The Solution: Open Democracy Embracing Deliberative Processes
Let's talk about citizen-centered democratic systems
Yesterday, I addressed several issues with our current democracy. I discussed how votes are essentially pointless, and citizens are excluded from the decision-making process until it’s time to vote on a whole bundle of legislation. It’s not working for us. How can we resolve these issues? Read on to learn more about the awesome tools that can create a citizen-centered approach.
There are high bar things and easy, low-hanging fruit. Let’s look at a couple of different layers today: Deliberation and sortition.
What is a deliberative process?
A deliberative process is with a facilitator who has a strategy. They get a diverse group of people together to think through an issue. They give them a bunch of information about a topic and clarify the actual question they’re trying to answer.
People will talk about it, share their opinions, and maybe influence each other. Out of that conversation, some questions will come up that need answers.
“Wait a minute! I didn't know that that was true. Is that true?”
“Whoa, how does this work?”
“What data do we have that this is possible?”
Then the facilitator introduces experts into the process, and the people can choose the experts. The experts will answer the people's questions; the group will talk about it more and come up with some more questions. The process repeats until the group determines the solutions that work for everyone. This approach is super effective with diverse groups. Various facilitation models can do this: An example is Convergent Facilitation, which Miki Kashtan describes in her book The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Reach Breakthrough Collaborative Decisions.
I wrote about collaborative communication a couple of weeks ago. So this process can get people to come together and truly think something through. Now, we could apply this to Congress or a city council, but it works great with a group of citizens.
There are ways to bring in the different stakeholders and the people with interests, even corporations. They can have a piece of this conversation. But, it takes time. It can feel like, “Whoa, we don't have time to think this issue all the way through. We're in a hurry. This is urgent!”
Sure, some urgent things need fast decisions. However, the huge issues, including policing, guns, climate, and election laws, need proper focus. If we could have a two-to-four-year-long deliberative conversation about it, we could come up with answers that people were really on board with. We’ve already spent decades debating these things, and we’ll still be debating them in decades if we keep trying to find quick answers.
The U.S. Navy Seals have a saying: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” And I think that applies here. If we try to get our solutions quickly and just get it done now, we will actually slow ourselves down by moving too fast. We will have to revisit this for years if we try to rush the solution.
But deliberation is fast. If we think it all the way through, we can develop some amazing ideas. There's something powerful about deliberation creating a sustainable outcome that people are on board with, which really has the possibility of working for a long time.
If we have a deliberative process, when new questions come up, we can just deliberate more because that's how life is. It's going to keep on going, everyone!
So, who are these people in the deliberation process? We have well over 300 million people in the United States, and most of them are adults. That's a lot of people to have in one conversation, even if we just took a city. How do we select people for this deliberative process? Here is where sortition comes in.
What is sortition?
You can think about sortition as a lottery, and it’s the same process we use to select juries. It's a random sampling of the population.
People get an invitation, and they come in and talk. That random sampling gets the whole picture. We have the people who strongly care about the issue on one side and people who really care about the other side. Then we have the people who don't even know what we're talking about.
Those people need to be in the conversation because they will all be impacted by it. It’s important to have the say of regular people, not professionals, experts, lobbyists, or advocates. If you have 15-25 folks, you can get a pretty good sampling of the population.
That group can go through that deliberative, transparent process. There are various critiques of this idea.
You might be thinking, “Hold on, just regular people making decisions for us? But they're not that smart, not that educated. They probably don't even know what they're talking about!”
There's a lot of evidence showing that this process really works. Group intelligence tends to be far superior to any individual's intelligence. There's also lots of evidence that people can change their minds. Even if they come in strongly in a position, they can learn, make decisions, and change their ideas. There's a book by Trammell Crow and Bill Shireman called “In This Together–how Republicans, Democrats, capitalists, and activists are uniting to tackle climate change and more."
This book specifically talks about how these groups need to come together to think about climate change and the environment. Of course, this applies to most of our political issues. They talk about how 70% of the population tends to be more interested in solving problems than whatever their position is. And 30% of the population cares more about their stance than actually solving the issue. In this random sampling process, there can be a conversation where the majority of the people are trying to solve the problem.
Polarization ignores this. Instead, it focuses on the voices that staunchly believe in one side. Our media definitely found the benefit of that. The best clickbait on the internet is about polarizing topics. They get a lot of airtime. But actually, most people want to figure things out.
We can give them information to learn more and make better decisions. So sortition-based thinking is a great idea. This process is called a citizen assembly, and there are links for different kinds of citizens’ assembly processes and groups at the bottom of this essay. We’ve used it everywhere, from Oregon to Iceland. Check out citizens’ assemblies: One very interesting one I recommend checking out is an organization called of by for*.
I get that this sounds like a lot. I'm not sure if we're ready to replace our representative government with just a government run by citizens. I can understand your concerns. That's okay. We can take smaller steps. We can start with authentic citizen engagement right now using the system we have. Politicians could lead this, and we can demand that politicians engage with the people impacted by something before making decisions.
In my local city council in Oakland, I’ve observed a problem with our current citizen engagement. Most people get involved in the process or share their opinion when that big bundle of legislation is about to be voted. People come and say, “I don't like this. I like this.” But by the time something gets to where an elected representative is voting on it, that decision's already been made.
We need to go way upstream, which is where citizen engagement can be really powerful. Instead of thinking about democracy as a yes/no, win/lose, or up-down voting situation, what if we thought about this as a consensus-building effort? What if our representatives looked at the diverse population they represented and said, “Wow, I want to find something that everyone here can get on board with.”
Let's try to figure out how we can reach a consensus. Again, we have the tools for that: Sortition, a citizen assembly, and a deliberative process, to name a few. At the bare minimum, there are a couple of other possibilities.
Consensus-building tools
There are really cool consensus-building digital platforms: Tools where tens of thousands of people can participate in a certain situation. Some examples are Ethelo and Pol.is.
For example, a council could discuss what they will do about a park they have funding for. Instead of bundling it into some piece of legislation, people get a chance to choose what happens during the decision-making process.
Do people want more tennis courts, a dog park, or a playground? Is safety more important than beauty or all these different things? Do they want the money spent on public art?
They can even introduce sliders showing how people feel: “I value this, I don’t value this, and I would allocate this much money here.” Then they realize they've allocated all their money, so they can’t use it for something else. Representatives and politicians can use these tools right now to gather opinions as they're trying to figure out what to do about various things. That's a far cry from “We've been bundling it all up into one thing. Please vote yes or no.”
Stakeholder impact statements
Another thing that we could use in our process is an idea from a friend, colleague, and former podcast guest of mine, Manuel Herrera. He talks about creating a stakeholder impact statement. If you're bringing a piece of legislation, there are many questions to address:
What's the problem you're trying to solve?
Who are the stakeholders? Who is going to be impacted by this?
Who's in favor of this? Why?
Who's not in favor of this? Why? What did they say?
How have you considered their ideas? Did you give them the chance to talk to each other?
Would you be willing to share some of their words?
Imagine if someone was introducing a new law, and they were able to say, “I've spoken with everyone who's impacted by this. These are the different opinions. I’ve addressed some of these concerns.” That level of thoughtfulness, knowing that they actually spoke to all the people, that's amazing. It could be super powerful to take opinions into account and include people long before the legislation comes in.
Values of Open Democracy
Some of these values are from the book Open Democracy by Helene Landemore, "reinventing popular rule for the 21st century." There’s a really great podcast interview where she talks with Ezra Klein about this concept called “A Radical Proposal for True Democracy.” (Apple/Spotify)
The idea of open democracy is that people should be involved in the decisions impacting their lives. These are really important values. Those are values of inclusion. We need to make sure that we include everyone, not just those who agree with us. We need equality of voice and votes. True equality where no one is better or worse than anyone.
Making sure that there's a facilitated process, that people can participate in decisions, and political transparency: These are the values we need in our democracy. That's the essence of what the Omni-Win Project is about.
We don't know if this is going to work. We don't know if we can transform our democracy into one where citizens participate. Everything needs to slow down enough to make sure it's deliberative. People will need to learn to trust what the representative population sample says. Maybe people don’t even want to participate further upstream in this thing.
We have a choice right now.
As I said earlier, democracy is struggling. It's not working out very well. People don't trust that politicians represent them, and they disapprove of how things are going. We know that polarization is freezing up our system. When it comes to really important long-term issues, we are not having good conversations about them. Our representative democracy, two-party system is a huge issue.
So what can we do about that? We can go in two directions here.
We can go down the path of more democracy, figuring out what matters to the people impacted by an issue, and start to value that. It'll be slightly less efficient but way more sustainable and effective. It takes advantage of the value of multiple perspectives looking at any given issue.
The other direction we can go is a very popular choice: Authoritarianism. We can go down the path of a leader telling us the answer and ignoring what the people say. We can make fast decisions, and maybe there's a benevolent dictator there that wants to work things out for us. Who knows if that's going to work out.
So, we either go towards more democracy or less democracy. I'm not really into binaries; I'm a fan of both/and, but I think there's a real choice here. Let’s make the right one.
The near future for the Omni-Win Project
The Omni-Win Project will be promoting all these tools to better our democracy. Just to give you a sense of the arc of where all this is going:
Next week will be about philosophical frameworks, cultural trajectories, and the folks thinking about how to understand what is going on.
The week after that will be about how we prepare ourselves as individuals to open up to listening to other people. After that, I’ll break down all of these: Citizen assemblies, corruption, facilitation, complexity, stakeholder impact statements, etc.
I'm launching a new podcast this summer called the Omni-Win Project. I'm going to be talking to the experts in these different fields. We’re going to talk about how to move things forward. In the first season, I'll give the guests a chance to tell us what they’ve got going on, unpack some of their ideas, and see what else I think we should be thinking about. If you want to stay tuned for all of this, follow my YouTube channel below, or subscribe here. I'm excited to be on the journey with you.
Here are some extra resources:
Fractal Friends episode "Healing the Political Divide" with Bill Shireman
Fractal Friends episode "The Emergence of Wise Democracy" with Tom Atlee
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video of this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
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