Institutions of citizen deliberation are a counterweight to partisan electoral politics.
This column was produced and published by NOEMA Magazine.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that societies with inclusive political and economic institutions thrive and sustain themselves, while extractive societies, where wealth and power are concentrated at the top, ultimately fragment and fail.
In the last Noema roundup, we focused on how the benefits of productivity growth and wealth creation fostered by AI can be spread widely through the idea of universal basic capital, where everyone, not just the top 10%, has a share in “owning the robots.” The aim is not just to constrain the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.
The corollary in political life is to balance the power of special interests with the time, money and organizational capacity to dominate electoral democracy at the expense of the average person. This can be done by inviting the broader civil society into governance through new mediating institutions that empower citizen engagement from below as a complement to representative government.
Indeed, as politics at the national level are paralyzed by zero-sum partisan combat or even moving in an authoritarian direction, engaged citizens across the democratic world, in cities, provinces and states, are coming together to forge solutions to the issues that matter most to them, closest to home.
In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from citizens’ assemblies to policy juries and independent citizen reviews of ballot measures that are taking place from Brazil to Europe to the U.S. state of Oregon.
The aim in each endeavor is to convene a gathering of citizens that is indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers. Fishkin’s experience over 30 years consistently demonstrates how the polarization sparked by the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and how common ground is found through structured deliberation.
The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as citizen-driven deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” which directly impacts policy choices.
For example, in Mongolia, of all places, the law requires a deliberative poll by citizens before any proposed change in the constitution can take place.
While Europe is often castigated as being behind in economic innovation, it is often ahead in innovations of democratic governance.
In Ostbelgien, the German-speaking part of Belgium, a permanent citizens’ assembly with rotating participation has been established that convenes to address a particular issue of general public concern. Fifteen hundred residents are invited annually to join through a process of random solicitation, from which 30 are chosen. Meeting on weekends over several months, their recommendations are forwarded to the parliament, which is required to consider how to enact them. This process has led to binding policies such as banning cell phones in middle schools and the provision of government funding to recruit young people into the nursing profession, where there is a shortage.
Increasingly, digital tools are enabling deliberations at scale.
One compelling example is Decidim Barcelona. Launched in 2015, it is the official open-source digital platform for citizen participation in the Catalan capital that allows residents to propose, debate and vote on city-related issues. Over the last decade, it has matured into what is essentially the “soft infrastructure” of “smart city” governance.
On the Decidim platform, citizens can weigh in on city government proposals, including strategic plans involving traffic, tourism, housing and infrastructure, as well as submit their own proposals. If those proposals attain a designated threshold of support by others on the platform, they will become a deliberative case. When citizens recommend actionable items arising from that process, city officials must provide an answer of acceptance, amendment or rejection, along with the reason for that decision. The platform has a self-monitoring function that reports on the follow-through implementation of policy decisions.
From now until 2027, the Decidim process will determine how and in which districts, and for which projects, 30 million euros ($34 million) of the city budget will be spent.
On the other side of the world, in Taiwan, another participatory platform for citizen engagement, vTaiwan, was also set up in 2015. Launched by the island’s first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, it is an online platform that enables thousands of participants to simultaneously discuss an issue and reach a rough consensus.
An AI sorting tool visually tracks the migration of divergent views toward convergence during deliberative sessions when participants are fully informed and exposed to others’ views. Topics tackled have ranged from whether Uber should operate in Taipei to same-sex marriage. So far, the platform has facilitated deliberations on 26 national issues, with more than 80% leading to government action.
The latest iteration of such AI-assisted deliberation is the introduction of Engaged California (EC), which we wrote about in Noema when it launched in February. The Berggruen Institute was closely involved in moving it forward. Set up within the state’s Office of Data and Innovation, it is a three-way tool with a three-step process.
EC enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and respond; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.
The engagement process first invites a wide range of citizens to sign up for deliberation on a given issue and offer proposals that set the agenda for addressing the problem. AI will then sort through those thousands of comments and organize them thematically into discussion areas. The online participants, with access to expert advice and relevant information, then weigh the proposals among each other, refining and ranking actionable items for the government to enact. The AI tool visually displays, in the form of data points, where consensus views congregate.
Just last week, the first use case of EC, focusing on recovery from the firestorms earlier this year in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was completed.
The process whittled down thousands of comments from the affected residents into 19 categories, from which participants prioritized their top five actionable items, which included burying power lines underground, urgently revamping the water supply infrastructure in potential burn areas and streamlining emergency communications. Coordinated by the Governor’s office, the relevant agencies at the state, county and city levels then specified the immediate and long-range remedial government action being taken in response to each of the citizens’ recommendations.
Having proven itself, the Engaged California project is now in the process of being institutionalized as a regular feature of governance in the state alongside elections and the direct democracy of the citizens’ ballot initiative, the recall and the referendum.
As these practices proliferate, a new governing ecosystem is evolving in which the new mediating institutions serve as a counterweight to what the political scientist Robert Dahl called the competitive “polyarchy” of political elites who predominantly hold sway in electoral contests.
