Sortition and the need for Internal Deliberation

Posted on April 1, 2015 by jgarry20151

What should randomly selected citizens actually do when they are deliberating? Should the deliberation occur in their heads or should it be talk-based? This internal-versus-external deliberation question is core to any discussion of the legitimacy of decisions reached by randomly selected citizens. In the attached paper, presented at a conference in Dublin last Friday, we suggest, to put it bluntly, that talking is bad and imagining is good. We further suggest, and operationalise, distinct ways of facilitating imagined deliberation and present tentative experimental findings as to their relative effectiveness. This draft paper is very much a work in progress but we would welcome any thoughts (including robust disagreement).

Imaginative Randomocracy: A General Model of Citizen Decision Making Applied to Northern Ireland (and the UK)

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 23 Comments »