Equality by lot

The first post regarding the recently released report by the UK think tank Demos proposing the use of allotted bodies as part of the British political system is here.

In this part of the post, I highlight some quotes collected by the authors of the Demos “Citizens’ white paper“, from their interviews with former and present ministers and civil servants as well as interviews with members of the public at large. The picture which emerges from those interviews is not new: the elites are frustrated that public is too unruly, and that they are making unreasonable demands on the political system. Some of them hope that allotted bodies could be a tool for getting the people in line.

The people, on the other hand, feel that the elites are self serving at their expense. While the idea of giving decision power to allotted bodies is seen favorably, there is a lot of suspicion that this would be just another elite ploy. A member of the public expresses this attitude so:

Overall, no, I don’t think we’ve got a say. You give your vote to one party. And that’s the end of it, basically, you probably like to believe that you’re doing the right thing by voting for that party. But the proof is in the pudding, and I’ve never seen it happen yet.

A civil servant offers an the explanation for this:

Policymakers, be they the politicians and their advisors or the civil servants, do not look like the country either in all of its entirety, and quite a lot of them will not have had to go to the Jobcentre Plus, or many of them, given the age profile, and particularly younger ones will probably have not had to interact with the social care system yet.

This explanation hints at the principle of distinction – the decision makers are different from the public at large. However, the civil servant does not clarify whether they see this difference as resulting in decision makers lacking necessary knowledge, or a in having different interests and world views. A lack of knowledge can presumably be fixed relatively easily, while the second effect is much more stable.

Naturally, an elected politician thinks this difference between decision makers and the public applies to civil servants but the elected are not like this at all. He or she says:

But if you think about it, [civil servants] don’t engage with people day in day out, having discussions with constituents.

While another civil servant thinks that ministers are simply under too much pressure. If they could only work without too much scrutiny from the media, maybe things could be better:

I think one of the biggest issues is short term thinking… I think the issue is [ministers] are unbelievably busy. They have very, very limited time to engage with the work. I think they’re under huge amounts of pressure to get everything right because one mistake becomes a newspaper headline.

A minister concurs, claiming that they really wanted to get to “understand the problem properly” but found it very difficult to do so “being reshuffled into a ministerial position every two minutes”.

But a “senior political advisor” reveals it is far from just being a matter of having “discussions with constituents” or being “unbelievably busy”:

[T]he views that matter are quite narrow. And much of it is for the theatre of Westminster and feeding the lobby, rather than what it also needs to be about, which is actual delivery for citizens.

The “also” casually inserted into that statement is worth noting.

A civil servant claimed that they “didn’t know how to go and [speak to people]”, another said it was more a matter of arrogance:

There is often quite a degree of arrogance in sort of central policymakers, be that elected politicians or civil servants, or political advisors that ‘I know what the public are going to say about it. I’ve seen YouGov polls, I’ve sat in a couple of focus groups, I know what people say about this, I don’t need a very expensive citizens assembly or whatever… to tell me something I already know’. That is problematic and needs to be overcome, because it’s demonstrably not true.

Or as a minister put it:

I think most politicians know what they want to do and what they should do. So [involving the public] becomes an impediment.

Another claims that it’s not that they don’t want to give away their power, it’s that they are worried that they would be held responsible for decisions they did not make.

Will we still be held accountable for things where we’ve actually allowed people to have a more direct say?

It is inconceivable, it seems, that citizens will actually make important decisions – they are just not competent to make them, they’re “unequipped”, they “haven’t done the work”, they easy prey to media manipulation, they just want more money for education rather than understanding that “the way reading is taught in this country” needs to be fixed.

Nobody elected the people [in these groups], and there’s a risk in ‘public participation’ that actually it’s used by people in the system to hide from their own responsibility. […] I think [it’s important to make] sure that… public participation is a way of getting people heard, but not a means of lumping responsibility back onto them, which they’re not actually equipped to discharge.

There’ll be a danger then of using the media to influence [public participation processes]. I mean, I mean, the media is used all the time, ineffectively, because it’s a difficult beast. But that’s what would happen isn’t it?

If you appoint a panel of twenty people to decide on what should be the priorities for education policy, do you think they’ll say ‘well, we think the way reading is taught in this country is a disaster for disadvantaged kids because they don’t learn properly at school, they don’t learn at home, and this is why we have such high illiteracy rates’… No. They’ll say ‘more school funding’, they’ll say, ‘we need to recruit more teachers, we need better discipline in schools’. But they won’t get into that nitty gritty because they haven’t done the work.

The concern that allotted bodies would be used as a shield from responsibility is of course legitimate, but this assumes that allotted bodies would not be wielding real power to begin with, which would be the more fundamental problem. It seems this is indeed how some members of the elite conceive of how “public involvement” should work.

I think if you’re able to point to the fact that actually citizens were involved and the public was involved, then it gives you a bit more ground to stand on to defend the decision.

Disdain and fear of public opinion is a recurring theme – the need to control the beast.

Showing the public that we think that the normal, everyday voice of people… when exposed to the information and the arguments, that their ideas are valuable, I think is an important signal to send.

Then there is the concern that the allotted would become more informed and invest more time and effort in considering issues, they would become unrepresentative of the uninformed and non-reflexive public.

When you involve people in [a Citizens’ Assembly]..they’re often the kinds of people that get involved in this, and even if they’re not, once you start getting involved and showing them stuff, they begin to understand the issue in more detail than most people do. And therefore, they don’t necessarily react in the way that the public as a whole would. If your intention is to have them as a kind of representative sample, they cease to become representative.

This concern seems to reflect the electoralist thinking of an elected official who is worried about a popular backlash against a decision by an allotted body that goes against popular sentiment. In the current situation, government actions are considered suspect a-priori, but in a well-functioning democratic system the public comes to trust government decisions, based on a track record of delivering good policy. The a-priori attitude should be that the allotted are in a better position to reach good decisions, and only a long term poor track record, or specific outrageous decision, should result in a backlash.

About 2/3 of those surveyed said they would be likely to accept an offer of a seat in a citizens’ assembly organized by the government. A third said pay would be an incentive.

[What would make people more likely to take part?] Maybe by actually seeing a change, you know, just having some sort of security and the knowledge that your opinions will be acknowledged, and will be taken into account, and they will report back on what the outcome has been from the process.

The authors report that “by far” the most common reason provided by respondents for not participating is skepticism about the effect of their work: “We heard this scepticism in our Citizens’ Conversations, that even if they did take part, they didn’t believe it would have any impact on the government’s policy making”.

Interestingly, non-negligible parts of those surveyed disagreed with the idea that the public “should be involved” in decision making in various areas. This ranged from 12% who thought the public should not be involved in making decisions on public services, to 24% who thought the public should not be involved in making decisions on international and defense issues.

I think it’s really complicated. And there’ll be loads of things happening that we don’t understand and aren’t in the public domain. And I think it really needs somebody who understands geopolitics to know whether this is a good idea or not. And I don’t think the vast majority of people would.”

Obviously there’s been talk about things like Ukraine – I don’t think it is down to us to make a decision. But, you know, things like local housing… could do with the public’s help on stuff like that…

It seems quite some trust in government does remain when it comes to managing foreign affairs. Quite a few people are unwilling to trust the elite of their society with running their own country, but are still happy to let them intervene in the business of other countries and applying military power abroad.

It is worth adding a footnote about cost, a point that was mentioned in the excerpts above as well. The authors estimate that the total cost of their proposals, involving multiple allotted bodies, is 20 to 30 million pounds per year. They provide some sort of a breakdown of this sum in part 4 of the report. It is, unfortunately, hard to figure out from the breakdown how much of this is remuneration for the allotted, as opposed to costs of the various professionals that would be involved in the process in one way or another. It worth noting that since the median income in the UK is about 30,000 pounds per year, this sum would be enough to for generous pay to about 500 allotted citizens for full time work in decision making bodies, or for paying, say, 250 allotted citizens and one full time assistant for each. (It is rather clear spending the money in this way would be very far from the Demos proposals, but that is a different matter.) Another point of interest is that according to the report, this sum would represent a mere 5% of the amount spent by the UK government on policy research in civil departments every year. Thus, unsurprisingly, the cost of allotted bodies would be trivial compared to governance cost and more generally compared to public spending.

Filed under: Opinion polling, Participation, Proposals, Sortition |