Source: Radio New Zealand
A meeting of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly. The country’s first deliberative democracy process was a Constitutional Convention held over 18 months starting in 2012. Maxwells
What if a group of randomly selected people were put in a room and asked to hammer out national policy, or co-opted onto select committees?
It sounds like a social experiment, but was raised repeatedly at last month’s Democracy Forum at Parliament, hosted by Labour’s Duncan Webb and National’s Vanessa Weenink.
The concept even has a name – a citizens’ assembly. It sits under a broader political science idea known as deliberative democracy (our current system is a representative democracy).
Randomly selected people would make decisions as a group. The issue could be very local or take on more precarious national questions, like the superannuation age.
One panelist at the forum was Mika Hervel, a winner of the Rod Oram Memorial Essay Prize. He envisaged the process playing out a bit like a jury.
Citizens assembly proponent Mika Hervel. Phil Smith
“A group of randomly selected people, demographically representative of the population as a whole, are brought together, typically to discuss a particular issue,” Hervel explained.
“This group of people is then provided with experts who they can question, stakeholders who they can hear from. They’re provided with information about budgets and costs and benefits, scientific information, modelling… and given time to deliberate.
“This then leads to recommendations often, or decisions that are passed on to be implemented by officials or to be operationalised.”
Of course, Parliament already has built-in ways for people to participate between elections – through petitions, select committees, through contacting MPs – even via protest.
Hervel says these form a solid foundation for public engagement, but deliberative democracy could help address some of the limitations critics often point to in the select-committee process.
He argues that the current engagement is self-selecting, which can mean hearing from the usual suspects again and again, and that MPs rejecting one’s ideas can be disenfranchising.
Others might respond that the current system of self-selected feedback to select committees ensures that subject experts and those most likely to be impacted are also the most likely to feed into the issue.
“Deliberative democracy seeks to engage ordinary people, including those often forgotten by politics and decision-making, which I would suggest energises and connects people to the issues happening that directly affect them,” says Hervel. “[It] helps them see how they are affected and empowers them to be involved in looking for solutions.”
Fellow panelist Max Rashbrooke suggests that 100 people, representative of New Zealand demographically, would likely reach similar conclusions to the whole country, if everyone could fit in a room together.
Constitutional law expert Andrew Butler sees it as an innovative way to improve participation. He described a democratic fatigue – that political parties are not functioning as forums for deliberation in the way they might have in the past, when membership was larger.
“Most people get into politics through political parties – good people who go and put [their] heads above the parapet – because they actually want to make a difference,” says Butler. “They want to help debates, but there is something about the way in which the ecosystem works, which makes that difficult to achieve.”
Butler sees deliberative democracy as complementing select committees.
“Supplementing the work that is done [in Parliament would draw] people in to want to participate on issues that are important.
“What all of the studies emphasise is the importance of framing the issue, getting the right people in the room facilitating the conversation – probably the hardest aspect of the exercise – but well-facilitated deliberative democracy adds to the sense of democracy and… to democracy’s legitimacy.
“One of the points about our democracy is to try and achieve a level of acceptance of decisions, not the ones you agree with – that’s easy. The point of democracy is to find acceptance of those very things you do not agree with.”
While the idea of citizens’ assemblies raised its head repeatedly at the forum and most agreed it could be very useful for local issues, not everyone saw it as a solution for national decision-making, with criticism coming from other speakers, in Q&As and informally.
While proponents argued that democratic engagement is flagging, public submissions to select committees have grown by orders of magnitude over recent Parliaments, repeatedly breaking records and showing participation is in fact improving.
Some participants and attendees pointed out constitutional and process issues, while others saw citizens assemblies as hopelessly naïve – and that disagreement is not a product of politics but exists in any group of people facing a significant issue.
Some argued that the idea discounted the value of expertise and experience, factors they believed were crucial for solving complex national issues. Arguing that assemblies were not a salve to discord, one attendee noted that, in international experience, the randomly chosen participants had received threats (as politicians also do), which mirrored, rather than removed the emotion and discord of traditional politics.
Listen to the audio version of this story by clicking the link near the top of the page.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
