It’s not enough to simply invite citizens to give input, she [Victoria councillor Lisa Helps] argued. The problem is that special-interest groups can too easily dominate the discussion.

Dan Doherty, a director with a non-profit called Wise Democracy, has already tested one possible solution.

In 2011, he was contracted by the city to build “citizens insight councils” tasked with giving input into the city’s official community planning process. He found participants through a random selection process.

By calling 60 people, selected randomly by address, Doherty found 24 willing participants who agreed to a half-day workshop.

“It gets at people whose voices are not usually heard,” said Doherty.

Following up on “Wise Democracy” yielded their website, with a table explaining how the Wise Democracy process is differentiated from other “deliberative democracy” processes.

http://plenarchist.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/keeping-the-sortition-process-honest

FWIW, I am not personally very enamored with the fact that this system seems to place personal choice (a literal “social contract”) at its heart. I think it is a dangerous mistake to think that any political system could ever by voluntary (although I do believe that political system owe those who live under than an explanation for the way they handle things).

Concerned by California’s faltering government, a coalition of eight nonprofit good government groups conducted an experiment in June. They invited 435 Californians of every stripe from every corner of the state, from every political persuasion to spend three days in a Torrance hotel deliberating 30 proposals for government reform. The coalition raised $1 million to cover their travel costs.

Kazakoff is referring to the What’s Next California deliberative poll:

The original 30 proposals covered a gamut of concerns: term limits, reforming the initiative process and tax reform, among others. Participants were polled on their views before deliberating in small groups, and at the end, sometimes revealing a wide swing in their views. The resulting ballot initiative would require:

• Clear goals for government programs and regular updates on progress.
• Two-year budgets and three-year to five-year budget projections.
• The Legislature to show how new programs would be paid for.
• Transfer of control and financing to local government for certain programs.

The origin of the those ideas and the process by which the original proposals were turned into the “resulting ballot” is not specified. The fiscal focus here seems suspiciously aligned with standard establishment complaints.

Jim Fishkin, a Stanford University communications professor and democracy expert, patterned the event on the Athenian Council of 500. In ancient Greece, 500 citizens were chosen by lot to vet proposals before the electorate voted on them to ensure the people’s business got before the people.

That’s what needs to happen in California: The people’s business needs to get on the ballot. Fishkin is promoting the idea of regularly convening a citizens advisory council, whose proposals would automatically or easily go on the state ballot. It typically costs $3 million to qualify a measure, an almost insurmountable barrier except to special interests who would benefit from the measure at the people’s expense.

This is what surprised the conveners:

• Despite the Legislature’s 14 percent approval rating, the majority polled wanted to extend legislative terms, because legislators would then have more time to do the people’s business.
• Most tax proposals went down to defeat – but not all.
• Proposals to allow the Legislature to reform the initiative process were uniformly rejected.
• Participants remained firm in their conviction that a good portion of government spending is wasted.

The third bullet in the surprises list is rather surprising itself. Why would the citizens, who distrust the legislature, allow it to reform the initiative mechanism – a mechanism that was deliberately introduced in order to reduce the power of the legislature?

There has to be a better way.

Some of us reached that conclusion after discussing the mess our congressional and legislative governing systems have come to.

[...]

How could we find a system that frees our elective representatives from the servitude of full-time fundraising, from the draining of energy and spirit that go with permanent campaigns, and from the tribal commitments to political caucuses and parties? How could we free them from these things so they could spend full time working on legislation to make our state and nation better?

Somebody asked, what about a lottery? Why not just select our representatives by lottery?

That suggestion sounded like a joke. At first.

What could be more antithetical to democracy than putting aside citizen participation and simply choosing representatives by lot?

But, after I thought about it a minute, some advantages were apparent. No need to raise money. No permanent campaigns. No automatic partisan divides on every question. And, with modern computer techniques, a legislature that could be composed of people that would closely reflect the population, geographically, ethnically, gender, age, and otherwise.

Of course, somebody said, you would have a whole bunch of people who would have no idea what they were doing. Then, somebody else said, Neither do most newly elected legislators!

Still, making important selections by chance is just not the way we do things in America, is it?

One person quietly mentioned that we get our jury pools by random selection. The jury system is not perfect. But Americans have a pretty strong commitment to it. It works without the problems of partisan bickering and gamesmanship, fundraising, or time-consuming political campaigns.

All this may be true, but selecting representatives by lottery would be an unprecedented violation of the democratic tradition that began in ancient Greece.

Or would it?

Actually, the selection of many major officers in Athens was by allotment or a random process. According to the “New World Encyclopedia,” “Election was seen as less democratic and open to corruption because it would favor the rich (who could buy votes) and the eloquent, whereas a lottery gave everyone an equal chance to participate and experience, in Aristotle’s words, ‘ruling and being ruled in turn.’”

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1. Criteria – What criteria should define a “democratic” and “good” legislative system?
2. Categories of actors – Which broad categories of actors (e.g. all the people, allotted representatives, elected representatives, all-purpose versus limited-purpose representatives, staff) should play important roles in the legislative process? What roles should they play?
3. Activities – What are the main activities that must (or should?) be carried out in a democratic legislative process, and in what order? In some cases order will matter, in others it won’t.
4. Bodies and offices – Which specific bodies and offices (e.g. allotted chamber, single issue panels) should carry out each activity, playing what roles?
5. Processes – What processes should be used for each activity?

What do you think? I look forward to your ideas, and I’m hoping that maybe together we can create a simple structure that will not only help us, but many others as well.

VOL 5, NO 2: SPECIAL ISSUE: DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Guest Editor: Bob Brecher

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Democracy and Social Justice, Bob Brecher

Articles

Property, Propriety and Democracy, Mark Devenney
Jürgen Habermas and Bush’s Neoconservatives: Too Close for Comfort?, Vivienne Matthies-Boon
Inclusion and Participation: Working with the Tensions, Gideon Calder
The Two Sides of the Representative Coin, Keith Sutherland
The Dilemma of Democracy: Collusion and the State of Exception, Mark McGovern
Derrida, Democracy and Violence, Nick Mansfield

Green ‘super jury’ idea proposed to protect the future environment
by ClickGreen staff

A new report has been launched proposing the creation of a green ‘super jury’ of ordinary people to act as guardians for the country’s future.

The ‘Guardians of the Future’ report by University of East Anglia philosopher Dr Rupert Read calls for radical constitutional reform to safeguard the basic needs of future generations.

He proposes that a council of randomly picked members of the public, like a jury, should be placed above the House of Lords to oversee all government decisions – with the power of veto to stop legislation which threatens the interests of future generations.

Abstract: We propose a non-political parliamentary system where the parliamentarians are randomly chosen from the public, using computer technology, and there are no elections. In this ‘random parliament’, government is by ordinary people with proportional representation by all groups including women, men, workers, managers, old people, young people, and so on. The random parliament is the closest thing to true democracy that is currently attainable. Local government may be a suitable place to trial the idea of random representation.

Elections do not always determine new directions, but they allow retroactive democratic oversight. So, in my opinion, there can be no democracy without elections, but a democracy in which, in addition to elections, random selection is practiced along with other forms of consultation and public debate, would start to resemble a real democracy.