Equality by lot

In 2020 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published the report of its Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

The report is a useful example of how the liberal U.S. establishment views the state of the political system and for the kind of ideas it generates for institutional reforms. A set of self-appointed reformers, highly credentialed by the establishment, functions as the tribunes of the people. The report is ostensibly based on “listening sessions” held with various groups in the U.S., but of course the entire exercise is controlled from beginning to end by elite actors and it is completely up to the commission members to select the makeup of the groups “listened to” and to channel their “input” into the a set of recommendations. In fact, regarding the makeup of the groups in the “listening sessions”, the report specifically asserts that “[t]he intent of this strategy was not to collect a statistically representative sample, but to cast a wide net and surface the personal experiences, frustrations, and acts of engagement of a diverse array of Americans”.

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens. Since 1780, projects that work to bolster American citizens’ understanding of and engagement with the institutions of their government have been a hallmark of the Academy’s work.

The background for the commission’s work is a grim picture of disintegration of social cohesion and distrust in institutions. As is standard practice, the real-world causes of this situation are left unclear. Abstract economic issues like inequality and mobility are mentioned, and it is asserted (citing Gilens and Page) that “[c]ongressional priorities, studies have shown, now align with the preferences of the most affluent”. However, real-life, specific outcomes of those “congressional priorities”, such as food insecurity, lack of medical care, indebtedness, declining life spans, or incarceration rates are not discussed.

The public’s approval rate for Congress—our national legislature and the first branch of government established in the Constitution, charged with articulating the will of the people—hit a historic low of 9 percent in 2013. Now rates hover around a still-meager 25 percent. Income and wealth inequality levels have exceeded those on the eve of the Great Depression. Social mobility has stagnated. Inequities continue to track lines of race, gender, and ethnicity, revealing deep structural unfairness in our society. A surge in white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant vitriol has flooded our politics with sentiments corrosive to the ethic of a democratic society, while people of color continue to confront barriers to opportunity and participation. At all levels of our system, voter turnout remains low in comparison to other advanced democracies. Trust in institutions has collapsed while an online culture of gleeful, nihilistic cynicism thrives. Fewer than one-third of Millennials consider it essential to live in a democracy. Partisan rancor has not reached the intensity of Civil War–era America—but it is nonetheless very high. When Americans are asked what unites us across our differences, the increasingly common answer is nothing.

The commission makes no attempt at a systematic analysis and critique of the existing system. The notion that the political system was designed as an oligarchical system, and that it is largely working as intended, is never considered. In fact, electoralism is enshrined in the definition of democracy offered in the report:

DEMOCRACY In the twenty-first century, democracy refers to
a political system in which legislative and chief executive decision-makers are elected by majority or plurality rule by eligible voters, with a presumption that the franchise approaches universal adult suffrage among legal citizens and that minority-protecting mechanisms are also in place.

Correspondingly, the 31 recommendations of the commissions range from the insipid and naive to the self-serving, e.g., increasing the size of congress, multi-member congressional districts, campaign finance reform, having elections take place on Veterans Day, instituting a year of national service, and increasing funding for research “supporting social and civic infrastructure”.

Along these lines is recommendation 3.3:

Promote experimentation with citizens’ assemblies to enable the public to interact directly with Congress as an institution on issues of Congress’s choosing.

For Congress to become a truly responsive institution, the House of Representatives must engage directly with the people. Just as constituents of individual districts should, through deliberation, inform the decision-making of their individual members, representative samples of America should come together collectively to deliberate about issues of national importance and submit their recommendations to Congress. These representative groups of citizens are known as “citizens’ assemblies.”

Citizens’ assemblies rebuild and foster trust in the institution of Congress and get the public more engaged and vested in policy outcomes. The value of this work can be seen in other Western democracies working to engage more of their citizens and give them a better seat at the table in decision-making on critical policy issues. The British Parliament, for example, has authorized a national citizens’ assembly on the issue of climate change that will take into account the outcomes of five regional citizens’ assemblies. Ireland and Portugal, for their part, have both implemented national citizens’ assemblies that led to tangible policy outcomes. In Ireland, recommendations from the citizens’ assembly led the Irish Parliament to pass legislation to protect gay rights. An electronic version of a citizens’ assembly is being implemented in Taiwan.

The United States lags many of its democratic peers with respect to citizens’ assemblies, but we nonetheless have a proven track rec­ord that can inform future experimentation. In 2010, AmericaSpeaks organized a citizens’ assembly on debt and the national deficit. Three thousand five hundred Americans in fifty-seven locations, linked by video, were invited to deliberate on America’s fiscal future. Their recommendations were submitted to the Senate and House budget committees and were critical to the work of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan presidential commission on deficit reduction led by Senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. More recently, CommonSense American—an initiative of the National Institute for Civil Discourse—put a set of challenging policy issues before a representative sample of Americans whose recommendations will form part of the policy debate in Congress. Those issues included the funding of Pell Grants, the problem of surprise emergency-room billing, and possible reforms to the legislative calendar.

These examples demonstrate that the public is ready to grapple with policy issues and engage with Congress as an institution, and that we have the methods and technology needed to do this productively. Members of Congress now need to exert the political will to make it happen, in part by harnessing the power of citizens’ assemblies.

It is quite clear from the last paragraph that the authors are addressing themselves to the political elite, rather than to the public. It is the political elite that needs to be convinced that the public is up to the task and that it can be managed productively, if the congresspeople set up the necessary apparatus. The obvious point that congress would aim to set up citizen assemblies to promote its aforementioned self-serving priorities rather than to address the problems of the public seems to have escaped the commission members. Crucial questions about institutional setup are absent altogether, with the emphasis being on assuring the political elite that their power is not threatened.

In a different context, the authors quote a citizen saying:

I have gone to so many public hearings and looked at the panel and [thought], ‘You don’t really care what I have to say.’ I just wasted two hours driving to Augusta in a snowstorm, and you have already made up your mind on what you’re going to do.

The authors do not provide any reason to think that their proposed citizen assemblies would be any different.

On a more practical, and even personal, level, the report has come and gone and left no mark on the political system or on the public conversation. Did the authors really expect that their recommendations would become a tool for progress? Or was it just another day at the office devoted to enhancing their credentials and their connections within elite circles?

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition |