It is timely to be discussing a randomly selected legislature amid declining public trust in representative government and elected leaders. The conversation about theoretical alternatives has been building since the late 1980s and has accelerated in this century.1 Many of the academic works on this subject have been matched by hundreds of trials of different variations of minipublics in local, regional, state, and national spheres of government.2
Gastil and Wright have added to this conversation by advancing a proposal of their own. In this chapter, I argue that their proposed sortition assembly can be successful only if adequate attention is paid to its deliberative process. These process design factors are crucial to sortition’s success, but they are not always appreciated, or even well understood, by those who develop and debate legislative reform proposals.
Much is known about who made the decisions in ancient Athens, the cradle of democracy, as well as the mechanisms for election and selection.3 Less is known about how they made decisions. Scholars classify the ancient Greeks’ decision-making processes as a form of direct democracy, rather than deliberative democracy, although Aristotle is said to have claimed “that the people deliberating together could often produce better decisions than an expert on the subject.”4 Direct democracy is an excellent way to gather public opinion, but it is not a robust method to deliver public judgment.5 In this chapter, I focus on the latter.
Gastil and Wright recognize the importance of decision-making methods in their proposal, but they only begin to touch on the subject. If sortition is introduced as a strong deliberative alternative to electing representatives, it needs to have distinct methods for more than its selection process. A sortition chamber should not replicate the adversarial or stalled decision-making processes that pervade modern parliaments—or worse, the type of corruption that occurs routinely among elected representatives everywhere.
A former judge, Tony Fitzgerald, who led a corruption inquiry in an Australian state, has noted that power “provides a rich opportunity for personal and political advantage: cronyism, the sale of access and influence and the misuse of public money.”6 Fitzgerald’s “impossible dream” for the restoration of trust in politicians could be describing participants in one-off minipublics:
Politicians will find it impossible to regain public trust unless they behave like normal, honourable people: Treat everyone equally, tell the truth, explain decisions, disclose any direct or indirect benefits for themselves or their allies.7
In designing their proposal for a sortition chamber, Gastil and Wright aim to follow five democratic principles: “inclusion; control of the agenda; effective participation; voting equality; and enlightened understanding.”8 Most of the authors in this volume attend to the first four principles, but I aim to describe how a well-crafted deliberative process can move a sortition chamber toward enlightened understanding.
Without deliberation in the assembly itself, the flaws of direct democracy or even representative government can arise. Contemporary elected legislatures fail the deliberative test, and it is near impossible to convert an elected assembly to a deliberative assembly—except perhaps when committees are convened. In fact, this provides a clue as to the way forward.9 We understand the weakness of a chamber that elects or selects a speaker or chair, as happens now, and having that person arbitrate on the debate across the floor of parliament, using something like Robert’s Rules.10 Representatives who stand and make speeches, having caucused beforehand, or listened to lobbyists, or succumbed to bribes, are not well equipped to make decisions even via a secret ballot. Curiously, Robert’s Rules of Order was subtitled for Deliberative Assemblies even though these rules deliver very little genuine deliberation. Debate, at least when unleavened by more deliberative moments, does not lead to the best outcome. It may have been a weakness of ancient Athens. Today, however, we know more about group processes and co-intelligence. We know how effective decision-making can be achieved consistently, and formal rules are not the answer.11
Deliberation does not just happen, and we are not born with deliberative capacity. It must be learned. It requires practice. Providing orientation and training and encouraging dialogue outside the chamber—between participants—would help to build respect and trust, but only collective, egalitarian deliberation will lead to better decisions. The good news is that we can design a more effective decision-making space that exploits the virtues of debate, dialogue, and deliberation, and this has been shown to work.
At the newDemocracy Foundation, we have accumulated a wealth of experience in relation to public deliberation,12 as have many others.13 Here are a few of the lessons we have learned:
• A vote can kill deliberation and is best delayed or avoided altogether.
• We can enhance citizens’ capacity to think critically and identify biases.
• When subjected to critical questioning, experts can expand citizens’ knowledge and understanding.
• The size of a citizen body will not alter its capacity to learn and to decide, whether it has 25 or 350 participants. Deliberation, however, must take place in small groups, which then build to a collective decision.
• Even a large citizen body can reach decisions that satisfy all—or nearly all—participants.
• Skillful, independent, nonmanipulative facilitation is essential for the group to find its own way.
In summary, sortition as a selection process can deliver descriptive representation—an essential strategy to build trust in government, and it can give decision-making power back to everyday citizens. Beyond that, however, sortition’s companion—its best friend—must be a suite of robust, democratic microprocesses to ensure that the randomly selected body is able to make decisions that satisfy the whole group and the wider community.
I will describe the essential elements of deliberation, based on my decades of experience with minipublics.14 I begin by discussing the general principle of deliberation, then address important subtopics, including critical thinking, working with experts, facilitation, and making decisions. In the third section, I will address one of the most widely debated questions in the field of deliberative democracy: How might the wider population be part of a deliberative system?15 Unless a randomly selected legislature extends its reach to the wider population, it risks earning the same low levels of public trust that harm the current legislative system. I then consider other unresolved questions and offer a call for attention to process design for anyone interested in adopting sortition.
An Overview of Group Deliberation
The democratic deficit has led to a drift toward populism and demagoguery. There is a disturbing shift in public attitudes worldwide. In some countries, including Australia, Britain, and the US, the proportion of younger people who think it essential to live in a democracy is now a minority.16 Perhaps even more disturbing is the rise in the share of citizens who approve of having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections.17 If a “major systemic transformation” is indeed under way, the likely end point will be more power-wielding, antiestablishment leaders unless we rethink leadership, decentralize decision-making, and limit—or at least share—government power.
Even the most expert leaders are not necessarily the wisest. Consider that if we know a great deal about something, the following happens: We close our minds to alternative pathways; we share our knowledge with people who support our opinion and this, in turn, limits our thinking; our creativity is constricted because we think we know what’s possible; and we dismiss anything that sounds unrealistic.18
Everyday citizens, gathered in a legislative assembly, can equal or surpass the decision-making abilities of elected leaders, who are rarely experts. They have to do a lot of learning in office, and they rely heavily on outside experts or staff members. Citizens can do that just as well.
There are few opportunities for everyday citizens to exercise their own leadership qualities in the political realm. At newDemocracy, we have watched thousands of people grow through public deliberations.19 Citizens not only learn; they also collaborate to develop acceptable, sustainable, and innovative proposals. In a sortition assembly, they will be unconcerned about winning the next election, so they are likely to remain focused on solving problems for their communities.
To do this, however, they will need support. To think critically together, they will benefit from having an independent facilitator. As Hélène Landemore explains,
in every randomly selected assembly you would find leadership unexpectedly … We over-value the Type A elected representative as the model of a leader … I think there are many ways to be a leader that can be achieved by people who are more soft spoken, more quiet, leading from behind … We just have to reinvent leadership to fit with this model.20
This will not happen simply because people are randomly selected. The diversity of the group is a catalyst, but building deliberative capacity will provide the fuel.
Deliberation foregrounds a very important difference in the way political discussions can occur. Here, the focus is on public deliberation, not the internal deliberation that we each do during contemplation. To explain the difference between public deliberation in, say, a sortition assembly, and what occurs in current parliamentary assemblies, it’s useful to provide contrast.
Typical political discussion is debate. The aim is to persuade others, and ultimately the majority, to one’s own position. Even at its best, it’s a win-lose situation where participants are inclined to maintain their original view. Debate can be angry, adversarial, and swift. It can also be rational and drawn out.
Dialogue can help to cut through some of the weaknesses of debate, through a slower civil exchange, sharing understandings by listening well, and building relationships. Dialogue places less emphasis on decision-making and more on a respectful, clarifying exchange of perspectives.21
Deliberation involves elements of both dialogue and debate.22 Debate might occur when there is an invited panel of experts arguing about their various positions, and this can be useful input for deliberation. But deliberation is distinct, even though it still involves a “competition of ideas.”23 This is because public deliberation aims to investigate various options by first hearing from experts, then exploring and establishing common ground, and finally reaching a group decision. The fundamental difference between deliberation and debate is whether the end objective is zero-sum or consensus seeking. In the search for consensus, dialogue is an essential element.24
At newDemocracy we know when genuine deliberation has occurred in a minipublic because the proof is in the participant feedback we hear. Departing citizens will speak of challenging but surprisingly respectful conversations, despite individual differences. They remark on the deep exploration of issues, with a shared motivation to solve a problem, and they recognize in themselves an enhanced ability to think critically.25 When newDemocracy collects anonymous feedback post-deliberation, randomly selected participants almost always say they would do it again, and they want elected officials to make many more of these opportunities to their fellow citizens.26
It’s not a natural enterprise, this deliberative process. It requires skillful facilitation—just enough to keep the group on track and find its own way when the going gets tough. With larger groups, there will always be times when small-group activity is advantageous to accelerate the process and minimize entrenched viewpoints. Exercises designed to challenge cognitive biases and test expert knowledge are used because the group will be weighing up various contested options. The group members will find themselves busy with a variety of tasks: establishing their own agreed behavioral guidelines, setting criteria for evaluation, gathering information, testing it, brainstorming solutions, prioritizing those possibilities, agreeing on recommendations and accounting for minority opinions when consensus is not found, and collectively writing a report. The work is enjoyable and often arduous, but the group feels a tremendous sense of collective achievement once the mission is accomplished.27
When a group deliberates, it seeks consensus without requiring its achievement. Indeed, minority reports are always encouraged in minipublics. The aim of a deliberative group is to establish the extent of agreement and what each person can live with. Premature voting can be the death knell of consensus because it closes minds before all is known about a topic. If deliberation leads to a final vote, then a secret ballot is essential. This is typically done using keypads, with the collective result projected onto a screen.
Deliberative Process Within a Sortition Assembly
Given modern facilitation methods and information technology, to what extent can large groups, like a sortition chamber, achieve good deliberation? I answer this question by returning to four key features of deliberation introduced in the previous section. In turn, I discuss critical thinking, selecting and hearing from experts, facilitation, decision rules, and the importance of simultaneity.
Critical Thinking
A common assumption is that a randomly selected group of citizens will fail to understand or evaluate expert evidence because that talent takes a combination of natural ability and years of experience. The corollary is, inevitably, that experts and self-nominated politicians have this ability, but everyday citizens do not. I question that assumption.
It is true that citizens only rarely encounter the practice of critical thinking, or even the term itself, unless they have studied in an institute of higher learning. Even then, such training was likely designed to enhance the critical-thinking capacities of individuals doing solitary thinking and learning to think for themselves. In a public deliberation, by contrast, participants are part of a collective consideration of expert knowledge.
Citizens in the proposed sortition chamber will have to make a transition from “how to think for themselves” to “how to think well with others.” This extends the practice of individual “critical thinking” to a “collaborative inquiry,” or “critical engagement.” It is useful to think of the legislature as having a “collective mind” that is more than the sum of the minds of its individual members. Therefore, the training or practice of critical thinking must be embedded in such a chamber.
Considerable recent research has investigated the prevalence and effects of bias. However, it could be argued that neutrality and objectivity are difficult to achieve and that an exposure to bias may be a more realistic path to take when deliberating.28 For that reason, newDemocracy is currently experimenting with various critical-thinking approaches, especially when interrogating experts.
I first designed these exercises for a trial run by MosaicLab in Hobsons Bay, Victoria, Australia, in 2016. I then modified and used them for the Nuclear Citizens Jury in South Australia later that same year.
At Hobsons Bay, thirty citizens experienced the critical-thinking exercise; in South Australia over three hundred citizens repeated that experience. The latter employed a slightly abbreviated version of the original seven approaches considered essential for the practice of critical thinking—namely, clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, and logic. (In South Australia, “precision” was deleted because of the overlap with “accuracy.”)
Here’s how it worked—and this could be modified for the sortition chamber. Participants in both Hobsons Bay and South Australia were allocated a card displaying a single approach, watched a short film on critical thinking, worked in small groups with people who had the same approach, and together developed potential, specific questions to ask experts. Then, back in the plenary, participants shared what proved to be thoughtful and probing questions.
Participants then engaged in a “speed dialogue” session with multiple experts. In South Australia, the expert speakers were drawn from a Nuclear Stakeholder Reference Group or its nominees. Speakers were instructed to speak for only a few minutes and then allow the participants to fire questions. Participants were in small groups of five to six, and in most cases a range of approaches were represented. Experts rotated through the groups and were interrogated by all participants. Participants were told that the combination of all six approaches needed to be used and satisfied to ensure that critical thinking occurred.
To supplement these sessions in the South Australia Nuclear Citizens Jury, there was a “fact-check” wall that became populated with factual claims available for verification. In a later session, there was an opportunity to alert facilitators to gaps in information or knowledge and how the juror believed this gap could best be addressed (such as via a witness or a written response).
Once back in the plenary, participants again worked with people who were using the same approach to debrief about the questions that worked well and the facts that still needed to be checked. Later, they shared examples of effective questions (that is, those that extracted clear and accurate information, or those that exposed flaws in reasoning). It was good preparation for the next weekend when more experts, of participants’ own choosing, would appear as witnesses.
Participants’ spirit of inquiry meant that their minds were available for critical thinking. The combination of explanation and instruction about the use of critical thinking, along with opportunities to identify questionable facts, or missing information, provided excellent preparation for a selection of further speakers.
At newDemocracy, I have also begun testing an alternative approach to critical thinking, which asks participants to acknowledge their unconscious human tendencies, which I’m calling “personal biases,” as the first step in a public deliberation. Participants do this exercise during the first session (along with critical-thinking exercises on day one), then employ the critical-thinking approaches on day two. The idea is to promote awareness of participants’ own unexamined biases before demonstrating how to interrogate expert knowledge. The seven biases currently being used are anchoring/recency bias, bandwagon effect, blind-spot bias, confirmation bias, information bias, and stereotyping.
Selecting Experts
If a sortition chamber has a group of critical thinkers in its midst, then the subject of expert knowledge is important to examine because that group will need the help of experts to become more fully informed. To be successful, these experts must be not only knowledgeable but also representative of different viewpoints, respected by the legislators, and able to communicate effectively with nonexperts. (This includes having good listening skills and the ability to stay on topic.)
But who should select the experts, and how? For minipublics, it is customary for decision-makers (that is, those convening the event) to select expert speakers—either from within their own networks or from known institutions.
In Australia, it used to be common practice when convening a minipublic to form a steering committee of topic experts who then selected relevant expert witnesses (such as the consensus conference on genetically modified organisms in the food chain in 1999, or the citizens’ jury on container deposit legislation in 2000). One problem with this method is that occasionally there would be gaps in the expertise offered. For example, the consensus conference participants requested an ethicist, and this category had not been identified by the steering committee. For the citizens’ jury, when the beverage and packaging industry speakers withdrew at the eleventh hour, a library of comprehensive information had to be assembled, and the pro-deposit experts were told to stay away so that balanced information could be provided via that library of information.29 Thankfully, with a large enough group, citizens will spot gaps in information and will ask for additional experts or written information to fill that gap.
newDemocracy has taken on board the recommendation of a research report it funded, by the Institute for Sustainable Futures, that stakeholders play an important role in identifying experts. Stakeholders are now routinely engaged early in the life of any minipublic overseen by newDemocracy.
Further, newDemocracy acknowledges that citizens themselves have varying degrees of knowledge and are able to contribute their own knowledge to deliberations. Any evidence that is brought into the room by jurors or experts, however, must be scrupulously interrogated. Hence, we have developed the exercises described above that explore cognitive biases and enhance citizens’ capacity to interrogate their peers as well as expert speakers.
When bringing on board experts, newDemocracy has noted three hazards. One is that randomly selected citizens may not be the best people to select experts to address a particular topic—they don’t yet know what they don’t know. Another problem is that their personal networks may not adequately cover the full spectrum of views on an issue, and the group members are therefore likely to consider experts with a more public profile. The third problem is that even if the group makes its best attempt to choose a “balanced” group of experts, the media and the wider public often suspect the selection was rigged in favor of particular options.
There is also a weakness that can emerge from confirmation bias—our tendency to want experts to confirm rather than challenge our existing views. newDemocracy tries to address this problem by raising awareness of this bias as part of the critical-thinking training. Some of the “sensitivities around evidence, evidence-giving, and evidence giver in citizens’ juries” that are outlined above have also been addressed in a recent study by Roberts and Lightbody.30
Compared with selection by decision-makers, these alternative approaches can produce a better balance of views and avoid public and media suspicion of an unfair selection process. They also give the minipublic members a real voice in selecting the experts they will use.
Hearing from Experts
Choosing experts is one thing. Hearing them is another. Experts may be self-defined or may have obtained relevant credentials. They claim to know or do know a great deal about their specific area of expertise. These experts could be scientists, academics, government employees, special-interest groups, community activists, and more. For many of them, the so-called banking model of learning persists: learners are empty vessels into which knowledge can be deposited and later withdrawn.31 Adults do not learn in this way.32 Experts assume they need only provide a persuasive presentation or a fact-based lecture and their job is done.
One challenge for experts is their audience, when addressing a minipublic. A randomly selected group will have diverse participants—some knowledgeable, some quite ignorant, and many in between. These citizens will be tremendously curious because they are conscientious about giving due consideration to the challenge at hand. That’s their starting point—curiosity.33 Once their burning questions are answered, they will want to dig deeper and will have many more unanswered questions. A process needs to be created that enables these questions to be tackled. There is no point in inviting an expert to offer a lengthy presentation when participants want specific answers to specific questions.
Facilitation
When newDemocracy brings citizens together in a public space, such as a town-hall meeting, we employ a professional facilitator to play that role. It is commonly assumed that any professional facilitator with experience in focus groups or public meetings can run a deliberative forum effectively. Alas, new-Democracy has witnessed many a process go awry, and we have had to replace an otherwise skilled facilitator with someone who more properly understood public deliberation.
Likewise, more formal public bodies, such as legislative chambers, are commonly chaired (in committees) or arbitrated by a speaker (as in parliaments). Having a randomly selected speaker in a sortition assembly would not overcome the adversarial nature of that body, particularly when the physical space emphasizes opposition.
Skilled, independent facilitation and process design will be essential to creating a deliberative sortition chamber. Fortunately, deliberative minipublics teach us a great deal about how to facilitate citizen groups effectively.
A minipublic is not a parliament that is designed to “give people a hearing.” Minipublics aim to share opportunities for voicing ideas and experiences and ask people to broaden themselves to other viewpoints, then work to find common ground. As noted earlier, they are consensus-exploring and consensus-seeking, though not consensus-insisting. Dominant and timid personalities inevitably surface, rigid thinking is exposed, and the range of competencies becomes evident. There might also be issues with language or cultural differences. An experienced facilitator can work with these challenges.
Minipublics are often contested spaces, and facilitators can be pulled into those conflicts. I have witnessed instances where participants in a minipublic have insisted that a facilitator be replaced. Another time, a participant declared the facilitator biased because the decision-making was not going his way, only to have the others in the minipublic demand that the facilitator continue to serve (after the participant took over and tried to lead the group in another direction).
At the same time, an effective facilitator supports a group’s critical-thinking process, which can bring important conflicts to the surface. A minipublic’s diverse membership is meant to resemble the entire population. Participants are often surprised by their ability to work productively within a diverse group, without having to ignore differences, when they have a facilitator who encourages the surfacing of differences of opinion.34 It is not always easy or comfortable, but there is increased understanding of other perspectives and a willingness to accommodate them. When successful, the facilitator models a style of engagement that participants then carry over into smaller group discussions, where they have more responsibility for self-facilitation.
In longer deliberations, it is important for facilitators to provide a range of ways for jurors to interact. A facilitator can change the rhythm of discussion and the size of small groups and can get people moving, physically, through their meeting space. The facilitator can allow time for quiet, individual reflection and offer activities that respect the different learning styles of individuals. All this can keep the deliberation lively and help participants do their best critical thinking.
Always top of mind for the facilitator is to enable the group to find its own way—not to direct or cajole.35 This requires great skill. A good facilitator must honor the group’s own process decisions and be flexible enough to offer whatever microprocess will prove helpful to the group. Sometimes it is important for a facilitator to share his or her knowledge about process. For example, a facilitator might advise the group that voting will not necessarily be helpful because it’s difficult to shift one’s viewpoint once voting has occurred. If the information gathering, or expert questioning, or decision-making is not working well, the facilitator (or sometimes participants) will need to encourage the group to try something new that works better.36 To paraphrase Lao Tzu, leadership is best when the people say “We did it ourselves.”37
A good process design also pays attention to physical space because deliberation need not occur in one room. Sometimes field trips are necessary.38 Participants can learn an enormous amount on such excursions, and the facilitator must keep up with this, while recognizing that a site visit or hands-on experience does not call for the same facilitation techniques as a plenary session or group discussion.
More generally, it is not important that a facilitator knows anything about the topic under consideration. Indeed, it is preferable that they do not have expertise to share (or hide) because it is easy to subconsciously lead a group toward a predetermined answer. Shared ignorance can make the facilitator and participants companions on the journey of discovery.
Because of the complexity of this job, cofacilitation often works well. Two or more facilitators can attend to both task (getting the job done, staying focused on the group’s purpose) and maintenance (ensuring each group members is being heard, that the group is working harmoniously). A team including many assistant facilitators can prove necessary for larger groups, which often do much of their work in very small groups. For example, the South Australia Nuclear Fuel Cycle Jury had over three hundred participants, and its two principal facilitators led a team of nearly twenty cofacilitators. This required tremendous clarity of purpose and consistency, particularly with very clear and shared objectives for each session. This team also managed the challenges of reconvening and reorienting back to shared goals and outcomes, after splitting into separate groups. Even in plenary sessions, multiple sets of ears and eyes, and different process designers, are better than one—especially since modifications often have to be made on the run.
Whether as part of a team or working alone, facilitators manage a delicate balance of distance and personal engagement. To help the group reach an agreement, facilitators must hear what group members are saying to give timely and appropriate feedback, while the group pushes through disagreements and uncertainties on its way to a decision. A facilitator who delights in this experience as much as the participants is a rarity, but it is essential for the group’s success. The facilitator must have a genuine curiosity, willingness, and ability to help the group surface differences and disagreements, while exploring them respectfully, to reach an outcome that works for all.
Given the importance of this role for a sortition chamber, the hiring and firing of a facilitator or facilitators should be controlled by the chamber itself. It need not be a permanent position: facilitators can be hired and let go, as needed. Above all else, it should not be assumed that the skill set for competent facilitation will reside within the randomly selected group. When appointing a facilitator or assessing the merits of an existing one, the chamber must always look for facilitators who view themselves as the servant of the room, not the star of the show.
Decision Rules
Professional facilitators have a tool kit of microprocesses for exploring common ground or prioritizing—whatever is needed to reach a shared decision. The choice of such microprocess will depend on many variables, such as the complexity of the issue or available time.
As for formal decision-making in a sortition chamber, Gastil and Wright suggested secret voting (once known as the “Australian ballot” because of its nineteenth-century origins in my country). Though I understand the need for formal rules in a legislative body, I believe that voting should be the last resort when deliberating because it entrenches positions and is not conducive to exploring consensus. Should voting be required (owing to a failure to reach consensus), then many voting tools are available: the Condorcet method, preferential voting, “preferenda,”39 ranked-choice voting, multi-option voting, and so on. To introduce nuance, it will be worthwhile to expand the voting repertoire beyond those methods currently used in parliaments.
Simultaneity
One additional way to delay the vote, and extend deliberation, would be to convene multiple or simultaneous minipublics that would feed into the assembly, or to divide the assembly itself into simultaneous consensus-seeking groups. I will say more about simultaneous deliberation in the next section. For now, I will focus on the use of simultaneous small groups within the assembly, drawing once more upon the experience of new-Democracy—albeit its experience in local government.
The newDemocracy model for simultaneous minipublics is an attempt to broaden the deliberation to staff members in local government but is transferable to a parliamentary assembly. Here’s what we have done so far, and the lessons we have learned.
In 2012 newDemocracy convened a citizens’ jury, called a citizens’ panel, in Canada Bay (metropolitan Sydney, Australia). The staff person responsible for overseeing that citizens’ panel was inspired to try something similar among members of the council’s staff. She assumed the role of facilitator and the organizer of the random-selection process. She then replicated the activities of the citizens’ panel among a diverse group of staff members; this staff jury included senior office workers, rubbish collectors, road workers, and so on. There was considerable overlap between the recommendations of the two juries.
In 2016, newDemocracy convened a citizens’ jury in Eurobodalla (coastal district south of Sydney). Again, a staff jury was convened to run alongside the community citizens’ jury. This time, the same professional facilitator was used for both. The staff jury was as diverse as the Canada Bay jury, chosen using random selection. Each day of the staff jury followed a citizens’ jury meeting. Again, the two juries’ recommendations overlapped.
Professional staff are a good resource for skills, knowledge, and expertise that is helpful when informing a citizens’ jury. The staff jury and citizens’ jury can be integrated to the extent that they can share background materials and expert speakers. They can report to each other as they build knowledge.
In summary, there are real advantages to convening simultaneous minipublics. These include building trust among staff, building trust between citizens and staff, building trust in government decisions, improving the chances of buy-in when similar recommendations emerge, tapping into the additional knowledge that staff bring, exposing staff to democratic innovations, and improving understanding of all operations across the staff population since they are often unaware of responsibilities beyond their own.
This approach provides a way of integrating bureaucrats with randomly selected groups of citizens, but what about the wider public? The next section considers broadening deliberation beyond the sortition chamber itself.
Deliberation Beyond the Legislature
If a sortition assembly remains as unconnected from the wider population as current legislatures, it will fail. The architecture of government is more than a parliament. Deliberative democrats argue that minipublics should be deeply embedded in government decision-making. Community collaboration should be a natural aspect of the policy cycle and governance in general.40 In this section, I explore four ways to extend deliberation: an agenda-setting forum, proposal teams, the planning cell model, and an accountability forum.
Agenda-Setting Forums
The G1000 model has been used widely in Europe. This method is best used for idea generation and agenda setting, but it has the potential to be combined with other decision-making methods. This would work well in combination with a citizen legislature, to ensure that the wider population (one thousand citizens each time) provides input at an early stage of decision-making. This can help prioritize issues and identify coalitions of participants willing to move an issue forward.41
Proposal Teams
For many years, software designer Brian Sullivan has wrestled with the challenge of deliberating online. His latest design—What Do We Think?—has the potential to involve large numbers in curated conversations, using emails.42 This software platform would enable citizens beyond the assembly to participate as little or often as they wish, but in a way that requires collaboration and thoughtful deliberation to reach agreement on proposals to forward to legislators. Stakeholders and civil-society organizations who have dedicated their lives to advocate positions warrant involvement in the decision-making process so that their ideas are seriously and fairly considered. With this method, multiple conversations are drawn together—curated transparently—to reach agreement. Participants can see the history of the exchanges and how summaries were created. This overcomes the usual problems associated with calling for public input, which can yield thousands of responses, often duplicated, and sometimes expressions that are ill informed or indifferent to the views of others.
Planning Cells
Professor Peter Dienel designed a workable method in Germany (starting in the 1970s and continuing through today) that could be used to take policy development and evaluation to the wider population.43 His planning cell method uses multiple groups of twenty-five that can be convened simultaneously in different locations, thereby resulting in a public deliberation of, say, twenty by twenty-five—or five hundred—randomly selected citizens. The benefit of this model is that common ground can be easily discerned. For example, if nineteen out of twenty groups recommend a particular decision, the “outlier” can be examined closely to understand the divergence. This model could be replicated within a sortition chamber, but also extended beyond its walls to draw in fresh public voices. Either way, a design choice has to be made about whether to run the meetings simultaneously (for example, through a digital linkage) or consecutively, as they are more often convened in Germany.
Accountability
Gastil and Wright’s sortition chamber proposal includes brief notes about an internal oversight mechanism to require a modicum of accountability for the citizen legislators, at least to each other. A more satisfying proposal would go farther, because declining trust in government stems, in part, from the lack of meaningful government accountability to citizens between elections. A chamber without elections would lose even that.
Legislative assemblies often involve annual summarizing addresses to the assembly or the nation—for example, the State of the Union address by the US president to Congress. In Australia, an example would be the budget speech delivered by the federal treasurer to the House of Representatives. In the UK, “question time” serves as an example. These are declaratory one-way statements, meant as a means of accountability on which the media provides commentary.
What’s missing in all of these is an accountability conversation that is representative, deliberative, resistant to manipulation, influential, and trusted by the public. This could give constituents the chance to join this questioning and analysis and talk about how policy questions bear on their lives.
An example that could be modified for the sortition chamber emerged during the French presidential election in 2017, when an intriguing promise was made by candidate Emmanuel Macron. Macron spoke of the importance of accountability to citizens. He proposed an annual speech, a “State of the Union” address to the parliamentary assembly, and another given to an assembly of randomly selected citizens. He offered few details, but a sortition assembly could try this.
The process could start with the minipublic model, to enhance participants’ critical faculties, subject representatives to genuine inquiry, provide adequate background information, and use random selection to deliver a diverse group that reflects the wider population.
Using the Australian example, imagine a model with citizens in the foreground. Organizers could assemble seventy-six citizens (let’s call it “C76”), with twelve randomly selected from each state and two from both mainland territories, as with the current Senate. The selection would be stratified to reflect current demographics according to the latest census data in terms of age, sex, education level, and location (regional, urban, remote). A proportion of these seats could be set aside for indigenous Australians, who have been excluded from political decision-making throughout Australia’s post-eighteenth-century history. This could happen each year—a national lottery, well publicized.
Before the C76 meets, the government publicizes its forthcoming gathering and gives every citizen an opportunity to pose questions for consideration. Within small teams, interested people work in curated online deliberations to develop and agree upon questions to submit. These questions become the starting point for the C76’s early sessions, during which they discuss how to question the sortition chamber about the decisions it has made, or the policy issues still under consideration. This would provide an excellent combination of participatory and deliberative democracy by incorporating public opinion (from the wider population) that leads to public judgment (by the C76 accountability group).
The representatives from the legislature answer questions posted by the C76 in a plenary session, as well as via a rotating small-group model. They need to provide sufficiently clear and direct answers to the satisfaction of the C76. Opportunities are provided to note any facts that require checking, or any gaps in information. The C76 then deliberates and makes recommendations, loosely categorized as stop, start, or continue (a given policy direction). These recommendations are communicated to the sortition chamber and to the wider public, and the chamber has a period of time in which to draft and make public responsive action plans.
Conclusion
I have offered several suggestions for how to achieve a deliberative process within a sortition chamber, as well as beyond it, by drawing it closer to the wider public. In doing so, I drew on my experience at newDemocracy and as an observer of numerous minipublics and other public events. The proposed sortition chamber, however, raises questions that this limited knowledge base cannot answer.
Most of all, newDemocracy’s minipublics are one-off events with the longest spanning several months. What happens when a randomly selected group is convened over a much longer period—years instead of months? How might the group dynamics change? Anticipating such changes will have an impact on the deliberative design—a fascinating challenge for any deliberative designer.
Are randomly selected citizens to become modern-day philosophers, recalling Plato’s belief that only philosophers should rule?44 Being philosophical is consistent with the principles of deliberative democracy, which calls for interrogating evidence and questioning everything, including one’s own biases. Might this overcome the “corporate coup” occurring in some Western democracies by replacing power seekers with deep thinkers?45
More than anything, the overarching question should be, “What can this assembly contribute to a democracy?”46 The shift from a self-selected, political-party-dominated assembly will make a significant contribution to democracy, but this will be insufficient. We know that the architecture of government, by its very design, can lead to democratic deficits.47 Institutional structures must be supported by process design that enables collaboration to surface, and a willingness to partner for the benefit of all.
Gastil and Wright were alert to this, and their suggestions about orientation and training of new representatives will be essential, as will be effective staff support. Gastil and Wright have also recommended an oversight commission. This could be modeled on Australia’s successful state-based Independent Commission Against Corruption. Or if we want to persist with wider involvement of citizens, then citizens’ parliamentary groups could work well as monitors or overseers.48
Above all else, I hope this chapter serves as a call to action. We must avoid seeking only a change in representation by simply substituting randomly selected citizens for elected ones and blithely assuming an entirely different outcome. In any such reform, careful process design will be essential. What happens in an assembly—how decisions are to be made—is of equal importance to how those representatives are selected. Process design can make or break a sortition assembly. Attention must be paid to methods that enable legislators to come to judgment, not merely how to count their personal opinions through voting. Genuine deliberation will be imperative to restore trust in the workings of government.