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France’s Convention for the Climate, held from 2019 to 2020, brought
together 150 randomly selected citizens and asked them define measures
to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030
compared to 1990. Katrin Baumann/CCC
<https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/convcit-Dossierdepresse_EN.pdf>
*Citizen assemblies and the challenges of democratic equality *
Published: December 5, 2022 3.08am GMT
// // Annabelle Lever, /Sciences Po / <#>
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1. Annabelle Lever
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Sciences Po
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There are a wide range of ways to create decision-making bodies in
democratic societies. Elections are one of the most common, with
individuals stepping forward and seeking public support. If elected by
their fellow citizens, they then take action on their behalf. This is
known as representative democracy <https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/representative-democracy/43508#>.
An alternative form is direct democracy <https://www.britannica.com/topic/direct-democracy>, which involves all
citizens voting on proposed government policies or legislation.
af Another form that’s growing in popularity are citizens’ assemblies –
decision-making bodies created by random selection. While less
widespread, they’re creating a sense of optimism about democracy among
those who have heard about or taken part in them, as well as organisations such as the OECD <https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/innovative-citizen-participation-and-new-democratic-institutions_056573fa-en#page1>. Randomisation – also known as sortition <https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/> – holds out the possibility that
everyone can have an equal chance of being selected; politically, it
offers the hope of consensus because partisan engagements are not a
prerequisite for participation. Randomisation also promises an assembly
where diversity of experience and opinions promotes critical reflection
and reasoned judgement, as with criminal juries <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0032329218789892>.
Citizens’ assemblies can be asked to weigh in on major challenges to
society – for example, France’s Convention for the Climate <https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/> and the UK’s Climate Assembly <https://www.climateassembly.uk/>, both held from 2019-2020, brought
together hundreds of people together and asked them define measures that
will allow to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an equitable manner.
Other such bodies included the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit <https://citizensassembly.co.uk/brexit/about/> (2017) and Germany’s Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy <https://participedia.net/case/5806>. Ireland even has a standing Citizens’ Assembly <https://participedia.net/organization/5796>, established in 2016.
Reflecting society as a whole
Creating a citizens’ assembly that truly reflects society as a whole
isn’t so simple, however. In particular, only a very small percentage of
those invited to participate actually agree to do so. According to a 2017 study <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313447022_Explaining_non-participation_in_deliberative_mini-publics> published /European Journal of Political Research/, the precise percentage depends on how large, complex and time-consuming the process is likely to be. It ranges from 4% for larger, more onerous assemblies to 30% in a couple of exceptional cases, and averaging out at 15% across all countries and all forms of assembly. As a consequence, the formal equality of opportunity that unweighted lotteries promise tends to result in assemblies skewed to the socially advantaged, the partisan, and those most confident in their practical and cognitive abilities, whatever the reality.
To create an assembly that is more descriptively representative of the
population – or one that looks more like us – several approaches are used <https://www.oecd.org/gov/innovative-citizen-participation-and-new-democratic-institutions-339306da-en.htm>. One is to have an initial phase of unweighted selection followed by a second phase that uses weighted lotteries. Another is to use stratified sampling or forms of stratification from the beginning.
For the Climate Assembly UK, organisers sent out 20% of its 30,000
letters of invitation to people randomly selected from the lowest-income
postcodes, and then used random stratified sampling by computer to select 110 participants from all the people who were over 16 and free on the relevant dates <https://www.climateassembly.uk/detail/recruitment/index.html>.
Because citizen assemblies are very small compared to the population as
a whole – France’s Convention for the Climate was made up of just 150
people – the descriptively representative character of the assembly can
occur on only a few dimensions. Organisers must therefore decide what
population characteristics the assembly should embody and in what
proportion. Randomisation thus does not preclude difficult moral,
political and scientific choices about the assembly to be constructed,
any more than it precludes voluntariness or self-selection.
<https://images.theconversation.com/files/497189/original/file-20221124-15-fdtm9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip>
The Convention for the Climate was made up of 150 French citizens from
all walks of life. Katrin Baumann/CCC <https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/convcit-Dossierdepresse_EN.pdf>
The use of weighted lotteries <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/707212> means that
individuals will /not/ have a formally equal chance to be selected to it
– nor, of course, a substantively equal one. Assemblies created by stratified random selection <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/stratified_random_sampling.asp>
offer a much wider set of opportunities to serve than is typical of
other deliberative bodies. It is thus important to remember that even
when a randomly selected assembly “looks like usâ€, everyone will not
have had the same chance to be selected to it, nor to take up the
invitation if they want to.
Making the debate truly open
The most egalitarian element of citizen assemblies, then, may lie in
their commitment to deliberative equality <https://delibdemjournal.org/article/525/galley/4532/view/> among
participants, rather than in the social profiles of their members. That
commitment means that organisers ensure that all members get to share
the same high-quality, impartial information. Otherwise, it would be
difficult for assembly members who have limited knowledge about the
topic of deliberation to discuss as equals with those who are already
well informed (or convinced that they are).
Assemblies also use facilitators to ensure that all members feel free to
contribute, that some don’t dominate the discussion or intimidate
others, intentionally or otherwise. The importance of facilitation to
good deliberation is brought out by the experience of one facilitator <https://books.google.fr/books?hl=en&lr=&id=yXfO1gsosBgC>, who stated
“In every single citizens’ jury we have done, we’ve been thrown out –
and asked back in.â€
<https://images.theconversation.com/files/497185/original/file-20221124-20-uy40xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip>
France’s Convention for the Climate took place from October 2019 to June
2020, and involved seven sessions that helped build understanding,
defined the challenges, and reached formal conclusions. Convention for
the Climate
While the importance of having equality among participants and between
organisers, experts and participants should not be underestimated,
democratic equality does not require that deliberative bodies be
composed of social groups in proportion to their share of the population.
Trying to ensure that the membership of a small assembly matches that of
the population along lines of sex, age, level of education, professional
status, geography, means that it is impossible to match them in other
ways – for example, in terms of their different beliefs, or in terms of
the proportion of women who are farmers rather than bank managers. In
short, trying to create a microcosm of the population along certain
lines prevents the deliberative representation of the population on others.
Giving the disadvantaged a real voice
As a consequence, political philosophers who are concerned with the
adequate representation of disadvantaged social groups often suppose
that what we should be aiming for sufficient representation to ensure
that their voices, opinions and internal differences are taken seriously
in public assemblies, rather than representation in proportion to
population. As Anne Phillips puts it <https://books.google.fr/books?hl=en&lr=&id=K2A9AwAAQBAJ>:
“The underlying preoccupation is not with pictorial adequacy – does
the legislature match up to the people? – but with those
particularly urgent instances of political exclusion which a
‘fairer’ system of representation seeks to resolve.â€
For example, the over-representation is likely to be important for
groups such as the homeless, the very poor, those with limited
education, or those who suffer from chronic illness. They may be
relatively small compared to the total population, but they also suffer
from severe disadvantages that make it difficult to participate in
public deliberations, and to be heard and respected as the equal of
others. For them, adequate representation will likely require membership
that is much greater than their share of the population.
In short, such groups are likely to suffer from “cultural imperialism†<https://mrdevin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/five-faces-of-oppression.pdf>, as Iris Marion Young called it. This means that the creation of an assembly that “looks right†is insufficient. Instead, forms of assembly created specifically to maximise their opportunities to be heard may be necessary, even at the cost of underrepresenting members from more advantaged groups, such as university-educated middle-aged men, whose perspectives are likely to figure disproportionately in public discussion.
Consensus, but not at any price
It may also be desirable to rethink the practice of having a single
report with policy recommendations, rather than allowing for separate
majority and minority reports. Pressure to reach consensus can impede
deliberation, as seems to have happened with France’s Convention for the Climate <https://www.cairn.info/revue-archives-de-philosophie-du-droit-2020-1-page-399.htm>, and reinforce social and political inequalities. Understanding why citizens disagree when faced with the same evidence and arguments is, itself, a contribution to public knowledge and reflection.
Seeking consensus is important, because citizens need to know what they
can agree on in matters of public policy. But deliberators may have
important disagreements to air publicly, and these should not be a
source of shame or embarrassment, nor seen as a threat to the success of
an assembly, rather than as evidence of the complexity of the issues
with which it grappled. In short, while trained moderators are essential
to citizen assemblies – and might profitably be used in many other
deliberative fora – securing the inclusion and diversity that make
citizen assemblies so appealing, requires confronting cultural
imperialism more explicitly in future.
/
/
* Climate change <https://theconversation.com/topics/climate-change-27>
* Democracy <https://theconversation.com/topics/democracy-619>
* Europe <https://theconversation.com/topics/europe-823>
* France <https://theconversation.com/topics/france-1290>
* Equality <https://theconversation.com/topics/equality-1548>
* Direct democracy
<https://theconversation.com/topics/direct-democracy-29989>
* Sortition <https://theconversation.com/topics/sortition-91950>
* United Kingdom (UK)
<https://theconversation.com/topics/united-kingdom-uk-106478>
* The Conversation Europe
<https://theconversation.com/topics/the-conversation-europe-126932>
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