POLITICAL REFORM BLOG
Democracy in America: One day, they may get it right
The election process...works to favour special interests rather than the common good. The public knows all this, feels powerless, and turns off.
Related Programs:Citizens Assembly, Political Reform Program
Topics:
Political Reform E-mail, Print or Share this Blog Post:
(Published in the Toronto Globe & Mail by Gordon Gibson of British Columbia)
A conference in California last weekend gave new hope to U.S. democracy.
While most American writings proclaim their democracy as the best, those
sentiments are more patriotic than factual. The U.S. Senate, the
self-proclaimed "greatest deliberative body in the world," managed to defeat
repeated calls from the lower House for slavery's abolition prior to the
Civil War and, today, grossly overrepresents small, rural states to the
disadvantage of the large, urban ones where the biggest problems lie.
The House of Representatives is based on gerrymandered districts of such
partisan reliability that the re-election rate for incumbents would have fit
well in the old Soviet Union. The election process, from the primaries
through campaign funding to the procedural rules of Congress, works to
favour special interests rather than the common good.
The public knows all this, feels powerless, and turns off.
According to both reformers and politicians at the Deliberative Democracy in
California conference, giant California (now about 37 million souls) is much
the same. So there is a determined search for better tools, and the
promising area looks to be "deliberative democracy," which empowers random
panels of ordinary people as a powerful new "interest group."
Canada is a leader in this field. The B.C. Citizens' Assembly is the gold
standard for what citizen assemblies can do.
In that case, we took 160 randomly selected people and asked them to
reconsider our electoral system. As a result, we have a genuine shot at
electoral reform in B.C. The federal government is looking at a version of
deliberative democracy to assess federal institutions, and the Nova Scotia
electrical utility and the Romanow commission have both used variations.
Californians are looking at this for their own purposes, and if they can
marry citizens' panels to the initiative or proposition process, it will be
a huge advance. But most of the U.S. work is on a smaller scale.
At Pepperdine University, site of the conference, leading U.S. practitioners
outlined their various experiments. One avenue is "deliberative polling," in
which groups ranging up to several hundred are polled on a given topic, then
given a crash course on the subject by experts and repolled. It turns out
education makes a real difference -- a reason to question ordinary polls.
Another path is "facilitated dialogue panels," which are randomly chosen to
advise politicians on specific issues.
What is happening in each case is that ordinary people are given the
opportunity to seriously study public policy, knowing that their views will
be seriously taken into account. It turns out that they dare to go where
politicians dare not (because they have nothing to lose) and that their
entire focus is on the public interest (because they also have nothing to
gain and no axes to grind.) It is often said that the people are "ahead of
the politicians," but this is only a fairy tale unless you really ask them,
and that is what is now going on.
One of the most surprising things is that randomly selected panels (drawn,
say, from the voter's list) are actually far more representative than the
so-called representatives we elect. If you look at the face of Canada, you
do not find it reflected in the House of Commons. And, for some things,
these random panels are far better than elected representatives or groups of
experts. They are not partisan and they do not play games.
This is not to disrespect elected representatives, who will and should do
the bulk of the work of governance. They are paid to be experts on our
behalf. But citizen panels on policy issues can be highly imaginative. They
have been used on environmental cases in Texas, on what to do with the Roma
in Bulgaria, on reconstruction planning in New Orleans and on public works
prioritization in China (really -- and it worked). A gathering of 600
"ordinary citizens" is scheduled to appear in the European Parliament
chamber in June to discuss the future of the union.
The big excitement, however, is likely to come down south, just because the
United States is so big, so powerful and so governmentally messed up. The
key will be to use citizen panels as we have done in B.C. and Ontario to get
around the conflicts of politicians and reform the very machinery of
democracy. For the good of the world, that most needs doing in the United
States.
________________
Gordon Gibson, a former member of the legislature and author of Fixing
Canadian Democracy, designed the Citizens' Assembly process for the B.C.
government. He can be reached at ggibson@bc-home.com Return to Main Blog Page
A conference in California last weekend gave new hope to U.S. democracy.
While most American writings proclaim their democracy as the best, those
sentiments are more patriotic than factual. The U.S. Senate, the
self-proclaimed "greatest deliberative body in the world," managed to defeat
repeated calls from the lower House for slavery's abolition prior to the
Civil War and, today, grossly overrepresents small, rural states to the
disadvantage of the large, urban ones where the biggest problems lie.
The House of Representatives is based on gerrymandered districts of such
partisan reliability that the re-election rate for incumbents would have fit
well in the old Soviet Union. The election process, from the primaries
through campaign funding to the procedural rules of Congress, works to
favour special interests rather than the common good.
The public knows all this, feels powerless, and turns off.
According to both reformers and politicians at the Deliberative Democracy in
California conference, giant California (now about 37 million souls) is much
the same. So there is a determined search for better tools, and the
promising area looks to be "deliberative democracy," which empowers random
panels of ordinary people as a powerful new "interest group."
Canada is a leader in this field. The B.C. Citizens' Assembly is the gold
standard for what citizen assemblies can do.
In that case, we took 160 randomly selected people and asked them to
reconsider our electoral system. As a result, we have a genuine shot at
electoral reform in B.C. The federal government is looking at a version of
deliberative democracy to assess federal institutions, and the Nova Scotia
electrical utility and the Romanow commission have both used variations.
Californians are looking at this for their own purposes, and if they can
marry citizens' panels to the initiative or proposition process, it will be
a huge advance. But most of the U.S. work is on a smaller scale.
At Pepperdine University, site of the conference, leading U.S. practitioners
outlined their various experiments. One avenue is "deliberative polling," in
which groups ranging up to several hundred are polled on a given topic, then
given a crash course on the subject by experts and repolled. It turns out
education makes a real difference -- a reason to question ordinary polls.
Another path is "facilitated dialogue panels," which are randomly chosen to
advise politicians on specific issues.
What is happening in each case is that ordinary people are given the
opportunity to seriously study public policy, knowing that their views will
be seriously taken into account. It turns out that they dare to go where
politicians dare not (because they have nothing to lose) and that their
entire focus is on the public interest (because they also have nothing to
gain and no axes to grind.) It is often said that the people are "ahead of
the politicians," but this is only a fairy tale unless you really ask them,
and that is what is now going on.
One of the most surprising things is that randomly selected panels (drawn,
say, from the voter's list) are actually far more representative than the
so-called representatives we elect. If you look at the face of Canada, you
do not find it reflected in the House of Commons. And, for some things,
these random panels are far better than elected representatives or groups of
experts. They are not partisan and they do not play games.
This is not to disrespect elected representatives, who will and should do
the bulk of the work of governance. They are paid to be experts on our
behalf. But citizen panels on policy issues can be highly imaginative. They
have been used on environmental cases in Texas, on what to do with the Roma
in Bulgaria, on reconstruction planning in New Orleans and on public works
prioritization in China (really -- and it worked). A gathering of 600
"ordinary citizens" is scheduled to appear in the European Parliament
chamber in June to discuss the future of the union.
The big excitement, however, is likely to come down south, just because the
United States is so big, so powerful and so governmentally messed up. The
key will be to use citizen panels as we have done in B.C. and Ontario to get
around the conflicts of politicians and reform the very machinery of
democracy. For the good of the world, that most needs doing in the United
States.
________________
Gordon Gibson, a former member of the legislature and author of Fixing
Canadian Democracy, designed the Citizens' Assembly process for the B.C.
government. He can be reached at ggibson@bc-home.com Return to Main Blog Page
Post new comment