Deliberative Democracy and Citizens’ Assemblies

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss democratic institutions. 

What most people think of when they hear deliberative democracy probably are citizens’ assemblies. Deliberation is the process of thoughtfully discussing a specific topic, weighing different options, and using logic and reason to form opinions within a group, that then may lead to a decision or consensus. 

With Ian O’Flynn, I discuss various forms of deliberative democracy, from parliaments, to deliberative polls, to citizens’ juries, and the most well-known the citizens’ assemblies. Deliberative democracy was first discussed in the context of representative democracy, our parliaments. Yet, more recent concepts of deliberative democracy have been developed by political scientists that are best summarized as mini-publics. The most common characteristic of mini-publics is that participants are selected based on sortition, that is a random selection of people from the entire population. The randomly selected people then come together to deliberate and possibly make recommendations to the government. 

Ian has conducted extensive research both on deliberative and participatory democracy. He explains the various challenges and opportunities of mini-publics and how they can fit in the wider context of democracy. Mini-publics may likely further develop as an institution of modern democracies, complementing representative democracy and direct democracy.

Ian O’Flynn is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Newcastle University. He holds a PhD from Queen’s University in Belfast. His main research interests are in deliberative democracy, but he also works on compromise, power sharing and referendums. He has written several books, the most recent ones titled Deliberative Democracy and Deliberative Peace Referendums. I link to his website and to his Twitter account in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the twenty-second 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. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so just send me an email to [email protected], and please leave a review and share this episode with friends and colleagues.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Ian O’Flynn, welcome to the Rules of The Game Podcast, very happy to have you on the show.

Ian O’Flynn: It’s my pleasure. Really looking forward to talking today Stephan.

Stephan Kyburz: My first question, as always, is what is your first memory of democracy.

Ian O’Flynn: Yeah, that’s a really good question, actually. I don’t know if it’s my first memory of democracy but I guess my first real kind of pronounced or strong memory I think is probably the Belfast agreement of 1998 and the referendum around that. I mean I should say that I’m from Ireland originally. I’ve lived in the Uk for I guess over twenty years. I’m from Ireland originally and I guess my first memory of democracy might be something like the 1983 abortion referendum. I mean that was a very interesting one in Ireland. It really was, I think it was held so that in a way that social catholicism can reassert itself in Ireland. I don’t have a great memory of it. I would have been about 15, 16 at the time. I don’t have a great memory of it but I knew that something very, very important was happening. I guess my first clear memory of something very a really… kind of a really important democratic moment when I had a clear sense of what was going on was probably the Belfast agreement in the 1998 Referendum. It was passed by 90 odd percent in the south of Ireland, and by about 70% or so in Northern Ireland. I mean it was a hugely significant event because it really was a mass statement to the effect that look, we’ve had enough of this conflict, 30 years, over 3000 people dead. For democracy through a referendum. The signal. We’ve had enough. We want peace. We want power sharing. I mean this was an incredibly powerful important moment I think so it’s not my earliest memory but I think it is the one that to this day continues to stand out my mind is perhaps, certainly, the part of world of the world that I’m from probably the most significant memory that I have of democracy in action.

Stephan Kyburz: And was that significance and that power that you felt… and also that decision by the people, did that influence that you later on started studying Direct Democracy and Deliberative Democracy and also to do research? You have written a bunch of books about these topics and a lot of journal articles. So was that really the starting point of that journey?

Ian O’Flynn: Well maybe. I think it was part of it, I think. So when I left school originally I studied music. I had these ideas I want to be a musicIan and in my mid 20 s actually I went back to university and did a degree in Philosophy and that kind of morphed into an M.A. in Political Philosophy and I became particularly interested in the works of Jorgen Habermas so that’s really how I came to Deliberative Democracy. So that was around that time. Then I went to Queens in Belfast to do a PhD in Political Theory again on Deliberative Democracy. Although this time on Multiculturalism and what was interesting I remember when I was having my vivo it was that my PhD was examined by Albert Wheel, a very well-known highly respected British political theorist and he asked me at the end of all of this… So this was about 2001, 2002 so again, we’re already a couple of years past it and Albert asked me he said you know why are you writing about Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism when you live in a deeply divided society? Why aren’t you doing something around… Well Deliberate of Democracy in deeply divided societies? Why aren’t you doing that? It seemed so obvious because of course there were many people writing on Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism, but at the time pretty much nobody was working on the prospects or implications of Deliberative Theory in particular. For example thinking about institution design for example, thinking about power sharing or referendums or whatever. How institutions could be guided institutions in divided societies, could be guided by deliberative norms. Nobody was really doing that kind of work and to be honest, despite the fact that I was living in Belfast during this hugely… Well I guess it was an upheaval but positive upheaval, I guess with lots of bumps along the way and yet in a way it never occurred to me. It was only at my PhD viva when I was asked why I wasn’t doing this work that I kind of stopped and said you know what? you’ve got a point. Why aren’t I doing this kind of work? So at that point I went to Essex which is a very good politics department actually to do a Postdoc with Albert and I decided I would start all over again. So I wrote my first book when I was there that year on Deliberative Democracy in divided societies. That was really the start of my work and of course, I guess things like being there just after the Belfast agreement, seeing Clinton for example, come to speak, these things, you know, turned out to be far more… I didn’t realize it at the time but they turned out to be far more kind of intellectually stimulating than I imagined, they actually were… It was a fabulous… It’s an odd word to use given that I’m talking about a conflicted society but it was a fabulously exciting time to be in Northern Ireland. I mean I’m not from Northern Ireland, I’m from Cork, in the south of Ireland but it really was a fabulous time, exciting time to be either. And has to say I got lucky I had someone to ask me the question. Why aren’t you doing this work? And it really was like, there’s a lot of kind of I guess serendipity about these kinds of things. It was just you know, fortuitous. It’s accidental that someone came and asked me this question and I said okay I’ll do that and so that’s really how it started a series of accidents to tell you the truth and it took somebody to ask the question.

Stephan Kyburz: And since then obviously, you took the question very seriously and also you asked yourself a lot of questions about Deliberative Democracy, Participatory Democracy and all the different institutions that are building that type of of democracy and so I think what people who haven’t heard a lot about Deliberative Democracy, what people maybe more likely have heard about Citizen Assemblies or also Deliberative Polls. So Can you maybe give a bit of an overview you know, about Citizen Assemblies, Deliberative Polls and maybe what are some of the characteristics and the differences and how that relates to Deliberative Democracy and maybe you want to start with Deliberative Democracy itself, I’ll leave that up to you.

Ian O’Flynn: That’s an absolutely great… It’s a huge question, but it’s a great question, but I think it’s also a very, very important question because one of the things that has happened nowadays I think is that people readily equate Deliberative Democracy with Citizens’ Assemblies. In fact, they reduce Deliberative Democracy to Citizens Assemblies and they tend to use him to change… Now I should say that’s a bit crude. I mean it is a bit crude to put it that way. But I think certainly say for example, if you were doing a quick search on Twitter or something of that sort, you would imagine that Citizens Assemblies are exactly the same as Deliberative Democracy. That’s not actually the case. I mean effectively Deliberative Democracy is a theory of democratic legitimacy from mass societies. It’s a theory about what we need to have in place, what normative or philosophical conditions seem to be in place so that we can stand over decisions, collectively binding decisions. And it essentially says that ultimately decisions are legitimate if really, they are the outcome of a process of inclusive deliberation between free and equal citizens. Now that’s an ideal that kind of deliberative principle of legitimacy, the idea that as I say, decisions are legitimate insofar as they can be seen as the outcome of a process of inclusive deliberation between free and equal citizens. Now of course that’s a theory. It’s a normative standard that needs to be applied and it needs to be applied in a context sensitive sort of way. We know that in modern mass democracy it’s impossible for all citizens to deliberate together in one space. So we need to think about different ways in which, I guess, really pragmatic accommodations to reality if we live in a small, small society for example at the level of a village or something, yes, we could all sit around as free and equals and aside what we want to do through deliberation. But in modern mass democracies that’s not really possible and I think it’s true to say that at least for people like the kind of you could call him early deliberate Democrats, people like Habermas for example, Rawls, Joshua Cohen and so on they were in the first instance thinking of representative institutions, electoral representatives type institutions. So effectively, they’re thinking of parliament. There is of course a long tradition of thinking about Deliberative Democracy by focusing on parliament. So we think for example of John Stuart Mill referring to the British parliament as a congress of opinions and if you read his descriptions in his work “Considerations and Representative Government” you get a fantastic picture of what a deliberative parliament should look like, we can see it in the works of James Madison, we can see it in many, many different places. So I think there’s a reason why they focus on representative institutions and it was simply because well we’re talking about mass democracies and in any mass democracy I think it’s inevitable that elective institutions are going to be at the center. Now the problem of course, what’s happened is of course over time people are getting frustrated with that. They look at their parliaments, they look at the legislatures and they say, well you know what? These aren’t representative. Voices of marginalized societies are not being represented. They’re not being heard within these chambers. We see that many, many sorts of ways we look at dissatisfaction with legislatures right across the world, falling levels of trust and so on and so people are beginning to think they’re beginning to ask themselves: How could we get the voices of a diverse range of citizens back into our democratic politics? Now this really was a question that James Fishkin started to ask in the early 90’s. His first book appeared in about 1991… I can’t remember the name in hand… something like Democracy and Deliberation [“Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform”] or something that affect. He began to think about how could we… How could we inject a bit more legitimacy, a bit more deliberative legitimacy in particular into representative politics and he came up with the idea of a deliberative opinion poll. Now what is a deliberative opinion poll? Well effectively what it is, it’s you take a random sample of a population, you educate them. You give them good balance information and you see where they end up. But that’s what it is in a nutshell. It really is just society in microcosm. Jim Fishkin wasn’t the first of course to think of this idea; his own teacher Robert Dahl of course suggested the idea of what he called a mini-populace back in 1989 in his book “Democracy and its Critics”. But of course long before that people pointed back to the ancient Greeks and the assembly and the [Buglan] and the rest of it. So it’s not a new idea. But certainly from the 90s on people begin to sort of think about: Ok. We want our parliaments to be deliberative but we also want to make space for people, also, to have their voices and so Fishkin came along with this idea of a Deliberative Opinion Poll. Now I should say of course people have been doing this anyway in the broader society. Many, many civic organizations have been doing this. Many participatory and deliberative Democrats have been doing this for a long time anyway, they haven’t necessarily given it a posh name or talk in terms of kind of complicated statistical sampling or anything of that sort. These are not new ideas but certainly within the academic literature from about the 90s on Jim Fishkin comes along. He started to talk about these mini publics and particularly this idea of a Deliberative Opinion Poll. Now you may wonder why is he talking about an opinion poll but the starting point for this was simply to say: Look, we have all these opinion polls running all the time. But what they give very often is just top-of-the-head impressions. Somebody stops you in a street, somebody knocks on your door, somebody phones you up and they ask your opinions about various sorts of things but very often these are very unreflective. They’re not thought through, you may have no information at all. But there’s lots of things about opinion polls that show that people don’t want to come across as being ignorant, in the sense of not knowing, so they’ll say very often what they think the interviewer wants to say but that’s not much good because we’re not getting informed opinions. We’re getting top-of-the-head opinions, off the cuff, whichever metaphor you want to use. We’re getting very unreflective. And very often ill-informed are badly informed views reflected in these opinion polls. So what Jim wondered was could we do opinion polling better? And so what happens in a deliberative poll is somebody contacts you and they ask you to take a survey. So you take an ordinary opinion survey just as you would. When you finish your opinion survey what then happens is you are invited to take part in a deliberative event over a day or a weekend or something of that sort. If you say yes, you’ll be sent balance briefing materials in the post that you can read over a couple of weeks and maybe you’ll start to talk with people learn about the issues and so on. Then you turn up on the day. Remember this is, I should have said this is, of course, a random sample that turns up on the day, you deliberate in small groups and in plenary, you get the chance to question experts and so on and at the end of the event you’re polled again using exactly the same questionnaire that you took on first contact. And what that means is you get a pre deliberation opinion poll and you get a post deliberation opinion poll and you can check to see what happened. Did people shift? That is I think an absolutely brillIant idea because it really it’s not just any all opinion poll, it’s a deliberative opinion poll. It’s the views and because it is a random sample, it gives us some sense of what the rest of the population, what they would have thought if they could have been put through a similar process. So that’s what a deliberative opinion poll is. Now, I don’t think that Jim Fishkin in any of his work has ever suggested that he thinks that, you know, that opinion polls should substitute for representative Democracy. Jim hasn’t focused on reforming parliament or legislatures so that they might become more deliberative but he certainly thinks that deliberative opinion polls could play an important role in improving public opinion. It can make a major opinion like sort of a major contribution to deliberation in the public sphere but also ideally it should be taken up by elected representatives. As well as part of their deliberations.

Stephan Kyburz: So it’s really a way also to get more profound opinions by the citizens, right? In that sense if we just look at deliberative polls.

Ian O’Flynn: Absolutely, That’s what it is because you know again, it’s about legitimacy. You can stand over there and say look, these aren’t just public opinions. They’re the opinions of a random sample, hopefully a highly statistically representative sample of the population, that in some sense can stand in for the population. So It tells us a lot about what the population might think under very good conditions and that’s very rare. We obviously can’t put the entire population through an experiment of this sort but we can put a statistically representative sample through it. And it can give us some sense of what the population might have thought under similarly good conditions. That’s very useful to know. That is something that our legislatures, that our elective representatives should take seriously. It’s something our media, our newspapers and so on they should take seriously. It’s something that the public sphere, televisions, everything you know we should take this seriously. There are large questions I’m sure you’re going to ask me with that in a minute but whether these kinds of mini publics should have decisional authority or whether we should allow them to decide on our behalf, I don’t believe that to be the case. Nevertheless I think they can play a very, very important role in providing a very, very valuable perspective on people’s views, people in general’s views. That’s really important. So if anyone has been looking at my Twitter feed they may say I’m very very critical of these things. I’m not actually… Well. I’m critical of their use and the way in which they’re represented I think but I’m not critical of the idea itself which I think is a very, very valuable one and an important step forward in thinking about how to kind of reinvent some, maybe perhaps even resuscitate democracy.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s very interesting and maybe I can quickly summarize how I see what you just said. So we started with a deliberative type of democracy but among elites, right? Among representative democracy which were especially in the early days, I guess, quite a small group of society that had a lot of knowledge and that were described by John Stuart Mill or or Harbermas in the sense that we have pretty good deliberation, I guess in parliaments. But so the deliberative polls were really an instrument or are an instrument  to also inform representative democracy about opinions by the citizens and how a random sample of people, how they process information given to them and how that shapes their opinion. So are citizen assemblies then kind of an evolution of deliberative polls that are more institutionalized? Would you agree with that statement or what is the difference then between citizen assemblies and deliberative polls?

Ian O’Flynn: So what’s unique, I think about a deliberative poll is really the pretest and posttest questionnaires. Now, basically there are lots and lots of types of let’s use the word mini public instead, a deliberative poll is a type of mini public, mini public here is just this idea of microcosmic democracy said a random sampling. Citizens assemblies are a type of mini public. Citizens juries are a type of mini public. There are many, many different kinds. They also overlap in many, many different ways as well. Sometimes it could be hard to tell which is which. Really the deliberative poll can usually, ideally would have about 250 participants or so. Citizens assemblies tend to be a little bit smaller, maybe around 150 but it just depends on who organizes these things. And Citizens juries will have between 20 and 40 around, so much smaller numbers. The bigger the numbers, the better, I think because you have a better chance of having a statistically representative sample. That’s important. The other important thing about this is that citizens assemblies tend not to, certainly the Irish ones didn’t, tend to use a pretest questionnaire and a posttest questionnaire so they’re not actually tracking opinion change in that sense. That’s important. Traditionally insofar as there is a tradition, citizens assemblies tend to run for a very, very long time. If you think back to the British Columbia citizens’ assembly electoral reform that ran over the best part of a year. I think the Irish citizens assemblies have also run around nine months or so. Nine months to a year so they run for a very, very, very long time.

Stephan Kyburz: With the same people, right?

Ian O’Flynn: With the same people. Although I should say, certainly in the Irish case, the problem is there are issues around attention. Same people don’t turn off necessarily every time and that’s a problem because the idea is that the same people are meant to go through a very long and extensive educative process. But if people drop in and out you’ve got, you know, you’ve got issues. So I should say, we will probably talk about this in a minute, but although these things are often presented not just as panaceas but also as kind of perfect institution designs. They’re not because of course they have all the problems attaching… Not all the problems, they have their own problems. So for example, one of the problems with citizens assemblies is getting people to turn up over the course of all of this. There are many problems attaching to them. There are also lots of problems that we don’t know about and that people are beginning to write about. So for example with the participants, especially in a citizens’ assembly which runs for a very long time, I should say a deliberate poll or a citizen jury would probably only run over a day, a couple of days, a weekend, perhaps maybe a couple of weekends but the citizens assemblies run for a very, very long period of time. The difficulty with that of course is that. It may be that the participants can be got at in some sense. By the media perhaps, by vested interests. We don’t know a lot about these kinds of questions yet. We’re only beginning to feel our way into how they work, how they don’t work and so on. We just don’t know as they said, they’re very often presented as these perfect institutionalizations of deliberation. They’re not. There are lots and lots of problems attaching to them. So for example, one of the problems is so you know you get an invite but the uptake of the invite for many of these citizens assemblies is about 5%. So actually the people who agree to participate in the first place are themselves a very, very small, not just selected but selective element of society. Of course they use stratified random sampling to make it look like this looks like the population at large in terms of general characteristic demographic and attitude characteristics like gender, educational level. You know these kinds of things. But you know if you’re only getting 5% of a population of those you invite, agreeing to participate in the first place, the chances are you’re going to be missing quite a lot of people. So these things are not perfect. They can be done more or less well and I think what are the benefits of a deliberative poll is the size of the sample and the sheer effort they put in to make sure that it really is statistically representative. They don’t use stratified random sampling. They go for more scientific. The numbers are bigger so they go for scientific sampling in that sense. So there are differences, there are overlaps. In a way I guess citizens’ assembly is the most popular now because they have become almost like a brand. We hear about them all the time. Climate citizens assemblies. So the French citizens’ assembly on climate. The citizens assemblies have been run on climate right across the UK. We’ve had the citizens’ assembly on the abortion referendum in Ireland and so on. But in a way it’s probably the case for many people that the term Citizens’ Assembly is now substituting for the umbrella term Mini Public. It’s just really caught on this idea of citizens assemblies. And you can see why it’s a great term. It’s about people coming together. A term like Deliberative Opinion Poll people are likely to say: What the hell is that? It’s not very kind of trendy. It doesn’t get too many people excited unless you actually knew what it was. But you know anything with the word citizen and it sounds good. If you’re interested in Democracy. So Citizen’s assembly is very, very trendy. It’s a type of mini public. It shares much in common with Deliberative Polls, much in common with Citizens assemblies, sorry, Citizen juries but there are lots of subtle differences and that you know that may make more or less big differences along the way.

Stephan Kyburz: It’s interesting because in Switzerland I would say the term Citizens Assembly is way less known. I’m not sure whether you know political scientists, of course they have taken up these discussions and there is research on those citizens assemblies. But I think to most people they’re probably less well-known. I think the reason also being that Direct Democracy is very strong in Switzerland at all levels of government. So even in many municipalities you have, like, two times a year, you have a municipal assembly which is kind of a citizen assembly because anybody can go. it’s not a sortation or a random sample. No, anybody can go and vote and decide on issues that affect the municipality. And so I think to me it was always like our municipal assemblies are essentially citizen assemblies but it’s like a full sample which is kind of an interesting alternative, you know. And sometimes also I have shown some confusion because I said our municipal assemblies are citizen assemblies. So to me what would be interesting to know is for you, what would be the optimal implementation of such mini-publics and where do you really see the limitations especially in terms of institutionalization? What can they do and what can they not do?

Ian O’Flynn: Again I mean that’s a really important question, a very tough one to answer. So there are a range of different views about where they should be located within the broader political system. There are some people on the more extreme end who would like, I think to, in some sense, replace electoral democracy, electoral representative democracy with citizens assemblies. Now I think that’s a very bad idea actually. And one of the reasons I think is a very, very bad idea is because really, you’re talking about a random sample of a population. Now if you’re sampling a population the problem is it’s a tiny proportion of an overall population. If you have a population like the UK here, 60, 70 million and you bring together 150 people I don’t know, I can’t do the math quickly enough but what percentage of 70 million is 150. The fact in the matter is the vast majority of the population will be excluded from participation. So while it is true that they may be statistically representative and inclusive in that sense, in real terms the fact is far too many people will be excluded. Now people who advocate that kind of position say. Ah yeah, but it’s not just sortation. It’s not just a lottery. It’s not just a random sample. It’s a lottery plus rotation. But the fact of the matter is you would want to hold an awful lot of assemblies to give everyone a go, even once in their lifetime. So I think that is deeply problematic because you know democracy means rule by the people. It’s about the Demos. It is about popular legitimacy, it’s about people authorizing government to do its thing. Whatever form of government. The tricky thing is if you only have citizens assemblies, the vast majority of people do nothing ever in their lives. They simply wait on their numbers up. It’s like waiting to win the lotto. You might win the lotto. You might not win the lotto. But for the vast majority of people you don’t win the lottery, you will never be called upon to participate politically. That’s a massive problem for all sorts of reasons. It’s a massive problem in principle. Why would you think that’s good for democracy to exclude the vast majority of the people? Despite all these claims about statistical representativeness and ,you know, how smart people’s algorithms are and so on. The fact of the matter is they’re highly exclusive. Even if you allow for a process of rotation over time. That’s really worrisome. It’s worrisome in principle, I think because it offends key democratic principles of inclusion and equality. But it’s also very important I think, from a more pragmatic or empirical point of view, because you know we want people to feel motivated. We want people to feel a sense of allegiance to their democracies. We want them to feel motivated to carry the burdens of participating in political life. And of course this is a very important theme in participatory democracy. If we want people to reciprocate benefits and burdens which is what you have to do in a democracy, you have to do that freely. Of course a dictator can simply force you to pay your taxes or do military service, whatever it is, but that’s not true of course in a democracy. We have to find some other, at least it’s not true in principle, we have to find some other motivation. And of course as participatory Democrats have argued for, well right back to John Stuart Mill and back to Rousseau I guess, well beyond that. Political participation going back to Tocqueville for example, is really a school for democracy. It motivates people to care about the causes that affect us all. The problem is if you just had, if you just institutionalized many public citizens assemblies, you really treat ordinary people as a little more than some kind of canon fodder or something of that sort. You feed them into an algorithm every so often and some of them will come out the far end, others won’t. That is no good for democracy. It completely, I think robs democracy of the motivational basis. The kind of civic spirit and motivation that I think democracy really needs. And that I think participatory democracy is, I think ,very alive too. And of course you’ve mentioned Switzerland, these open-air, these open-air councils. You’ve mentioned the long traditions of swiss use of referendum and so on and so forth. That is much more towards the participatory side of it, where people genuinely feel they can have a say in the rules under which they have to live. I would find it very offensive to be told you don’t need to do anything. We’ve somebody who’s like you, who’s got you know, gray haired like you, who you know went through the same kind of school as you and so on. It’s okay, he will speak on your behalf or she or they, whatever it is. You just sit back. It’s okay, we’ve got this covered. That is not democracy in my view. So that was a very long answer. I would like to rule that out. I think that is implausible. I think it’ll never happen. I think all the worries about capture and all these other kinds of things will kick in. I think we’ll have severe problems, really. I think it’s a disaster of an idea and I think it’s fundamentally undemocratic. That’s putting it very strongly. But I think it allows the idea. That said, if I may go on, I don’t see if you want to get…

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, sure. No I just wanted to maybe quickly say that we have a hard time having representative politicians speaking on our behalf. I mean at least I sometimes have a hard time because I think like,I would know it better or whatever, you know, I should be there, right? I could run for office of course. But obviously you have the same kind of mechanism that if somebody else would be randomly selected and speaking on your behalf, you’re never really satisfied because you want to give your opinion too because your life, your experience, your knowledge is valuable and I think we should value all that knowledge that is among the population and those who want to contribute, those who want to be creative in providing you know solutions, they should be allowed to, right? And if we have a pure sortition mechanism then, that is clearly not the case.

Ian O’Flynn: No, that’s an absolute problem, a huge problem. You’ve mentioned a couple of other things that are very important. It is true. We look at say for example here in Britain, I mean you look at you look at Westminster, you look at the parliament here. Who do they look like? Well they certainly do not look like the population at large. Now should we worry about that? I think we should for all the reasons that you’ve said. However, one of the things that bugs me about the way, you know the theory that I’ve invested all these years studying, deliberative democracy, it’s a broad theory but it can inform, not just things like mini-publics or even say for example, parliamentary reform. There’s some very good work being done at the moment around reform of the committee systems within parliament and legislators to make them more deliberative. You know great work being done here. But I think one area that I think where we haven’t done enough work at all, and I think you kind of hinted at this, is around, for example, electoral systems. We want, you know, certainly in “Considerations and Representative Government” that book by John Stuart Mill that I mentioned earlier on where he talks about parliament as a congress of opinions. He also has a very much of a kind of a descriptive idea of representation in mind, he wants parliament to look like this society at large and in the book he talks a lot about what he calls. Mr. Hare’s system, Mr. Thomas Hare’s system, this electoral system that he thinks Britain needs to adopt. Mr. Hare’s system is effectively what today we would call the STV, the single transferable vote form of proportional representation. We have Mill calling for a shift to single transferable vote way back in 1861 when he published that book. Today is 2022 and say for example, the electoral society here in Britain is still calling for single transferable vote. Because it is more representative, because of the kind of the preferential structure of the ballot is very important because that gives candidates incentive to reach out beyond their own core constituency and so on. It makes them talk to other people, beyond the people who are always beyond the people who are most likely to vote for them. Because of the preferential nature of the ballot and the way which it runs through various rounds. You can’t just rely on your own supporters because actually supporters from, maybe the moderate middle or from the other side may make a difference to your getting elected or not getting elected. It makes you broaden your appeal. It makes you act more like a deliberate democrat, than you otherwise might be. So really, for me. This kind of answers the other part of your question, for me deliberative democratic reform is a package, is a package deal. We need to look at how we reform what goes on within our parliaments. We need to look at what goes on in our committee’s systems. We need to look at what goes on within our electoral systems that elect parliaments,that elect politicians. Who are parliaments in the first instance? We need to look at things like funding. We need to look at things like public broadcasting. We need to look at things like public journalism. We need to look at media regulation. And we need to look at citizens’ assemblies. What role they could conceivably play in all of this. We need to look at support for referendums, education for referendums. We need to look at the mix between citizens assemblies and referendums, the so-called citizen initiative review type model. We need to look at support for civil society organizations. More bottom up approaches. So we want to broaden out inclusion. Now I should say somebody we mentioned earlier on. Again, there’s nothing new in any of this. If you think back to say, Habermas’s work for example on the public, on the public sphere anchored in the institutions of society, Habermas talks about what he terms a two-track model. He distinguishes between strong and weak public. So really,the government makes decisions, fair enough. But the government must be open and porous to contributions from civil society. He thinks that civil society, it shouldn’t just be any old public opinion, that’s generated within civil society. It should be an informed public opinion. Now, that’s an obvious in, for thinking about citizens assemblies: let them contribute to the formation or the formulation of a more informed public opinion, which is then factored into representative decision-making, which in turn must give an account of its decisions to the public. So the whole thing. Ideally what we have is a virtuous circle between civil society into government, from government through accountability measures and so on, to publicity and accountability back into civil society. Jane Mansbridge, for example, talks about recursive democracy and I think she’s absolutely right. It’s an old idea again. It’s not a new idea but it is that sense that we really need the interplay of institutions, both civil institutions and more centralized political institutions and where deliberative democracy comes into all of this as a grand theory is that it’s meant to shape the thinking about the interplay between all of this, this virtuous circle. Really, how we think about, how we evaluate it, should be in terms of its deliberative quality or capacity. Now that idea has been given expression, a slightly different expression in recent years in the notion of a deliberative system. So we don’t look at say for example, a citizens’ assembly because as Mansbridge for example says, and rightly says, no single institution, no matter how well formed, could have sufficient legitimacy to justify decisions that are going to be binding on everyone in a modern mass democracy. No one institution can do that. It’s impossible. Yet some of the citizens’ assembly folk seem to think it is. It’s not. It’s crazy. That’s a silly idea. It is really, the whole idea of deliberative democracy, certainly in that kind of two-track systemic view. It’s the whole lot together. The interplay between all these different parts of the system. Assess in terms of the deliberative quality. That’s what ultimately generates democratic legitimacy from mass societies. So it’s that much broader picture, that picture, that’s not my idea. I think we’ve learned more about this as time has gone on. I mean Habermas I think is one of the very first to lay this out. People like John Dryzek have done a huge amount of work developing… People like Jane Mansbridge and John Parkinson think about deliberative systems so we’ve been developing this over the last twenty, thirty years. What makes it really, really odd and weird then is this shift towards citizens assemblies. These people are coming in and thinking that it’s some sort of panacea that can ride to the rescue. It’s dubious in practical terms. It’s dubious in institutional terms. It’s dubious in legitimacy terms and it’s just not terribly democratic. Now I must say I think they are a fantastic innovation. I would like to see more of them, I would like us to learn more, I would like to think creatively about where they could be inserted, how we can publicize what they’ve done, how we think about… We need to think more about what exactly is the democratic character of their legitimacy characteristics that they have or don’t have and so on. There’s loads of philosophical questions yet to be asked about them. There are loads of practical questions about them. But they are very important. But I think it’s crucial that they’re seen as one cog in an integrated system, that requires, obviously enough, a systemic view, to see all of this fits together. Now interestingly enough the difficulty of course is how do you measure this stuff? How do you track this stuff? How do you get a handle on it? These are massive questions. There are some fiddling around the edges. So for example, my colleague Manlio Cinalli and I, we’ve sought to use network theory, network analysis to think about how we can map a system in that sense. But really understanding this richer, more integrated, holistic, whatever words you want to use, type of deliberative system, where it’s very much in its infancy. We’re only beginning to get a handle on it now and we’re really not too sure about how is everything going to fit together? How do we measure this? How do we evaluate it? How do we reform it? All these kinds of questions. There’s a lot of hate scratching going on. A lot of very good work. I should say I don’t mean to be in any sense patronizing and saying that. There’s excellent work from some brillIant people, doing absolutely great work. But you know it’s very much in its infancy. We’re struggling. But this idea that citizens’ assemblies, we can circumvent all of that. It’s just nonsense, absolutely crazy. That’s a bit strong but never mind.

Stephan Kyburz: No, I appreciate your opinion and your clear words of what they can be and what they cannot be right? And you have done so much work and you have built up over years your own opinion, through research and what I’m talking a lot on my podcast is political power and political leverage. And the question, how much power and leverage can you actually achieve with a mini public? Where are the limits? As you have explained as well. These are very important questions. And in terms of representative democracy I think it was also really interesting what you said, for example in Britain, people have been trying to make a parliament more representative of the people, essentially resembling the population, which you only achieve with a more proportional system. And this is also a topic I’m constantly talking about on my podcast and also on Twitter or in any discussions. And essentially to me what the relationship between representative and direct democracy or maybe also with a deliberative poll could be is that if you have a perfect representation in parliament, you kind of, you know, make direct democracy less important because the decision taken in parliament will be resembling the people better. If representative democracy is really poor, like in the US, I think, for example, at the moment or also in Britain, as you said, then direct democracy and deliberative democracy become more important and there needs to be a check on representative democracy and I think that’s also an interesting idea to think about whether a deliberative democracy like a mini public, could be a check, a type of check on representative democracy but it’s kind of the question of legitimacy is obviously an important one. And whereas direct democracy has you know achieved really, legitimacy that is high enough for people to accept these decisions. The citizens assemblies are probably still in an ongoing process and we will see where they lead to.

Ian O’Flynn: Yeah, I mean you put that very well. I mean I do think you put it better than I did. I think we are trying to find a balance between all these different aspects of a democratic system. We’re trying to compensate for weaknesses in one part of the system by perhaps introducing new ideas or developing or strengthening other parts of the system. As you say, if representative democracy is weak, we’ll maybe think about strengthening direct democracy and so on. These are difficult questions. I think there are very tough questions. There are, as you’ve also suggested, there are important kinds of philosophical questions here about the questions of legitimacy and I think you know we’re again. It’s interesting. We’re hearing a lot about the citizens’ assembly. The view is that they are legitimate simply because they’re a random sample of a population. Now that’s not true at all. A random sample is just a random sample. It has no legitimacy in itself. It couldn’t possibly have any legitimacy in itself. It’s just a random sample. If you like it’s legitimacy neutral. It doesn’t have any. Now there is no reason of course why a democratically elected government could decide to say: Well look, we’d like  to constitute an assembly and in fact we’re going to act upon its recommendations. So this was something like, Macron did for the Citizen Convention on Climate Change in France. So that would be entirely democratic and the assembly itself would have legitimacy because actually the process by which the French president or whatever it is comes to power is itself a legitimate democratic process and so far as the president, he or she, they’re working within their constitutional rights. If they have a right to do this and people agree that the constitution’s a legitimate constitution. Well that legitimacy gets passed on to the citizens’ assembly. So in theory there is no problem with giving legitimate or decisional authority to a citizens’ assembly. You can do that. You can simply, I mean say for example Helen Landemore in her book simply says, that as long as you know a majority of the population agrees that this is a good way to do things, well then it’s legitimate. I don’t have any problem with that in theory but the question is, the question which is unaddress that is how they may receive their legitimacy. Say, for example, a government could decide to constitute one. The prior question however is whether the government should do that in the first place. That question hasn’t been answered. What were the kinds of… why would a government want to do that? Yes, it can ascribe or for legitimacy to assembly but should it do it. That’s a prior normative question. Already hinted at some reasons why it mightn’t want to do it or certainly mightn’t necessarily want to do it on something like a permanent basis. And that’s simply because despite the fact that they may be statistically representative or inclusive, the fact is the vast majority of us will never, ever get the chance to participate in them. So there are doubts here as I say it just means that to me Democracy is about… I’ve never really thought of myself as a participatory democrat but I guess as I’ve got a little older it just seemed to me, you know what? We should all be, so far as possible, more of us should be participating more often and I think that’s important to the legitimacy of the decisions that come out the far end of the process. So, you know these questions are hanging in the air right now. It can be done. There is no reason why government shouldn’t create a commission, an assembly and therefore that, because it’s been democratically created, it will be democratically legitimate. No problem. But as to say the prior crescent question still hangs, should they do that? Or under what conditions should they do it? Or when should they not do it? When does, you know, what are the legitimacy considerations at play here?

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah I totally agree with that point and also there is a parallel to direct democracy in that way. That a top-down Referendum is a different thing from a bottom up process, right? And also I have written a blog post on Principles of Direct Democracy where we describe that actually initiatives should be bottom-up, should come from the population because if they’re top down, for example by the president, or the cabinet, or the prime minister then they are used for agenda setting, right? And it’s again a tool that is used by power, by the center of power to make people talk about some specific topic. But then the problem is, of the agenda setter, almost like a dictator saying what people should talk about and not bottom-up. So I think the legitimacy would be way stronger if it came from within the population.

Ian O’Flynn: I mean that’s absolutely right. I agree with that. It’s a massive issue here. Very often since assemblies of course are top-down and one of the reasons why they are top-down is because they are incredibly expensive. I can’t remember if I mentioned but early, you know, back in 2007 or so I worked with Jim Fishkin on a deliberative poll in Northern Ireland on the vexed question of education reform. We spent now ,this is 2007, so we’re talking fifteen years ago, we spent 150 thousand British pounds on that one day event. I mean let that sink in, 150 thousand pounds. Now you may say, you know, the grandest scheme of things you know, government’s budget is whatever, billions perhaps this is a drop in the ocean. Yes, that’s fine for the government. But if you’re talking about bottom-up processes, where you want people to kind of mobilize around these kinds of things. You have to be very wealthy to actually pull these things off. It’s very ,very difficult. It can be done but it’s a lot of money. The other thing about them as well, that you must remember, let’s say you want to bottom-up on you know, things like I’m not a statistician. I have a rudimentary knowledge of statistics, very rudimentary I should say. But you must remember the problem is to do things, these things properly, citizens assemblies, your stats have to be very, very good. If it’s not statistically representative, if it doesn’t look like the broader population, it’s open to criticism on the grounds that you’ve cut a few corners here or you’ve missed certain kinds of groups. The problem is the legitimacy of it would be attacked by people who want or have a vested interest in attacking the outcomes of these kinds of things. So you need a lot of money, you need a lot of expert knowledge to actually create these things and do them well, you need a motivated population. And that goes back to the legitimacy question because I think the idea is, one of the reasons why people would like to see decisional authority, decisional power afforded to these assemblies is because it may give people more incentive to get involved. Now say, for example, in deliberative polls. People are paid for turning up. It’s a very small honorarium usually but they are given some money. It’s also filmed. So for example, the one that we did in Northern Ireland that was filmed by BBC and made into a half hour documentary. So I guess you know, there’s incentive for people to participate because you know, they get their moment in the sunshine. That sounds terrible I know but you know, it’s nice. You know I’d like to be on television sometime. Or parents with health care issues or childbearing and so on. It’s important that money is made available so that they can actually find a carer for the day and participate. So the practicality is huge. The organization that’s acquired here is huge. But also you must remember if you want government to act and this is another kind of conundrum here; Yes, we want bottom-up but if you don’t have government buy-in the first place, it’s not clear why government would be prepared to act on any recommendations that come out the far end. Let’s say, you and I somehow find 150 grand, just walking out of the street and we say: This is great, let’s run a citizens’ assembly. It would be fantastic. And we go around knocking at doors and we recruit people. But the government will say, well you know, fair enough. Well done, nice and all that but who are you? Nobody authorized you to do this. So in a way you know, this is why this is not a part of the story for people interested in participatory democracy. Around protests it can be, you know, can often be a far more effective vehicle. I mean we’ve seen countless Climate Citizens Assemblies now, they’ve done nothing. Nothing has happened. Macron made all these fantastic promises but he didn’t act off the back of any of them. I have things like extinction but rebellion I have, you know, that is not straightforward. You know, their behavior isn’t straightforward and some of the claims they make isn’t straightforward. But at the same time you have to admire people getting out into the streets, I’m not counseling or suggesting that we should all engage in Civil Disobedience. I’m not suggesting that. I am saying that we think about these things because sometimes civil disobedience may be what’s actually required to bring about effective change. Citizens assemblies may not deliver on that promise. I don’t know. I’m just putting that out there, I wouldn’t want to stand over any of that. But again there are interesting questions about… We’ve been talking about a lot of them, cost practicalities, legitimacy but also effectiveness. How effective are these things? Can they be co-opted by government? Look, I hear this in the assembly. We’ve listened to the public. We’ve listened to you. We’ve heard. We’re listening bold. The usual kind of phrases that you hear. But actually they do nothing off the back of them. So the citizens’ climate assemblies here in the UK have had virtually no effect whatsoever. That’s tragic. It is tragic. It may be simply because citizens assemblies are new. They’re not very much part of our political culture. This background tradition. We’re not used to them. There are opinion polls asking people: What do you think of citizens assemblies? And they go, oh I love them. They’re great. But if you were to stop and ask them what they were. Again this sounds terrible but the majority wouldn’t know what they were. Anything with the word citizen and power or assembly is kind of you know, in people’s minds that sounds great. Yeah, I’ll have more of that, please, thank you very much. But in terms of actually educating people, in terms of what they are. I must say it’s difficult to know what they are unless you’ve actually been through the process yourself. I must say working with Jim Fishkin was one of the most insightful things that I’d ever had ever done, as somebody who had studied deliberative democracy for many years. You got to see what values that conclusion really meant. Who turned up? What difficulties were there? Values like publicity. Things that say, for example, Gutmann and Thompson write about quite a lot. What is publicity? Well you know what it is? It’s a camera, making a documentary which is broadcast on BBC. That’s publicity and on and on you go. So it’s really only by participating in these things that in a way… I think very often, John Boswell has a very nice piece and the journal in deliberative democracy about this, John Boswell has been studying these things for years as well. But he recently was a participant in one of them. In a citizens’ assembly. And he’s written up his experiences and how actually the experience of participating were very different in many respects to what he thought he knew as an academic studying these things for years. So again, you know, there’s a part of this is education. It goes right back to this is a very grand thing to say but right back to primary schools, secondary schools and so on. We don’t know what they are. And the difficulty is because the uptake is so poor and because participation numbers are so tiny. It’s very hard to know how you would educate people into a proper understanding of what they are. It’s really tricky, really tricky.

Stephan Kyburz: So I have still so many questions and thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and also some of your results from research and we agree that democracies, Representative democracies are in crisis, right? And I think we need to focus on political power. You know, how can we give the people more power? And it’s definitely a good question to ask. What mini publics could do in this regard. But as I think we agree, you know, there will be a common solution between representative democracy, direct democracy and also deliberative democracy which is an important element. So for people who want to read up more on these topics… Obviously I will link to your research website. Also your recent book “Deliberative Democracy” I will link to that. But do you have any other resources that you can recommend on these topics?

Ian O’Flynn: Well I mean in a way I’ve kind of gone blank because there’s just so much of it out there nowadays. Really, really there is just tons of it. I would recommend something, for example, looking at Jim Fishkin’s website, the center for deliberative democracy at Stanford. That’s well worth looking at. I mean there’s a pile of resources, videos, some of it is academic, some of it is user-friendly. A world of resources and a world of links from this, you could look at something like that. That’s a very, very good place to start. I think something like that, the Jim Fishkin’s website would be a great place to start. I think there’s a deliberative democracy handbook edited by, I’ve gone blanket. Maybe John Gastel I think. That’s well worth looking at. Big thick user manual in many ways. So you know there’s just so much work. I point towards somebody like Oliver Escobar’s work at the University of Edinburgh. Oliver’s a fantastic, vibrant, clever kind of guy with a real passion for this kind of stuff. He’s written a whole pile of policy papers that are well worth looking at. So maybe somebody like that as well. My friends at the University Of Turku and the Åbo Akademi, so I’m thinking of my Maia Setälä, maybe her works. I have looked at some of her work. But also Kimmo Grönlund has done fantastic work there. Their team has done piles and piles of work. André Bächtiger’s work again, have a look at his. He’s very, very important I think and I’ve mentioned Helen Landemore, much more philosophical. But again I think in terms of somebody who’s really pushing citizen assemblies beyond that line where I think I will be comfortable but certainly well worth looking at and so on. So there’s a lot of stuff I’d look at the Center for Deliberative Democracy at the University Of Canberra again loads of working papers. So really, you know “The Journal of Deliberative Democracy” would be something I would look at.So really, there’s just, I could really kind of go on all day, you know, looking at this.

Stephan Kyburz: Thanks a lot for sharing all those suggestions and references.

Ian O’Flynn: Apologies for all the really important people I forgot, by the way.

Stephan Kyburz: There’s always more of course. But I think you definitely mentioned some of the important names. Yeah Ian O’Flynn, thank you very much for taking your time. And maybe one last word that I wanted to say was, you know,  I think representative democracy is not at its best yet. Not at all. So I think we need to focus on that. But for sure deliberative democracy can have a role in both informing representatives but also the general public. And also maybe be an important complement to direct democracy.

Ian O’Flynn: Absolutely. Yeah I think that’s how I think about it too. Well thank you very much for inviting me along today. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you and I hope somebody finds this useful. I hope some of your listeners will find it useful and apologies in advance for anyone who I’ve offended anywhere along the way.

Stephan Kyburz: No worries, I appreciate your honesty and your opinions. That’s really great. That’s what I want to have on the podcast and thank you for everything.

Ian O’Flynn: Thank you very much.