Macron’s vaccine ‘citizen panel’ is doomed to fail

Posted on January 8, 2021 by keithsutherland

A column by Keith Sutherland and Alex Kovner in the The Spectator:

France has a problem when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has so far only given out around 5,000 vaccines, and France has one of the lowest levels of trust in the coronavirus vaccine in the world, with only 40 per cent of the public saying they want to be inoculated. Faced with this trust deficit, Macron has proposed a 35-member ‘citizen panel’ to oversee France’s vaccination programme. The body, made up of a random selection of French citizens, will be responsible for monitoring and advising the government when it comes to the vaccine roll-out.

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Sortition in 2020

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Continuing the series of yearly reviews appearing on this blog every December since 2010, in this post I review the 2020 sortition-related events that appear to me most significant or interesting. I invite readers to add their own reviews in posts or comments.

The most prominent sortition-related development of 2020 was without a doubt the work of the French Citizen Climate Convention. This body of 150 allotted citizens started its work in back in 2019 and has published its report in June. It received significant media attention in France even before it published its report, but public attention has intensified over the last 6 months. In fact one commentator was alarmed that discussion of sortition in France has reached pandemic proportions.

In the face of the expected pushback from elite groups, the French public has shown significant support for the CCC itself and for its recommendations. Toward the end of the year warnings have been raised about what appears to be the government’s attempts to abandon or water-down the implementation of the Convention’s proposals. In late breaking news, Macron has indicated that he is aiming to put constitutional changes aligned with the Convention’s proposals up for a referendum.

The work of the CCC and the aftermath of its report received scant coverage in the English-speaking media (with the sole exception of Equality-by-Lot).

At the same time, sortition made more modest progress in other countries as well. It was implemented or discussed in multiple contexts in Germany: 1, 2, 3, 4. Sortition was also implemented or proposed in Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, the United States, and Scotland.

In the United States, sortition got some fairly high profile exposure by Malcolm Gladwell (1, 2). On three different occasions sortition was proposed by undergraduate students as a replacement for the electoral system. It was also proposed as a way to achieve citizen oversight over the police.

Finally, two sortition-related books of interest were published this year. One is a hefty report published by the OECD on “Innovative Citizen Participation”. The report makes a historical summary of hundreds of cases of citizen participation in government, draws its conclusions and makes recommendations. The second book is by notorious sortition activist Paul Rosenfeld. In stark contrast to the OECD publication, Rosenfeld’s book, a combination of an autobiography and a sortition manifesto, makes for an easy and entertaining afternoon read.

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Democracy Without Elections Board Selected by Lottery

Posted on December 3, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A news release by Democracy Without Elections.

Directors for national board selected by lottery

The advocacy group “Democracy Without Elections” has decided to practice what it preaches and select its entire Board of Directors by lottery. Using a lottery, Democracy Without Elections (www.DemocracyWithoutElections.org) is able to form a diverse board and include input from less active members. The new Board, with Directors from across the country, will meet online later this month.

Democracy Without Elections is a grassroots member-driven organization that promotes better decision-making across all levels of government and in organizations ranging from Boards of Directors to student government. The use of democratic lotteries to select the decision-makers coupled with deliberation as the process to make the decisions are the hallmark of the group.

The organization specifically advocates for democratic lotteries to be used to select members in legislative bodies like Congress. The group also supports making fundamental changes in the way those bodies operate: replacing lobbyists, coalitions and partisan politics with deliberation.

Democracy Without Elections is a proponent of citizens’ assemblies as well. Citizens’ Assemblies are lottery-selected deliberative groups which make recommendations to legislative bodies. Each citizens’ assembly is tasked with one challenging issue like abortion or a specific ballot initiative.

The organization has members from Alaska to Florida and from New England to California. We welcome new members who can join us at www.DemocracyWithoutElections.org. We hold monthly online meetings that include relevant guest speakers and reports from Interest Groups.

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The French Citizen Climate Convention: a provisional analysis

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Yoram Gat

It has been about 5 months since the French Citizen Climate Convention has published its proposals, and with acrimony setting in about the de-facto shelving of much of its work, various conclusions are being drawn about the CCC process. As usual, the conclusions almost invariably confirm the existing notions of the analyst. My analysis is no different in this sense: it seems to me that to a large extent each party to the process has played its expected role and thus the outcomes are quite predictable. I will highlight however two points that have been established empirically that should not have been taken for granted regarding how things would turn out.

Here are points about the CCC process that in my opinion are worth noting:

1. The process was launched as a government response to the Gilets Jaunes, a mass movement whose agenda was not just anti-government but also anti-electoralist. A popular initiative process (Referendum d’initiative citoyenne, or RIC) and to a lesser extent sortition were a major part of the discourse of the Gilets Jaunes. The rise of the Gilets Jaunes movement was triggered by what the government presented as environmentalist policy – increasing the gas tax. Thus having a non-electoralist process for generating environmental policy proposals was a direct capitulation to GJ demands. This origin of the body as a direct, stop-gap response to mass protest is very different from the origins of other allotted bodies, such as the Irish constitutional conventions. Such bodies, even if they were in some way a response to public disaffection with the status quo, were constituted in a much more carefully controlled manner by established power.
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Carolan: Ireland’s Constitutional Convention: Behind the hype about citizen-led constitutional change

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A 2015 paper by Eoin Carolan, Professor and Director of the Centre for Constitutional Studies at University College Dublin, takes a skeptical look at the conventional claims around Ireland’s Constitutional Convention which led to the legalization of same-sex marriage. (Note that later there was also a different allotted body constituted in 2016 which was called a “Citizens’ Assembly” and which led to the legalization of abortion.)

The article suffers from the standard pro-status-quo bias of showing no recognition of the urgency of the need to address the problems with the existing system. As usual, recognition of problems with the established system is phrased in terms of “public perception”, “disenchantment”, “disillusionment” and a “crisis of confidence”, rather than in terms of the facts of ongoing consistent systemic atrocious policy. Thus, while the paper rightly subjects the Convention process to a series of critical examinations, it seems to assume that the status quo is a legitimate default alternative. That said, I find that the article asks good questions, makes good observations and is generally very useful.

Abstract

Ireland’s Constitutional Convention is one of a number of recent examples of ordinary citizens becoming involved in constitution-making processes. These participatory experiments are often praised by democratic scholars. That has been the case with the Convention, which has already been cited as an example for any future process of constitutional change in Britain. This article argues that the Irish experience has been oversold. The process in fact suffered from a number of serious limitations that undermine its claims to either representative or deliberative legitimacy. The approach taken to its composition, agenda, expert advice and evidence was problematic in several respects: opaque, apparently ad hoc and with inadequate attention to the risks of bias and manipulation by elite actors. The Irish experience provides a warning about how the symbolic value of the ordinary citizen can be exploited for political purposes.

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Extinction Rebellion claims the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly on the climate is rigged

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Yoram Gat

The Scottish Citizens’ Assembly on the Climate Emergency is an allotted body created by the 2019 Climate Act that is mandated to answer the question “How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in a fair and effective way?”.

The Extinction Rebellion organization was part of the process of setting up this body and its procedures. It has now quit the process claiming that the process has been rigged. “Rather than enabling a full spectrum of opinions to be heard, so people can come to their own conclusions, and make their own assessment of the value of current policy and targets, business as usual has been allowed to creep in and then take over.”

In an op-ed written by Extinction Rebellion members, they explain that civil servants have control over the design of the proceedings and those civil servants are happy with the status quo. In terms of how the rigging is done, they say:

Deliberations won’t be allowed to start until people have fully understood the difference between adaptation and mitigation responses, and the different government policy frameworks at a national and international level.

Those of us who have been talking about climate in different communities for years know very well this background understanding is not only not necessary – there’s a huge risk of disengagement from the very people we need to hear from.

People need to understand enough of the science, especially in terms of real-world impacts, but then need to judge for themselves the effectiveness or otherwise of our response so far: have the powerful’s many fine words led to any changes on the ground?

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Sicard: Replacing representative democracy with participative democracy is dangerous, Part 2/2

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Yoram Gat

This is the second and final part of a translation of an article by Claude Sicard published in July 2020 in Le Figaro. The first part is here.

In order to put an end to the Gilets Jaunes revolt, Macron embarked in January 2019 upon what he called the “Great National Conversation”. This has consisted of organizing huge meetings in city halls with the participation of mayors and the local elected politicians, and urging the population to share their comments in person in during the meetings or through an online platform. Macron himself made many animated appearances in these meetings all over the country, which usually lasted more than four hours. Macron would take off his jacket and respond to all the questions addressed to him. Meetings took place in more than 10,000 municipalities, and 1.9 million comments were made. The “Great Conversation” was concluded with a press conference on April 25th, 2019. On that occasion Macron said: “I wished to meet you in order to draw the main lessons from the Great National Conversation and to propose to the nation directions for a new way that our citizens are looking for, a new way for our republic”. He has described the Great Conversation as “an unprecedented exercise for contemporary democracies”. This was therefore a mass popular consultation whose goal was to orient the actions of public institutions over the coming years.

That was followed by a second step. Following the coronavirus crisis, on May 25th, the “Health Conference at Ségur”. The crisis required great dedication from health professionals in order to make up for grave weaknesses of our public hospital system. It was therefore necessary to take their many demands into account without any further delay. Macron saw himself as forced to try to address as well as possible those demands, having been the first praise the exceptional dedication of the health personnel during the crisis, going as far as calling the first responders “national heros”. Macron initiated another great consultation, this time among 300 principal actor in the health sector. This was a second exercise, then, in participative democracy. The goal of this consultation was particularly ambitious. The prime minister defined it as follows in his opening speach: “To construct together the future of the hospital, to heal a system that was blocked and impoverished, and build a new health system organization in each territory”. The participants were given an incredibly short period for reforming our public health system: a month and a half at the most.
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Reporterre: The members of the Citizen Climate Convention rebel against Macron, Part 3/3

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Yoram Gat

This is the third and last part of a translation of an article published by Reporterre following the aftermath of the French Citizen Climate Convention. Part 1, Part 2.

The situation mystifies the citizens. “We were sent to the front because government has to take responsibility”, says Willaim Aucant. “For us it is out of the question to re-debate our measures. We simply want to explain to those measures to all the actors”, he explains. The task is not simple. “France in its totality” is much more discordant than the allotted “France in miniature”.

“We are getting to a time when the citizens are going to come to reassert themselves”

“The government’s strategy is very clever”, observes Yolande Bouin. “While the cameras are trained on 150 regular folks, the executive short-circuits government bodies and civil society. We find ourselves the only ones speaking on the issue and the environmental organizations are completely marginalized. It’s absurd! We would like to have the doors of the ministries open to the activists, they know much better than us about the climate!” She regrets “the lack of countervailing powers and of oversight to monitor the actions of the executive”. The balance of powers is tilted. “The government dominates the discussion”, she emphasizes. In the media, the comments of the ministers are picked up more often than those of the citizens. The voices of the Convention’s guarantors, Cyril Dion and Laurence Tubiana, who are increasingly critical of the government, and of political supporters, like Matthieu Orphelin and Éric Piolle, do not get heard either.

“We are tired”, admits Grégoire Fraty, former president of the Association of the 150. “This experience, enriching as it is, has lasted for over a year. We all have jobs, family lives, it is complicated to find times in the evenings and the weekends for meetings and lectures”, he says. “It’s good to be in the midst of it, but at the end of the month that’s not what puts food on our tables.”

The citizens have not official standing, no legal existence. This weakness has already been observed by several legal experts such as Arnaud Gossement. “It is necessary to create a legal status for engaged citizens”, says Grégoire Fraty. As of now the citizens remain waiting. “For the moment, we do not boycott and do not throw a fit, but we would like to see things said clearly, truthfully and plainly”, he says.
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Reporterre: The members of the Citizen Climate Convention rebel against Macron, Part 2

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Yoram Gat

This is the second part of a translation of an article published by Reporterre following the aftermath of the French Citizen Climate Convention. Part 1 is here.

There are some signs that the Convention is becoming an opposing force to the government. On October 14th about ten citizens, coming from all over the country, set up a protest in front the National Assembly. They protested nothing less than an “act of treason”. Yolande Bouin, who arrived early in the morning from Douarnenez (Brittany) was angrier than ever. In front of an audience of journalists and reporters she announced:

The government is openly jerking us around. I have the feeling of having participated in a big scam to greenwash the President and to buy him some time. Still, 4 or 5 million Euros have been spent on this.

One of her companions, Isabelle Robichon, said she has the impression “of being taken for a sidekick”. Pierre Ruscassie, another citizen, laments “this series of small steps of reversal”. A week before, the MPs of the coalition voted for a law that re-authorized the use of neonicotinoides and for an emergency law that sharply violated environmental rights. “It’s a mess”, says Matthieu Sanchez to Reporterre. “Right now, it’s like fireworks. We don’t know anymore where to look. Between the comments of some ministers and the anti-environmental laws, we can’t work in a reasonable manner anymore.”
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Reporterre: The members of the Citizen Climate Convention rebel against Macron, Part 1

Posted on November 7, 2020 by Yoram Gat

An article in Reporterre, original in French.

The members of the Citizen Climate Convention rebel against Macron
November 2, 2020
Gaspard d’Allens

Anger mounts among the members of the Citizen Climate Convention. Left to “face the lobbies” all by themselves, disappointed that many of their proposals have been thrown out or unraveled, some lose their energy, others do battle.

Promises oblige only those who believe them. The same is true for Emmanuel Macron’s commitments. It seems so long ago that the President has talked, with great gusto, in the gardens of the Élysée about the climate crisis and the adoption “without filtering” of 146 out of the 149 measures of the Citizen Climate Convention. “I want to have all your proposals implemented as soon as possible. Let’s go! Let’s act!”, he exclaimed to the sustained applause of the citizens, reburnishing, on the cheap, his environmental credentials.

Four months later, however, the ground covered is limited and motion has nearly stopped. Discussion of the bill handling the proposals of the CCC was postponed to next year instead of being discussed this fall. The idea of a constitutional referendum has disappeared and many proposals were dismissed or watered down. Time is passing and opportunities are lost. The stimulus plan and the financing bill could in fact have included the Convention’s measures but they did not.
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