected group chooses topics for other ad hoc, time-limited citizens' assemblies to address.
Sceptics worry that institutionalisation could bring hierarchies, import a mentality of doing a paid jobs and lose the deep feeling of public service currently felt in shorter citizens’ assemblies. “I worry that permanent citizens’ assemblies could lead to over-bureaucratisation,” said the leader of one pan-European non-profit.
Sortition still little-known
One of participants' frustrations is how little-known sortition still is. Despite a constant drumbeat of dissatisfaction with the performance of elected governments, mainstream news stories about alternative methods of decision-making is sparse. “The lowest-read articles [I write] are the ones about citizens’ assemblies,” syndicated California democracy columnist Joe Mathews told the Democracy R&D conference.
Yet it is remarkable how very few, if any, citizens drop out of an assembly, despite the intense work, usually over weekends. In fact, it’s frequent to hear them say that the experience was a highlight of their lives. Such alumni often become ardent advocates of the process. More could be done to mobilise them to spread the word, even if such alumni are still a small group in the world.
Interest in sortition at moments of peak anger
Such interest in sortition as there is in mainstream media seems to occur at moments of peak anger with and unpopular governments and then to disappear in the wave of hope when a new party takes power. For instance, before the last elections in the United Kingdom, a Labour Party adviser suggested citizens' assemblies might be part of a victorious Labour Party program, but the party later backtracked. "As soon as they won, citizens’ assemblies suddenly became the last priority,” noted the chief of an international democracy non-profit.
Another suggestion to broaden experience of citizens' assembly would be to do more with the randomly selected first pool of those who do say yes, often numbering a few hundred people, who are not chosen in the final stratification. For instance, they could be invited to a special outreach session of the assembly in which they could discuss the issue at hand with those who were selected.
Improving terminology
Improving terminology, or awareness of it, could also help. The word sortition is little known or understood. Some say citizens' assemblies should be known as civic assemblies (to include, for instance, unregistered refugees). Some worry the word democracy itself may be off-putting and means different things to different people. One issue is that people now associate democracy entirely with voting, even though until the 18th century democracy (“rule by the people”) was mostly used to describe direct popular authority, channelled through the random selection of classical times. Another difficulty is that because people now think democracy means voting, and because elected governments are in such disrepute, the word democracy can now trigger hostile feelings.
Ways Democracy R&D conference participants suggested to popularise the process included ideas to: build up better data and stories on citizens' assemblies and their impact, and use these to craft a compelling theory of change; mobilise assembly alumni as spokespeople; win over politicians – critically, before they take power – to understand that citizens' assemblies can bring support and legitimacy and not threaten their elected roles; stress that citizens’ assemblies are more representative of diversity than elected bodies and are better at blocking special-interest groups; and better link deliberative democracy to what the wider public cares about.
"Funders sometimes out of touch"
Non-profit types often wring their hands about finding funding for their work. The world of deliberative democracy has a particularly difficult time raising money, with some organizations reporting close calls with fate.
Small donations on a large scale are unknown for democracy NGOs, perhaps since deliberative democracy is not (yet) a cause with an emotional punch that can attract the attention of the general public or a passing donor in the street. At the other end, big national funders to organisations doing democratic improvement are often linked to elected politicians, who can worry that supporting alternatives to elections might cut off the branch on which they sit.
Additionally, the field is new and untested, with very few organizations older than a decade. "The funders are sometimes out of touch,” the chief of one international democracy NGO told me. "Look at what happened with the Brexit referendum. Tens of millions of pounds were spent to swing the campaign against Europe. And with sortition, donors give us $100,000-$150,000 and then ask us, why haven't you changed democracy?"
Deliberative democracy attracts rich individuals
One encouraging difference is that deliberative democracy does attract rich individuals frustrated with the electoral system, a number of whom have set up their own non-profits and take an active interest in deliberative projects. Time will tell if they can coordinate to build up a broader movement.
Although the Democracy R&D network has grown rapidly to more than 100 organisations and 100 individual members since its founding in 2018, involving perhaps 400 people in total, few members expect a rapid global conversion to sortition. “The revolution will be a slow one, and it will happen in local administrations first,” predicted a founding member from Brussels, where next year's conference takes place.
Number of citizens' assemblies is rising
Still, the number of citizens’ assemblies being held round the world is rising in a logarithmic curve. I came away from my week in British Columbia sure that all the energy, new ideas, focused organizations, and idealism mean that the deliberative wave will not subside soon. The challenge for these new democrats is how to connect the solutions they offer – like citizens' assemblies – with the now widespread recognition that public trust has been lost in electoral processes and the governments they produce. Or at least, how to make that connection before the argument is won by the forces who are currently far ahead in this race: the one-third of the population in richer countries with electoral systems who suggesting that authoritarian rule is the answer.
Canada's Peter MacLeod (above right) urged the new democrats in Vancouver not to flag in their efforts, noting the ultimate success of the last big democratic wave in 1790-1830. In that period, the American and French revolutions spurred the replacement of monarchs, archbishops and aristocrats by then more effective elected governments.
"We have to keep delivering assemblies"
“Don’t underestimate the the ability of a small group of people to change the world [even if] it took another 120 years to full enfranchisement,” he said. “We have to keep delivering assemblies. Democracy’s second act has started.”