The Citizens' Chamber in the Canton of Vaud

Full Transcript:

INTRODUCTION: 

I am Stephan Kyburz and this is the Rules of the Game podcast. On my podcast I want to question and compare existing democratic rules, but also discuss alternative institutional frameworks. The rules of the game, our political institutions are never final, they are never set in stone. We actually should explore and be open to diverse institutional structures.

One common concern with democracy that I – at least to some degree – share is that our parliaments do not represent the citizens all too well, and hence do not find the optimal solutions for the society as a whole. To a large extent, this depends on the size of assemblies, on the electoral system used, how we regulate money in electoral politics and whether the people can veto legislation passed by parliaments.

One possibility to modify our democratic systems is to apply more random mechanisms, where they are suitable, and where we fear that processes are biased. Random mechanisms are already in use: for instance, in the Federal Administrative Court in Switzerland, legal cases are randomly allocated to the various judges to avoid partiality. Or in some elections, when two candidates receive the equal amount of votes, a coin is tossed to determine the winner. Yet, a random mechanism could also be used to select the members of an assembly, of a chamber of parliament.

With Rodan Bury and Charly Pache, I discuss their proposition to inaugurate a Citizens’ Chamber in the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland. The idea of the Citizens’ Chamber is to complement the existing unicameral parliament with topic-specific citizens’ assemblies, for which members are selected by sortition.

To be precise, rather than being a permanent chamber of the same citizens, the proposed Citizens’ Chamber consists of a number of citizens’ assemblies that would convene for several months to deliberate and legislate on specific political issues. The goal of the Citizens’ Chamber is to enable citizens to directly participate in legislative processes, to deal with controversial topics, to include the many different perspectives of citizens, while most day-to-day political negotiations would still be dealt with by the elected parliament. It would thus be a complement both to representative and direct democratic institutions.

Important to mention is that sovereignty would still lie with the people that have the possibility to veto the legislation crafted by the citizens’ chamber through a referendum.

Rodan and Charly are part of a committee that tries to institutionalize the Citizens’ Chamber through a popular initiative to be approved at the ballot box by a popular vote, as it asks for a change of the cantonal constitution. The initiative was submitted to the government of the Canton of Vaud a few months ago. The State Council that reviews initiatives rejected the proposal however, arguing that the proposition clashes with regulations in the federal constitution. The initiative committee appealed to the decision, and so currently Rodan and Charly are awaiting a decision on their appeal by the responsible court.

In case you’d like to read the entire proposition, I link to it in the show notes.

Rodan and Charly are part of a group of political activists that attempt to change political processes in the Canton of Vaud to more directly involve citizens in the legislative process and adjust the balance of power.

Rodan Bury works as an occupational therapist, and he is the coordinator of the initiative of the Citizens’ Chamber and is passionate about community and bottom-up democratic approaches. He is trained to facilitate and coordinate citizens’ assemblies, and a public speaker and advocate for democracy.

Charly Pache holds a degree in management information technology and a master’s degree in innovation and entrepreneurship. He has worked on numerous prospective projects involving organizational elements of tomorrow’s society. The way of working is one of them. He is also involved with participatory democracy and self-empowering, equal opportunities and diversity.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirty-third episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. Please send any feedback to rulesofthegame.ddi@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to do me a favor, please give it a 5-star rating. If you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog.

Without further ado, this is my first ever discussion on the Rules of the Game podcast with two guests. This is my conversation with Rodan Bury and Charly Pache.

DISCUSSION

Stephan Kyburz: Rodan Bury and Charly Pache, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show. So the first question as always is, what are your first memories of democracy? And Rodan, I give you the floor first.

Rodan Bury: My first strong memory of democracy was when I turned 18 and I voted for the first time and I went to the official place in the town to vote and then watch the results. And turned out that there were, there were four votes and one thing passed that was along what I voted and most others were like, really opposed to my ideas. And yeah, that was an interesting moment and also I felt a bit of a clash as the first experience.

Stephan Kyburz: So because three of four that you kind of were in favor were essentially rejected or not according to your wishes.

Rodan Bury: Yes. First experience.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly. And Charlie, what is your first memory of democracy?

Charly Pache: My first memory of democracy is also about a votation, but I couldn’t vote at the time. I was 16, it was 1992 and it was the time when Switzerland voted about joining or not joining the European Union. And we decided no. And I was not really interested, not at all interested in politics at the time. But I remember very well the tension in the society, it was kind of electrical. They were like for the climate nowadays, a lot of young people going out in the streets to be in favor of joining the EU. And then I remember those who were against it, they didn’t dare to talk a lot of publicly. But at the end, they decided that, to not join the European Union. And I think this was one of the most striking votation for me because it moved a lot of people in their heart in their motivation to do something. And I don’t know if you remember maybe but after the votation, some municipalities in Switzerland displayed in front of the cities and like the road signs, they displayed the European Union flag with the stars to show that their population wanted to join. So it was really a big, big issue in Switzerland at the time. And this is my first strong memory about it, but I couldn’t vote. And what is funny, because I got the right to vote with 19 because I was 19 when they changed the system from 20 to 18. So I was in the middle.

Stephan Kyburz: Oh okay, okay. I see. Yeah. Also that 1992 vote was very important for Switzerland to join the… it was actually to join the European Economic Area, right? Which is not exactly the European Union, but it’s very close. It’s like the solution that Norway has chosen. And yeah, that was a big fight in Switzerland, of course, because it was an important decision and eventually rejected. And that’s why later on we had all these bilateral treaties, right? Which were kind of a substitute but not exactly the same. So today, we’d like to talk about the Citizens Chamber of the Canton of Vaud. And this is a project that you’re both very much involved with. And essentially the idea is to have a citizens chamber next to the Parliament in the Canton. And this should be like a second chamber that is based on sortition. So people are not elected by the people, but they are randomly selected to represent the people. Now, let’s start with the motivation for the project before we go into the details, what this Citizens Chamber would look like. And also later on what is kind of the current stage of the project and what is, what are the developments? So there’s a lot to say about it. But first, I’d like to know, you know, what were your motivations to join this project? And then to really invest a lot of time into working out a new kind of institution for the Canton of Vaud. Rodan do you want to start with your motivation?

Rodan Bury: Yes, motivation. So a lot of people who are, especially from countries who view Switzerland as a very democratic country and there’s an issue with it. Several of them, but one key issue with this is how it’s been evolving for the past 20 years. And it’s been actually less and less of a democracy because there has been very little measures that has been taken to prevent the growing influence of lobbies and the power of money that is used inside this system. So there’s two ways like this for elected people, there’s a lot of money that is and more and more growing the amount of money that is used to influence the elected people’s point of view and decisions. And when the population is going to vote on a specific topic, then in the campaigns, there’s also a lot of money involved in the campaigns. And this has a huge effect on the outcome, on the debate and in people’s point of view. So this is one issue and another is like, yeah, this, we vote often on different things and many people don’t have a lot of opportunity to actually discuss in depth, what is it that we are going to vote on and what are the different options. And when we vote, it’s just yes or no, it’s just, it’s a predetermined question that has not been made by the people actually. And even though we could say, like the population can create a vote by setting up a question, just like what we are actually trying to do with AG!SSONS, we also realize by doing it ourselves that it takes a lot of resources, a lot of connections, a lot of money and time, dedication to actually do this. It’s also quite interesting to hear what some of our politicians that are in favor of the current system, what they say about this. And there was recently also the president of Switzerland who said that yes, the population has been given some rights and some power but not too much because like people who are elected also need to keep a lot of power and they do not want to give up too much power to the population and they have good limitations to the tools that are given to the population. And this is something that the people in favor of the current situation in Switzerland are also saying that it’s been made to give to some extent power to the population but not too much. And there are a lot of limitations and this is something we want to work on right now.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting that you say, because Switzerland is actually the country where people have way more power than in many other countries, right? So with the referendum and initiative, there are strong instruments for people to have a say. But of course, there’s always the question, how do you apply those instruments? And I agree, also that, you know, money in politics, I think we should put a lot of emphasis on it. We should understand it. How the lobbies work, how parties are financed. And I think we could do a lot more to bring more transparency. I think the transparency issue is important. I would favor that we would know more about who is financing the political parties and also the lobbying work that should be really well understood. Charlie, what was your motivation to join this project for the Citizens Chamber?

Charly Pache: Yeah, this project has a really interesting approach. Like to set up something parallel to the current parliament. So it’s something new and we are always open to improve democracy in Switzerland, we should at least and we are open to involve cities. And I think it’s quite symbolic also because it’s going back to the roots of this project. It’s like we did democracy at the beginning somehow. And the current political system went into a direction where it doesn’t give equal chances to access political offices for everyone and it ends by a lack of diversity. If you look at the politicians, they have kind of different backgrounds, but they don’t represent all the different backgrounds. I read once in the newspaper and I was shocked, like there are about one million people in Switzerland living in the… under the poverty line, but no one of those people, it’s one million out of nine, is sitting in parliament. So it’s proven in the scientific literature, in political sciences that the background of the politician makes a difference in the decisions he takes, he makes and also in the perception of the reality he has, what is important, what is not. So it’s important in the political system, in a democracy to have a broad diversity of people. And election doesn’t bring this. This is the fact. Then nowadays we realize also that there is a lack of a separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches and these checks and balances doesn’t work that well anymore. We could see that quite well and especially also the media is kind of power and maybe you don’t have this problem in the Swiss German part but in the French speaking part, the media is no more a counterbalance of the powers in place. And all this makes difficult for new ideas to emerge and for real debate about democratic ideas to emerge. And we will talk about it probably later how the authorities welcomed our project. And I think it shows a lot that people in place, they don’t want to change too much because they don’t want to give the power to others and they want to keep it for themselves. That’s it. And we have tools like initiative referendums, but like Rodan said, it’s limited to those who have the money, the time and the resources to do it. And AG!SSONS makes also other initiatives to try to improve the access to democracy because from outside it’s beautiful and easy but when you do it yourself, you start to realize, wow, it’s a lot of job.

Stephan Kyburz: Mhm. Yeah, it takes a lot of resources to build up enough power to actually bring about an initiative, right? And I think what I like about your idea, you know about the Citizens Chamber is really that it could be another check on parliament. You know, if you think that Parliament can be influenced by money or maybe this, the representatives are not really very well representing the people, even though I think at the cantonal level, for example, I think representation is not that bad because you have all the different parties, you have… It’s also a political problem that some people are just more conservative and some are more progressive. So I think we can leave that aside for now. But I think the idea is interesting because it could be like another chamber that also discusses those suggestions. And I think your project in a way is quite ambitious. If I had maybe kind of designed it, I would have made it a little bit less ambitious. But tell me first, what are kind of the pillars of your suggestion of the Citizens’ Chamber of Vaud? And there is a lot of elements to it. So maybe just focus on the main elements for now. Maybe Rodan do you want to briefly stake out what your suggestion look like?

Rodan Bury: Yes. And maybe also coming back to the intentions with it, one intention that came quite clear to us when we were choosing different possibilities, we wanted to have something that is quite the ideal end result of a legislative Citizens Chamber of something that is using sortition that really we would like on the long term to have it established. So we wanted also not only to just make the next step that we could potentially do easily because we saw that in the region, there was already citizens assemblies taking place and some of the recommendations being carried by the governments and some not. But there was progress going on. And still, yeah, in the movement, there was also people who were criticizing this or what would it look like. And then the next steps, if we would go really further and it’s not just a consultative thing that it’s really, it really has power and what it looks like. So this is what we wanted to do. We take a big, quite a big step to envision and clarify. OK. What’s our long term vision? A model where average people have a say in the legislative process. So key figure, key elements of that is that for each topic, this Citizens Chamber will be established and there will be 200 people randomly selected in the population of the Canton of Vaud with different criterias like income and level of education, gender, age, et cetera. It could also include some criterias about the topics just to make sure that the sample is not overly biased or overly influenced and their opinions on the topic that we’re going to discuss. Yeah. And then this several months process of getting people informed on the topic, starting to discuss the issue, making some proposals, then refining them with the support of lawyers, refining them with the comments from the population and from the authorities and all that. And then the Citizens Chamber itself takes the final decisions on what are going to be the new laws and they vote with a 75% threshold to pass a law. And then the idea is that it’s final. That was the original idea with Marcin Gerwin’s design, actually that we are using. We work a lot with Polish expert Marcin Gerwin, who really did the design for the Citizens Chamber. And the original idea is that every law made by the Citizens’ Chamber will be final. And it’s a sort of a stand-alone institution. And we already started to make some compromise with that to try and make it a bit easier to accept for the local authorities. So the elected parliament could also have a final say that if they vote with 75% the idea to refuse or modify a law that is suggested by the citizens chamber, then they could sign it, but they have to gather also a very strong majority.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, so quickly just to clarify. So the Citizens Assembly or the Citizens Chamber, which is established for a certain period of time, right? They would work out a law, they would deliberate on different suggestions and work out a law with the help of lawyers and other experts in the field, right? And they would propose the law. And then you have this threshold 75%. Why did you pick such a high threshold? Was there a reason?

Rodan Bury: That’s usually how it’s done in citizens assemblies, people really are able to decide with a very large common agreement. Sometimes it’s unanimous and sometimes it’s like 80% threshold or something similar. So it’s because people really take a lot of time to discuss within themselves to negotiate and discuss all their proposals and hear different perspectives. And so in the end, when they formulate the proposal themselves, after all this process, then they are really able to come together with their views and needs. It might seem a high threshold but actually for the citizens assemblies, it’s something that is proven to work really well.

Charly Pache: I would say for citizen assemblies, it’s quite low in fact because there is a different mentality in the assembly. I had this experience because I did also work for a project called Demoscan in Sion, in Switzerland. It was a Citizen Initiative review. And once we, in parallel, in this region, there was an assembly to rewrite the constitution. But this assembly was made mainly of politicians. And once the president of this constitutional assembly came to our small citizen assembly. And she was amazed how the mentality was different because our people, the citizens from the citizen assembly, they didn’t talk loud, they didn’t argue, they really… The mentality was collaboration. But in her assembly, constitutional assembly with politicians, it was more a competitive way, the usual way you do in politics. And at the end, when they vote about what they decide in our assembly, they had to write a text. They had, it was one A4 page, it was about a votation and the vote was unanimous. They agree because the process allowed them to agree about the text they wanted to write. But when you have a standard elected politician assembly, you always add other pressures and you want to show that you are better than the other one. And so that’s why the threshold is totally different in a classical election system than in a citizen assembly system where more time is taken to agree about things. And at the beginning, it’s very important, one citizen that goes to a citizen assembly or a citizen chamber, he doesn’t represent himself or a political party. He is going there for the good of the society somehow. So it’s totally a different mentality and totally a different approach that makes politics really, that makes it better and accessible for everyone. Because I heard many people don’t want to do politics to get involved into politics because of this competition, they don’t like it. And citizens’ chambers or assemblies, it opens for all the people, all the people are welcome because there is a very good process that goes along it, that allows us to do it in a nice way somehow.

Stephan Kyburz: In citizens’ assemblies often what is worked on are proposals or suggestions that are a bit more general than a specific law. So in politics, obviously, this is a… Parliament is a legislator, it needs to really work on the specific details of a law. And also of course, there are political trade offs, right? Redistribution of, you know, how much personal freedoms you want to give or how much do you want to restrict people? And those political problems also have to be resolved at some point. And do you think if a citizens’ chamber that you suggest is really able to work out the details of laws? Because I think citizens’ Assembly so far have often been used a bit more at a higher level, more at the meta level, suggest proposals to the government which are maybe a little bit easier to work out. What is your opinion there? Because I feel politicians also have a lot of experience in bargaining and also working on details of laws, which is, I think also needs some skills, right? How do you imagine the citizens that are randomly selected, working on laws directly?

Rodan Bury: I want to say also something about how it works with politicians actually. Because politicians, they are also very very supported by teams of lawyers inside their own political party and also inside the parliament. So it’s not really fair to say that they have all this so much skill and ability to work on laws by themselves. They are supported by lawyers, really a lot. So… but coming back to citizens assemblies, there’s also experiments that have shown that it works. It’s true that most citizens assemblies that have been done so far were quite short in duration. And so… And maybe also the scope of the question might have been quite large. So of course, then with this, it’s quite difficult in a short amount of time to come up with something that is so precise and detailed. However, it’s been shown that it’s also possible because for example, in the french Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat, the French Citizens Assemblies on climate change, it was a nine month process with seven weekends of three days weekends, actually. So that was 21 days. It’s actually quite a lot. Much more than what is usually done in citizens assemblies. And in this case, they also had a team of lawyers that were supporting them to write the legal text at the end. And so the final report was very, very detailed in the, in what they were suggesting and laws were already drafted. So this is just one example, it shows that it’s actually possible.

Stephan Kyburz: Charly, what’s your opinion on that?

Charly Pache: Yeah, I agree with Rodan. You have also the Citizen Initiative Review that comes from Oregan and then it was tried also in Switzerland. When it focuses on a specific votation, it means low, and the citizen that take part in those assemblies, they focus on those, this small text and they listen to the people in favor, they listen to the people against it, they listen to different experts and then they are able to understand the background of the issue and to also find the arguments against, in favor and sure they will not have the skills themselves. But like Rodan said, politicians, it’s a little bit overrated to think they can do everything by themselves. They are supported by also teams of legal teams and other experts. But in the way, in this way of citizen assemblies, you can somehow ensure that there is a diversity of experts that are called because nowadays in the Swiss parliament, I don’t know for others, but the work of writing the laws happens in commissions, it means also 20 people from different political parties. And it’s not transparent. We don’t know who brings which part of the law. We don’t know what is discussed about the law. So there is no transparency. I think that the system that we provide with the Citizen Chamber, improve the transparency, improve the process of making laws. And that’s a huge step.

Stephan Kyburz: And would you be worried that those, you know, legal experts, you mentioned a legal bureau, so it’s kind of an office that would legally support the citizen assemblies. And also the experts. Are you worried that those have too much power or that they would try to kind of influence people? And also how would they be selected? Would they be selected by the chamber itself or what is the process?

Rodan Bury: So in this design, there’s an additional concept that is permanent and that is also randomly selected and that members are rotated every one year and a half. It’s called Citizen Senate. And the Senate has a possibility not only to suggest four topics a year for the Citizens Chamber, but also has the duty to select the director of the legal Bureau and the director of the office that is coordinating all these Citizens Assemblies, Citizens’ chamber processes. So in the end these experts and these people that are supporting all this process, they are also controlled by randomly selected people. So that’s one check that we have for that. Another is actually the lawyers cannot have too much influence on the outcome because it’s the citizens who decide their intention and what they ask of them. So they decide on the recommendation and what should be in it. And then the lawyers just do the task of rephrasing into laws and knowing all the complicated things that we have to take into account when writing the law and just make sure it complies with the legal system and all that technical thing, but it’s not the content that they’re creating really. And then the citizens Chamber in the end also has the final say, if they feel that this is really what has been written really represents the intention or not, they can still say and they can still change it and say, hey, no, our intention is for something different. So please redo it. This is really still in the power of the people.

Charly Pache: It was all designed, the expert that helped us for the project, Marcin Gerwin is really experienced. There are hundreds of similar experiences already happening around the world and now there is a kind of list of best practices about how to choose. In fact, it’s about the process being neutral, the most neutral process possible. In fact, for some citizen assemblies like the one I told you before the Citizen Initiative review, it’s both sides of the vote. They have a right to veto the process. If they notice there is a… process is no more neutral, could be the facilitator that helped one side or they can veto the process and the process is stopped. So there are many, many tools that are designed in those chambers that help to have a better, a better function in the system. And the fact is that in those designs, we reach better quality, we lower the risk to have problems than in the actual parliamentary system those designs they are not implemented. We do still the laws like we did 100 years ago and there is a lot of improvement, possible improvement. And I think our hope also is to show that there is something else that we can design in another way and maybe that the actual politicians, political parties, they try to use those tools also to make better policy making.

Stephan Kyburz: So just to summarize quickly for the audience to understand. So essentially you would have a citizens chamber or several chambers that are topic specific, so that citizens would really work on a specific issue for a certain period of time, like a few months, I guess, or maybe a year. And then you have the Citizens Senate which would be a bit more permanent and kind of like a supervising body that would appoint some of the agencies use or the Standards and Procedure Council, I can just point it out and the Legal Bureau, they would, the Citizens Senate would essentially appoint certain roles. So my question now is why didn’t you go for a permanent Citizens Chamber that would really be just like another parliamentary chamber? That would, for example, the randomly selected citizens would be part of that chamber for four years or five years and that would be like a symmetric chamber with the normal parliament. You did it kind of in an asymmetric way, right? That the citizens chamber really has almost more power than parliament. What were kind of your thoughts on this? How do you want to balance the citizens chamber and the normal parliament?

Rodan Bury: Yeah, the intention, why we do not want to really like replace fully the parliament with the citizen chamber that will be permanent. There are several reasons for that. One is that the topic specific thing is really important. It’s really important that people don’t take decisions about everything at the same time because otherwise they can’t have the focus and the understanding of the topic. And this is one of the key things that we lack and also if it’s a permanent body, then it will need to have rotating members quite regularly anyway. And the thing is our elected parliament is working quite well on many issues that we are not really aware of because to us, they’re not so important. Many times they’re just doing the legal official procedures just to have something that is very consensual, that is just being done. So, a permit to transform some place and the territory or to build something or just, I don’t know, to give money to the school system or to build a new school somewhere that we just need all this and that, and like most of the time, I mean, in statistics of what they’re doing most of the time, it’s working quite well. And the thing is there are some very specific issues that are very controversial and very difficult to deal with inside this elected system. And so it’s on this specific thing that we want to have a proper way to address those difficult topics that then we can hear people from the different views of this population and gather and listen to each other. That’s the main thing. And also I will disagree that the idea that it has more power than the elected parliament or citizens chamber has this limitation that they can only have so many topics to deal with every year. So most of this decision will still be made by the elected parliament.

Stephan Kyburz: So it’s more like complimentary, right?

Rodan Bury: Yeah, for me, it’s more complimentary between controversial decisions so that we have a new way to deal with controversial decisions and the very usual system that works with situations that are more consensual already.

Stephan Kyburz: Charlie. What do you think about this co-work of parliament and the Citizens Chamber? How do you see that complementing each other?

Charly Pache: Rodan said it very well. There are issues that normal parliament can handle very easily and in a good way. But in our democracy, we are still missing, for those controversial topics, we are still missing more public debate over this and this is a way to involve the population. And I think, make a citizen parliament permanent for the people, it wouldn’t be so easy because if it’s focused on one topic, it takes less time and maybe you can handle some days for a small while, but it’s a different position to go tell your boss that you go for four years to do politics. So I think this approach is really in the middle way and it’s very good to have one chamber as a citizen chamber for one topic. This is really good and don’t forget that nowadays one problem of the politicians is that they are overloaded with questions and things to handle. So it’s better to not copy this mistake and to choose a way where we have different people. Also, it allows more people to get involved in those processes. This is also a way of democracy to involve people. So I think to have different chambers for different topics, it’s a very good way.

Stephan Kyburz: So if I understand you correctly, it’s almost like strengthening the initiative process, right? That is very common in Switzerland. So people can actually start an initiative but what the Citizen Chamber would do is to really deliberate those controversial topics and maybe new topics that are more easily, you kind of want to lower the threshold that controversial topics can be really seriously deliberated on right?

Charly Pache: In a more open way and maybe we can talk about it because now even this initiative was kind of blocked by the executive power. And if we would have a citizen chamber, it would be totally otherwise.

Stephan Kyburz: So that’s interesting, right? So you really submitted the initiative to the state parliament and they had to review the initiative whether it’s any contradictions with superior law. So can you briefly outline what were the reasons why it was rejected in the end? And what is the current state?

Rodan Bury: Yes. So it’s the Council of State that has the power to review this initiative, every initiative is submitted in the Canton of Vaud so it’s also their legal bureau doing all the work to actually check if it’s compatible with laws or not. And they raise a doubt that it will be compatible with the Federal Constitution. And so since our initiative wants to change the Cantonal Constitution to create a new legislative body, the citizens chamber, then it’s ok. It will be compatible with the Cantonal Constitution because that’s what we are going to change. That’s ok. But it also has to be compatible with the Federal Constitution. And this is where we have the current argument. The authorities are saying that in reference to article 51 of the Federal Constitution that it’s not compatible. And this article says really, it’s very short, it only says that every Cantonal Constitution needs to be democratic and that’s it, it doesn’t say what makes it democratic or not. And a common understanding of that is that a democracy means elections. And so their understanding is that this citizens chamber should be elected or this parliament should be elected in order to be compatible with the law. And we are arguing that randomly selected people is also a legitimate democratic way of doing this.

Stephan Kyburz: So you appealed to the decision and you’re essentially saying we still have parliament that is elected. It’s just an additional body or additional political institution essentially.

Rodan Bury: Yes, exactly. We are, that’s very much the key argument here because indeed the need to have an elected parliament is still enforced in our proposal. So we don’t change that. We just create something additional with a randomly selected chamber. And we appeal to the Constitutional Court of the Canton of Vaud. And now we have finished all the exchange of point of view and we see when a decision is taken, we don’t know yet.

Stephan Kyburz: And when do you expect more or less?

Rodan Bury: We have no idea when, it should be in a few months. We’ve been told that this process is fairly quick, but we really have no timeline that has been given us.

Stephan Kyburz: And are you thinking about changing the proposal and trying again or would you say, okay it’s impossible to change the system?

Rodan Bury: We definitely have different ideas. As I mentioned earlier, this goal, this idea of a citizens chamber, for us was also really to try and aim as far as we can and then see what are the current obstacles to it. And so what are the intermediate steps we might need to take before we can actually have this chamber. So yes, we are thinking of all the initiatives or all the proposals that are a bit less ambitious, but also that are key elements to build up on in order to reach that goal. But it hasn’t been decided yet. And we are still also waiting for the outcome of the Constitutional Court.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, but I guess you have expected a hard battle, right?

Rodan Bury: Oh yes.

Charly Pache: What is funny is that sortition or to select randomly candidates, it can happen, it happens already in the current system. So sortition or randomly selecting, for example, when two candidates have the same amount of votes, they choose randomly who will be elected and who will not be elected, you know. And there are other examples that are existing in the current system where they use also randomly selection. And so I don’t think they can rig the system that way. But we will see. And Rodan told me that in Basel in the Canton of Basel, there is also a similar initiative going on. So my hope is that it will emerge in many places with different also cantonal constitutions and it will have different effects. And at the end, I hope that one will work and make the way for the other cantons to accept this way.

Rodan Bury: Yes. And we can also say that in East Belgium, there is a citizens’ dialogue that is permanent. Citizens’ dialogue it’s also really interesting. It’s not as strong as the design that we have for the Citizens Chamber but it is still a permanent body and still has like three topics a year that randomly selected people can discuss and there’s also a permanent body that obviously how their recommendations are being implemented by the elected parliament. And so this is also quite an interesting design. And one thing that is also quite relevant there is that the regulations and the laws for this citizens’ dialogue to be set up has been written by parliaments themselves. So it can also evolve in that way, I think. And there’s different pathways that are currently being explored and currently emerging in different places.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. So I think the way I would like to see some experimentation is with it currently, we have a parliament that works out the law, right? And tries to figure out what law finds a majority. And then if enough people are opposed to the law, then there will be a referendum, right? People can collect signatures and put the law to a referendum. And then if too many people disagree, it will, the law will be rejected. And I think there is where I can see a citizen chamber coming in. And you know, if the citizens chamber would really review the laws and discuss them as well and reject certain things working with the parliament. So if it would be two symmetric chambers, essentially, both have to agree to the laws and that would reduce the likelihood of a referendum, I think. Because maybe some issues in the law would be rejected by the citizens chamber and lower the possibility of a referendum.

Rodan Bury: That’s one possible design, yes. There are several possibilities now and we really have to make some experiments. I think there’s people who would rather advocate that every recommendations out of assemblies, they will all go through a popular vote and see what the populations agrees on or not. That’s one possibility that has been also advocated by Dimitry Courant and it also has its drawbacks. But it’s a possibility. Or this, the idea of institutionalizing this as citizens incentive review or Demoscan and the idea that everything that is going to be voted by the population can be pre discussed by randomly selected people. And then this information will be distributed to the population that will be made by randomly selected people so it’s a more natural way to inform.

Stephan Kyburz: Like the pros and cons of the proposal, right?

Rodan Bury: Yes, there’s many different designs and I think we, there’s a lot of room to experiment and see what works.

Stephan Kyburz: For the audience, you know, people who want to read more on your proposal or maybe some books or articles that you want to recommend. Do you have anything to suggest that people could read?

Rodan Bury: Of course, there’s the design made by Marcin Gerwin that can be found on the bluedemocracy.pl website. It’s a very good website for in depth information about citizens assemblies and also the Citizens Chamber. And I would also like to recommend this book Legislator by Lot and it has been written by many experts. It’s a very good book. Also, the two main editors were John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright and editions is The Real Utopias project. Maybe the last one is the book of David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections. It’s also very easy to read and a good introduction to citizens assemblies and what are the key challenges right now in our democracies. It’s very well written and easy to read.

Stephan Kyburz: Thank you, Charlie. Do you have books or articles to recommend?

Charly Pache: I think to start with the question, there is a network of people who did a beautiful website which is called beyondelections.global, beyondelections.global, it’s in many languages and it introduces people to the topic of Citizen Assembly, sortitions versus elections. And this is a very good way to start with. And then there is this network of organizations that are doing citizens assembly worldwide, which is called democracyrd.org, democracyrd.org. And there you can find as well new resources and probably find out which organization do such things close to your country or in your country.

Stephan Kyburz: Great. Thanks a lot for those suggestions and I’ll include them in the show notes. Thanks a lot for joining the discussion on the Rules of the Game podcast. Rodan and Charlie, it was very interesting to hear your thoughts and to hear about your project and the initiative. And yeah, I’m very curious to know how it further develops and also what other citizens’ chambers proposals we may see in Switzerland or elsewhere. Thanks a lot for taking the time.

Charly Pache: Thanks for the opportunity and thanks for helping the trend to grow.

Rodan Bury: Yeah, thanks a lot Stephan.

Outro:

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