Equality by lot

Yoram published some anti-lottocracy paragraphs from Christina Lafont recently. It spurred me to read her book and compose a rebuttal, which I’m in the midst of. In the meantime, here are paragraphs from the book in which she urges the integration of advisory mini-publics in current mass democracies, from pages 148-159.

5.2. Deliberative Activism: Some Participatory Uses of Minipublics

Contestatory Uses of Minipublics

[The] considered majority opinion [of a mini-public] differs from current [mass] majority opinion [and] could give minorities a powerful tool to challenge consolidated majorities […].

[A] distinctive and very valuable feature of minipublics is their superior ability to secure effective inclusion of marginalized voices. […] This could lead to more nuanced positions on polarizing issues or it could prompt a general reconsideration of popular but unjust views […].

[I]n order to maintain their legitimacy, all such uses of minipublics would need to ensure the independence of the institutions in charge of organizing them.

To get a clearer sense of the democratic potential of contestatory uses of minipublics, we can focus on an actual example of a deliberative poll that was organized in 1996 in Texas on issues related to electric utility choices. […] Averaged over eight Deliberative Polls, the percentage of the public willing to pay a little bit more on monthly utility bills in order to support renewable energy rose from 52 to 84 percent. […] Based on these results, the Public Utility Commission approved a series of Integrated Resource Plans that […] led to Texas moving from last among the fifty states in the amount of wind power in 1996 to first by 2007 […].

Minipublics could be inserted in the political process not only for the purposes of political contestation but legal contestation as well. […] Civil society groups could include the recommendations of minipublics when filing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, and this could serve as independent evidence to challenge the assumption that raw public opinion actually reflects those views “deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions.” … the Supreme Court could be required to take up their recommendations in the legal reasoning justifying its decisions and to offer an explicit, reasoned justification whenever it rules against them.

Vigilant Uses of Minipublics

Similar, but perhaps even more significant, are cases when minipublics’ recommendations coincide with the [mass] majority opinion but differ from actual policy […]. If minipublics were institutionalized for public consultation purposes regarding specific policy proposals, then their outcome could put additional pressure on government officials to make their policy priorities more responsive to the interests, needs, and values of the citizenry.

One example is a deliberative poll organized in 2015 in Ulaanbataar, the capital city of Mongolia, for public consultation on budget priorities. Confronted with thirteen policy projects, participants consistently ranked “improve heating for schools and kindergartens” as the first priority and downgraded the government’s pet project of building a new Metro system to second-to-last.

[T]he fact that minipublics offer a considered majority opinion can be extremely powerful. It can effectively counteract arguments to the effect that the [mass] majority’s support for some popular policy is due to the citizenry’s lack of information or unfamiliarity with the complexity of the problems involved; or that it is due to irresponsible wishful thinking […].

Whatever the minipublics’ conclusions may be, the simple fact that their assessment would be available would be a tremendous improvement over the status quo.

Anticipatory Uses of Minipublics

But there is another form of misalignment that can be even more worrisome from a democratic perspective. These are situations when the public does not have any opinion at all about the issues in question.

Recently created supranational political units such as the European Union would be particularly suitable contexts for the anticipatory uses of minipublics. Since there is no unified public sphere throughout Europe and, consequently, no consolidated public opinion on European political issues as of yet, minipublics can provide a preview of what a genuinely European perspective on such issues might look like and upon the kinds of considerations, interests, and views that are likely to resonate among citizens once they learn to adopt a European (instead of a purely national) perspective. […]

Under current conditions of globalization, inserting minipublics into transnational political processes could have, in my opinion, the highest democratizing impact. From a participatory perspective, the function of minipublics would not be to directly shape the policies in question, but to enhance the visibility of what is at stake in each case so as to enable a proper public debate among citizens. In that context, their primary role would not be to recommend some policies over others, but rather to prompt the dissemination of sufficient information so as to be able to identify, among the various policies under consideration, those policies whose potential impact on citizens’ well-being, fundamental rights, and interests is so high that the citizenry needs to become informed about them […].

Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory |