Podcast in Print: Revitalizing Democracy Through Citizen Assemblies
05-14-2020 Thanks very much, Lawrence, and thank you all for being here. There’s some friends and colleagues in the “audience” here, so it seems that we’ll have a lot of very high-powered and thoughtful people. So I’m going to try and get through this quickly, and give us some time for a spirited debate, and question-and-answer, and let you guys participate as well.
So the title of the talk that Lawrence and I came up with is “Democratic Revival Using Lottery in Citizen Juries.” The basic idea here is that I think many of us are acutely aware of what we may call a crisis of democracy, a democratic deficit. There’s just a profound sense around the world, certainly here in the United States, that democracy is broken, that there’s a motivational deficit. And if you look at much of the theory, and much of the theory in leftwing politics in the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of it is sort of assuming almost the impossibility of democracy working as a way to bring the voice of the people into politics. A lot of theory now sort of says we can’t actually make government democratic, and what we have to do is sort of find islands of freedom outside of it, through protest, or alternative communities, or things of that [nature].
So a host of thinkers as wide-ranging as people like Simon Critchley, who argues that freedom is only to be found in protest against government; or David Graeber, who again argues that it’s in protest against government that we find freedom, not in government itself; or people like Jacques {Ratiere?], again arguing that politics is always about a kind of consensus, and that we need to find freedom in dissensus against government. You’re seeing a wide range of people turn against government for a whole lot of reasons, and I think a big part of it is a strong sense, and I think not an unjustified sense, that democracy as it’s being practiced in the West is not working.
Well, you have to ask what working means. And I think when we talk about how to fix democracy, or reform democracy, or the word I’m currently trying to use, revitalize or revive democracy, there’s two different ways we can address the problem: One is through broadening the electorate. So if you look at the United States, over time we’ve brought more people into the electorate, be it more poor people, more women, more blacks, more other underrepresented people. And there’s still a wide-ranging movement for reform today, and so there’s people who want to bring former criminals into electorate, because in many states former criminals are not allowed to vote; there’s arguments against voter suppression; and arguments for or against gerrymandering or redistricting.
And so all of these are reform proposals within the current system. I think they’re important, and I certainly support all of them. But there’s, I think, a fascinating, fairly new movement that has really taken root, mostly not in the United States, but around the world, and is becoming increasingly popular, and to me is maybe the most exciting activist movement of my life. And this is a movement which goes by the name of Sortition, which is a word I didn’t know before three or four years ago, and I’m sure many of you don’t know; but it’s basically about using lottery, random selection of citizens, and involving people in government in that way. In a sense, or directly what this movement for sortition argues is that it’s not just about expanding who can vote; it’s that voting is actually not the right way to do democracy and that we should look for another approach.
And this movement has both an historical and a present moment to its argument. So Bernard Manin, who is an historian-classicist, who just retired, has argued about Athenian democracy, and he makes two main arguments in his book on representative democracy: The first one is that lottery was central to the Athenian democracy; that the difference between Athenian democracy and our current representative democracy is not that, in the Athenian democracy, you had more people in a direct democracy, and in our democracy we have fewer people, a series of representatives. It’s that the representatives we select are selected by election, whereas the Athenians selected their representatives by lottery. So this is a big argument.
Today, when we talk about representative democracy, many people say, oh, well we have to use it because we’re bigger than Athens, so we need representatives. This argument—it’s not about size, and it’s not about, you know, the many or the few; it’s about how they’re selected.
And his second argument is that the use of lottery was not just an accident of Athenian democracy; that the use of lottery had reasons and was fundamental to the Athenian idea of democracy; that the Athenians had an intuition, he says, that elections did not guarantee the right kind of equality.
And there are three arguments he makes about how sortition speaks to democratic values: The first is rotation in office. The second is a democratic distrust of professionalism, or political professionalism. And a third is the idea of isogoria, the equal right to speak before the assembly.
So just to quickly go through these: The first two, rotation in office and a deep distrust of professionalism, I think go together. There’s a strong sense at the heart of Athenian democracy that you had to have a rotation in office. Aristotle articulated the idea that one of the forms of liberty is to rule and to be ruled in turn. There’s not just rulers and ruled; everyone should both be a ruler and be ruled. And this commitment to rotation and choosing representatives by lot stem from a deep distrust of political professionalism.
And so this leads into the second argument: Every political job in Athens was performable by non-specialists except for a very very few, like military leader, or something like that. The absence of experts, Manin writes, or at any rate their restricted role, was designed to safeguard the political power of ordinary citizens. The safeguards are necessary, he wrote, because the assumption was that if professionals intervened in government, they would inevitably dominate it. And so for Manin what he’s saying is that there’s a deep conflict between democracy and professionalism.
And I think this is really important today because perhaps if you want to understand a big part of the democratic motivational deficit today, or the critique of democracy today, I think a big part of it is a critique and a discomfort with an increasingly professionalized and elitist government. You see this on the right and also on the left, and I think it’s deeply important that we understand that one of the supposed values of democracy is that anybody can actually rule, and not a chosen elite.
The third part is this idea of the right to speak in public, or isogoria. And for Manin the point about lottery is that everybody has a right to speak; that’s the value of it. And what he then goes on to say is, elections only become a democratic idea in the 18th century, with the French and American revolutions, and that elections actually speak to a very different value than everybody has an equal right to speak and participate in government. The value that elections speak to is consent, and that representative democracy is structured on the value of consent of the governed as what guarantees legitimacy to government—not on the value of participation and equal right to speak. If you go back to Federalist-anti-Federalist debates around the founding of the American Constitution, this is very much what they’re about. The Federalists, like Madison and Hamilton, argued that you need to choose representatives through election because election will choose the more wealthy and also therefore those people who, if they have vices, they’re better vices than the poor. So Hamilton writes in a speech he gives in 1788 that virtue and vice are both in the rich and the poor, but the vices of the wealthy are probably more favorable to the prosperity of the state than those of the indigent and partake of less moral depravity.
Madison, in Federalist 10, which is, you know, his famous defense of large representative republics, argues that “it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are often carried, and the suffrages of people being more free will be more likely to center on men who possess the most attractive merit and most diffusive and established characters; namely, in a large republic, those who are wealthy and established will have their characters shown and will be chosen by the electorate.”
The anti-Federalists made the opposite argument: that you need a wide range of people in government, not just wealthy people of good character. You need, according to Brutus, one of the main anti-Federalists, you need merchants, farmers, planters, mechanics, and gentry or wealthy men. You need all of them. And he and other anti-Federalists argue that an electoral government will divide itself into classes, namely the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated; and this will create a natural aristocracy where wealth always creates influence.
I think the fact that today, in the United States, 100 percent of senators and 99 percent of congress[people] are college educated shows exactly what the anti-Federalists were worried about, which is that you will develop two classes. And I would say the classes have something to do with wealth today, but maybe even more so have to do with a certain kind of education versus non-education. At least in the United States that’s a big part of how we’re currently dividing and thinking about the country.
And so the question is, if elections are leading towards a class division—and by the way, Hannah Arendt argues in her essay on violence that, in a way, the great divide of the modern period that leads people to feel disenfranchised is the increasing rule by a meritocratic elite, and that, in her mind, the great class warfare is not even a class warfare. She calls it a race warfare between those who pretend to be intelligent and rule through claims of intelligence and those who they claim are unintelligent. And she says this will lead either to a tyranny of the elite or a kind of racial war against the elite by the uneducated. Again, not to say that that’s happening, but I think you see that in much of our politics today.
And so, as I said, given this critique of elections and consent as the base of our modern representative democratic system, a new movement is emerging arguing that what we need to do is not simply reform elections and make elections more broad-based; but we actually need to bring back the principle of lottery, of a more widespread selection into our government. And this has emerged in a number of areas. On the one hand you have people arguing for deliberative polling, like James Fishkin over at Stanford. And then the other, and the one we’re talking about today, is these ideas of citizen juries. And around the world you’re starting to see citizen juries emerge where not just like deliberative polling on the outside of government, but governments themselves are beginning to convene citizen juries. That means we use random selection to select a certain number of citizens with no educational or wealth or any other criteria, and we bring them in, and we educate them in the sense of they can bring in experts. And we select some, but they select some, and there are in a sense advocates for different sides. And they meet, they learn, they read together, they talk, and over a series of weeks they meet and come to a kind of deliberative conclusion.
These are now being used all over the world. In the United Kingdom a climate assembly is currently meeting where 110 people from all walks of life are gathering, and they are deciding how England should pursue its target of zero net emissions by 2050. Thirty thousand people were chosen at random and asked to apply or to be part of this citizen jury. Two thousand people volunteered, and 110 people were picked by a computer.
A similar process, again on the climate, is going on in France, where 150 French citizens chosen at random have been brought together, and they are deciding how France should go about cutting carbon emissions by 40 percent before 2030. President Macron has said that whatever this citizen assembly decides will be brought unfiltered—that means unchanged by electoral representatives—to a vote of the French parliament.
In Canada a number of cities, including Toronto, are using these citizen assemblies to make major decisions now. In Melbourne, Australia, they’re doing it. And in many ways these sort of first large-scale uses of these citizen assemblies to bring in unelected randomly selected people to be educated, and learn on themselves [sic], and deliberate, and make decisions goes back to an experiment in Ireland around 10 years ago, in 2010, where the Irish Constitutional Convention brought together people to propose changes to the Irish Constitution.
I have, as I said, been educated about this idea of sortition by a number of people, but predominantly by some of my students, two of them, in particular Jonas Kunz and Hans Kern, who have started a group that the Arendt Center runs called BIRDS, The Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy Through Sortition. And Jonas actually has worked a bit on the Ireland case, and I think he’s here. He was going to give a presentation on the example of Ireland, and then we’ll open up for questions.
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