Can citizen deliberation address the climate crisis? Not if it is disconnected from politics and policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by John Boswell, Rikki Dean and Graham Smith: “..Modelled on the deliberative democratic ideal, much of the attention on climate assemblies focuses on their internal features. The emphasis is on their novelty in providing respite from the partisan bickering of politics-as-usual, instead creating space for the respectful free and fair exchange of reasons.

On these grounds, the Global Citizens’ Assembly in 2021 and experimental ‘wave’ of climate assemblies across European countries are promising. Participating citizens have demonstrated they can grapple with complex information, deliberate respectfully, and come to a well thought-through set of recommendations that are – every time – more progressive than current climate policies.

But, before we get carried away with this enthusiasm, it is important to focus on a fundamental point usually glossed over. Assemblies are too often talked about in magical terms, as if by their moral weight alone citizen recommendations will win the day through the forceless force of their arguments. But this expectation is naive.

Designing for impact requires much more attention to the nitty-gritty of how policy actually gets made. That means taking seriously the technical uncertainties and complexities associated with policy interventions, and confronting the political challenges and trade-offs required in balancing priorities in the shadow of powerful interests.

In a recent study, we have examined the first six national climate assemblies – in Ireland, France, the UK, Scotland, Germany and Denmark – to see how they tried to achieve impact. Our novel approach is to take the focus away from their (very similar) ‘internal design characteristics’ – such as random selection – and instead put it on their ‘integrative design characteristics’…(More)”.

Citizen assemblies and the challenges of democratic equality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Annabelle Lever: “…Creating a citizens’ assembly that truly reflects society as a whole isn’t so simple, however. In particular, only a very small percentage of those invited to participate actually agree to do so. According to a 2017 study published European Journal of Political Research, the precise percentage depends on how large, complex and time-consuming the process is likely to be. It ranges from 4% for larger, more onerous assemblies to 30% in a couple of exceptional cases, and averaging out at 15% across all countries and all forms of assembly. As a consequence, the formal equality of opportunity that unweighted lotteries promise tends to result in assemblies skewed to the socially advantaged, the partisan, and those most confident in their practical and cognitive abilities, whatever the reality.

To create an assembly that is more descriptively representative of the population – or one that looks more like us – several approaches are used. One is to have an initial phase of unweighted selection followed by a second phase that uses weighted lotteries. Another is to use stratified sampling or forms of stratification from the beginning.

For the Climate Assembly UK, organisers sent out 20% of its 30,000 letters of invitation to people randomly selected from the lowest-income postcodes, and then used random stratified sampling by computer to select 110 participants from all the people who were over 16 and free on the relevant dates.

Because citizen assemblies are very small compared to the population as a whole – France’s Convention for the Climate was made up of just 150 people – the descriptively representative character of the assembly can occur on only a few dimensions. Organisers must therefore decide what population characteristics the assembly should embody and in what proportion. Randomisation thus does not preclude difficult moral, political and scientific choices about the assembly to be constructed, any more than it precludes voluntariness or self-selection…(More)”.

Urban governance and civic capital: analysis of an evolving concept

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jen Nelles & David A. Wolfe: “This article argues that the concept of civic capital affords considerable insight into systems of urban economic development, usefully bridging gaps in both institution-centric and social capital approaches. While the concept has been applied in the literature on urban governance and economic development, its use has been fragmentary and has not seen broad engagement. This review of the state of the literature situates the concept of civic capital relative to existing literature in the field, highlights its relationship to other concepts, and reviews several qualitative approaches that apply the concept to case studies. It provides an overview of the concept and a description of the way it has developed alongside the rich literature on governance and social capital in urban development to illustrate its potential for further analytical study….(More)”.

Meaningful public engagement in the context of open science: reflections from early and mid-career academics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Wouter Boon et al: “How is public engagement perceived to contribute to open science? This commentary highlights common reflections on this question from interviews with 12 public engagement fellows in Utrecht University’s Open Science Programme in the Netherlands. We identify four reasons why public engagement is an essential enabler of open science. Interaction between academics and society can: (1) better align science with the needs of society; (2) secure a relationship of trust between science and society; (3) increase the quality and impact of science; and (4) support the impact of open access and FAIR data practices (data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability). To be successful and sustainable, such public engagement requires support in skills training and a form of institutionalisation in a university-wide system, but, most of all, the fellows express the importance of a formal and informal recognition and rewards system. Our findings suggest that in order to make public engagement an integral part of open science, universities should invest in institutional support, create awareness, and stimulate dialogue among staff members on how to ‘do’ good public engagement….(More)”.

Democratic Innovations From Around the World: Lessons for the West

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Richard Youngs, and Ken Godfrey: “Recent initiatives for fostering citizen participation in Europe, Australia, and Canada have attracted much attention, especially selection-based “mini-publics”—of which one form, citizens’ assemblies, has become increasingly popular. Yet new forms of participation have also emerged in other countries and regions around the world. Like the innovations in Western democracies, these are far from perfect, but they offer valuable insights for those concerned with widening the pathways to democratic participation within Western states. The European Democracy Hub ran a project on democratic innovations outside the West in order to explore these lessons. This article synthesizes findings from the project by categorizing distinctive types of citizen participation from examples around the world and teasing out their policy implications…

With citizens’ frustration with and alienation from political elites becoming more widespread and severe around the world, as manifest in a rising number of significant antigovernment protests globally, the need for innovative channels of citizen participation has become more pressing. Despite the powerful global dynamics of democratic regression, many positive forms of such participation have taken shape in the last several years. Indeed, many analysts detect that a new ethos of citizen participation is defining efforts to push back against democratic decay.

Selection-based mini-publics are establishing an especially impressive track record as one form of citizen participation. These forums choose citizens by lot to deliberate on certain policy issues. In the West, this sortition template—now routinely implemented with highly sophisticated techniques of stratified selection to ensure representation from diverse sectors of society—is seen as the gold standard of participation, as it gives all citizens an equal chance to participate and ensures debates are highly structured around preset remits or elaborate formal institutional processes….(More)”.

How Food Delivery Workers Shaped Chinese Algorithm Regulations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matt Sheehan and Sharon Du: “In 2021, China issued a series of policy documents aimed at governing the algorithms that underpin much of the internet today. The policies included a regulation on recommendation algorithms and a draft regulation on synthetically generated media, commonly known as deepfakes. Domestically, Chinese media touted the recommendation engine regulations for the options they gave Chinese internet users, such as the choice to “turn off the algorithm” on major platforms. Outside China, these regulations have largely been seen through the prism of global geopolitics, framed as questions over whether China is “ahead” in algorithm regulations or whether it will export a “Chinese model” of artificial intelligence (AI) governance to the rest of the world.

These are valid questions with complex answers, but they overlook the core driver of China’s algorithm regulations: they are designed primarily to address China’s domestic social, economic, and political problems. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the ultimate arbiter here, deciding both what counts as a problem and how it should be solved. But the CCP doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Like any governing party, it is constantly creating new policies to try to put out fires, head off problems, and respond to public desires.

Through a short case study, we can see how Chinese food delivery drivers, investigative journalists, and academics helped shape one part of the world’s first regulations on recommendation algorithms. From that process, we can learn how international actors might better predict and indirectly influence Chinese algorithm policy…(More)”.

People’s Plan for Nature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The nature crisis affects everyone, and we believe everyone should have a say in how we solve it. The People’s Plan for Nature is the UK’s biggest ever conversation about the future of nature.

The People’s Plan for Nature will include recommendations for governments (local and national), food and farming businesses, non-governmental organisations, communities, and individuals.
 
These recommendations will be the outcome of the People’s Assembly for Nature, a citizens’ assembly that will run as part of the project. This assembly will bring together a group of people from all walks of life to have an honest conversation, find common ground and make recommendations for the protection and restoration of nature in the UK.
 
This will ensure the People’s Plan for Nature is rooted in the values, ideas and experiences of people from all corners of the UK…(More)”.

Who rules the deliberative party? Examining the Agora case in Belgium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nino Junius and Joke Matthieu: “In recent years, pessimism about plebiscitary intra-party democracy has been challenged by assembly-based models of intra-party democracy. However, research has yet to explore the emergence of new power dynamics in parties originating from the implementation of deliberative practices in their intra-party democracy. We investigate how deliberative democratization reshuffles power relations within political parties through a case study of Agora, an internally deliberative movement party in Belgium. Employing a process-tracing approach using original interview and participant observation data, we argue that while plebiscitary intra-party democracy shifts power towards passive members prone to elite domination, our case suggests that deliberative intra-party democracy shifts power towards active members that are more likely to be critical of elites…(More)”

Citizens’ Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Ariel Procaccia: “In 1983 the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution enshrined an abortion ban that had prevailed in the nation for more than a century. Public opinion on the issue shifted in the new millennium, however, and by 2016 it was clear that a real debate could no longer be avoided. But even relatively progressive politicians had long steered clear of the controversy rather than risk alienating voters. Who would be trustworthy and persuasive enough to break the deadlock?

The answer was a bunch of ordinary people. Seriously. The Irish Parliament convened a citizens’ assembly, whose 99 members were chosen at random. The selection process ensured that the group’s composition represented the Irish population along dimensions such as age, gender and geography. Over several months in 2016 and 2017, the assembly heard expert opinions and held extensive discussions regarding the legalization of abortion. Its recommendation, supported by a significant majority of members, was to allow abortions in all circumstances, subject to limits on the length of pregnancy. These conclusions set the stage for a 2018 referendum in which 66 percent of Ireland’s voters chose to repeal the Eighth Amendment, enabling abortion to be legalized. Such an outcome had been almost inconceivable a few years earlier.

The Irish citizens’ assembly is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. In recent years hundreds of such groups have convened around the world, their members randomly selected from the concerned population and given time and information to aid their deliberations. Citizens’ assemblies in France, Germany, the U.K., Washington State and elsewhere have charted pathways for reducing carbon emissions. An assembly in Canada sought methods of mitigating hate speech and fake news; another in Australia recommended ethical approaches to human genome editing; and yet another in Oregon identified policies for COVID pandemic recovery. Taken together, these assemblies have demonstrated an impressive capacity to uncover the will of the people and build consensus.

The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Have you ever noticed how politicians grow a spine the moment they decide not to run for reelection? Well, a citizens’ assembly is a bit like a legislature whose members make a pact barring them from seeking another term in office. The randomly selected members are not beholden to party machinations or outside interests; they are free to speak their mind and vote their conscience…(More)”.

“Can AI bring deliberative democracy to the masses?”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hélène Landemore: “A core problem in deliberative democracy is the tension between two seemingly equally important conditions of democratic legitimacy: deliberation on the one hand and mass participation on the other. Might artificial intelligence help bring quality deliberation to the masses? The paper first examines the conundrum in deliberative democracy around the tradeoff between deliberation and mass participation by returning to the seminal debate between Joshua Cohen and Jürgen Habermas about the proper model of deliberative democracy. It then turns to an analysis of the 2019 French Great National Debate, a low-tech attempt to involve millions of French citizens in a structured exercise of collective deliberation over a two-month period. Building on the shortcomings of this empirical attempt, the paper then considers two different visions for an algorithm-powered scaled-up form of mass deliberation—Mass Online Deliberation on the one hand and a multiplicity of rotating randomly selected mini-publics on the other—theorizing various ways Artificial Intelligence could play a role in either of them…(More)”.