The following is information found from the report “Life In Congress: The Member Perspective” provided by the Congressional Management Foundation and the Society for Human Resource Management.
Who manages all of the professional staff needed to organize, moderate, and educate these random groupings of citizens? I feel like lobbyists would still perform their lobbying by turning into the "experts" and speaking to a committee on their niche area of interest.
What prevents the random people committees from simply hearing two polar opposite (and each biased) viewpoints on a topic and then being left to decide on their own which portions of what they heard was true?
Hi Mike. Sure, deliberation session can be poorly designed or well designed. A well designed session would:
1. Have a wide panel of experts present their testimony. This need not just be for or against.
2. After the experts are trotted out, interested bureaucrats can then provide their testimony.
3. Then we bring out the interest groups and stakeholders and lobbyists, who are allowed to engage the Citizens' Assembly in this formal setting.
4. After each round of testimony, the citizens can do some Q&A.
5. Then they can break into small discussion groups of 5-10 people to talk about the issues at hand.
There are various ideas on how expert panels could be chosen. Political philosopher Arash Abizadeh advocates for a 2 chamber system where the House of Representatives is elected but the Senate is selected by lot. In his system, the House of Representatives makes the proposals but the Citizen Senate has veto power. The House of Representatives is in charge of providing the expert panels. The majority and minority coalition are tasked with providing experts for and against the proposal.
Because I think elections are a bad tool for selecting leadership, I would eventually want to get rid of the elected House by slowly removing their voting powers. The House of Representatives would then remain as an advisory council (or play a ceremonial role like today's monarchs).
Who remains then to organize, moderate, and educate these random citizens? Well, the random citizens themselves. They'd be in charge of hiring staff, advisors and executive officers. They'd be in charge of job performance reviews and promotions and discipline, and they're free to delegate however many of these responsibilities to who they hire.
So who becomes the experts? The Citizens' Assembly itself chooses its own experts. That makes them different from lobbyists. You trust your own staff, whom you control their purse strings, more than you'd trust outsiders.
Then with sortition, in my opinion we get a *stronger* meritocracy than what we have now. In the status quo, we rely on the ridiculous circus and chaos of elections as the "meritocratic" mechanism. It is obviously flawed and constantly selects for incompetence. With sortition in contrast, normal citizens can carry out a typical job hiring procedure of resume reading, job interviews, etc. That means instead of choosing between 1-3 assholes in an election, a Citizens' Assembly can interview dozens to hundreds of people. The Citizens' Assembly can also carry out a yearly performance review. Citizens' Assemblies are able to facilitate rational and systematic accountability on the bureaucracy, whereas voters cannot do the same with elected officials.
A typical design of a Citizens' Senate rotates out for example 1/3 of its members per year, allowing the rest to pass on their traditions to each new batch of jurors. In addition, the bureaucracy - the executives and advisors - will also remain to reinforce institutions.
I know you've shared examples of Citizen's Assemblies suggesting policy on a single topic before, but are there any examples of what you're describing working at a large scale today? I'm vaguely aware of sortition existing in the Roman Republic, but I thought it involved only a few people set in managerial roles (I could be way off there). I doubt the average Citizen would have the motivation to go through interviewing and hiring experts, organizing these sessions, or working on such an Assembly for a year or more.
I can only see this sort of thing working on a much much smaller scale where a Citizen's Assembly is pulled into an already established and functioning government body for a limited period of time like a week to a month in a similar fashion to Jury Duty. You show up, everything is organized for you, your job is to sit back, listen to proposals and expert opinions, gather up into a working group and (like a jury) decide if you have more questions, need more expert opinion, and then you vote on your solution and some lawyers craft the language to make a Bill.
It's a struggle to get the average citizen to vote once every four years. Expecting that average citizen to participate in such an involved Citizen Assembly seems far fetched. A fun idea for sure. It always intrigues me.
Participation is an easy problem to solve. Just pay the jurors an excellent salary of $200K, plus free childcare and elderly care. Throw money at the problem. We're already paying Congressmen about that same salary; we would pay citizens similarly. I think lots of people would be jumping up and down to get a pay raise.
And like any other institution, we would have to build up typical practices and norms. Once things get going, you do just show up, and everything is already organized for you (due to the work and institution building of previous decisions made by the assembly). To ensure continuity, only a fraction of the sortition assembly is rotated out each year. Meanwhile the bureaucrats and advisors will stay.
With full time salaried Citizen Senators, they have around 1800 hours per year to solve all the logistical problems they might encounter. They're going spend at least 100 times more time working out the logistics compared to the time we've spent on this discussion. With literally the power of the state behind them, they have a lot of resources to be able to develop competence.
>but are there any examples of what you're describing working at a large scale today?
Paris has recently created a permanent Citizens' Council. Sortition is based on the Ancient Athenian practice of using sortition to select magistrates, form their court system, and form citizen councils that ran the daily affairs of the city.
But sure, what I'm proposing is new. Unfortunately in order to learn if something is effective it must be first tried. And it is being tried. We've already tried advisory only temporary Assemblies. Paris and Belgium are now trying permanent assemblies with agenda setting powers. And the next step is to demand a permanent assembly with legislative powers. You'll note it's being first tried in enlightened Europe, where many Americans believe they've already solved all the problems of democracy. Apparently many Europeans disagree.
Interesting article and sample schedule, thanks for sharing this.
However, when you write "A sortition-assembly is better in tune with constituents " and "A sortition-representative also would care little about what lobbyists say," I think you may misunderstand what lobbyists primarily offer. It's not funds, but a wealth of expertise to members, who, however they are put in place, presumably want to do a good job serving their constituents. "Better in tune with constituents" may or may not be true, but in any sort of diverse nation (unlike the electorate of the Framers' time, which was overwhelmingly White male farmers) any representative should be self-aware enough to recognize the gaps in their knowledge. Lobbyists fill in these gaps for the voting members. (I assume that in a sortition-assembly, all members vote on all legislative policies.)
Hi Brian, my problem with lobbyists is with their biases. Lobbyists are employed to further the interests of their employer. So while lobbyists may have greater expertise than Congressmen, the advice they offer is not impartial.
Common people neither have the time to lobby nor the funds to hire lobbyists. Reliance on lobbyists for expertise tends to advance the interests of the wealthy over the rest of the public.
If the government needs expertise, that expertise ought to be hired in-house. Nothing is coming for free.
Moreover, it is typical for many lobbyists to be associated with Political Action Committees, that just so happen to donate to the campaign when the interests of the lobbyist and the politician align. This legalized bribery once again favors the wealthy against the interests of the public.
Hi John, thanks for the response, and I hear where you're coming from. But having served in the legislature, I also see the gap between public perception and reality. The negative perception of lobbyists is generally deserved, for all the reasons you state. (I could tell you stories..)
When you say "If the government needs expertise, that expertise ought to be hired in-house" we come back to the knowledge gap: representatives (no matter how they get their office) often don't know what questions to ask in the first place, since they don't know the details of the issue at hand! The reality is, they should want to learn from people who know more, whether that be individual constituents or paid representatives.
Compare lobbyists to lawyers (whose negative perception is also well deserved) as an example of paid shills whose institutional knowledge make the judicial system run better than if every plaintiff and defendant had to learn the court's rules on their own, even though their biases introduce their own set of problems.
My solution, which can be implemented today without changing laws or rules, is for the common people with neither the time or funds to lobby for themselves to unionize as swing voters, leveraging their electoral power in exchange for legislative action. https://americanunion.substack.com/
Who manages all of the professional staff needed to organize, moderate, and educate these random groupings of citizens? I feel like lobbyists would still perform their lobbying by turning into the "experts" and speaking to a committee on their niche area of interest.
What prevents the random people committees from simply hearing two polar opposite (and each biased) viewpoints on a topic and then being left to decide on their own which portions of what they heard was true?
Hi Mike. Sure, deliberation session can be poorly designed or well designed. A well designed session would:
1. Have a wide panel of experts present their testimony. This need not just be for or against.
2. After the experts are trotted out, interested bureaucrats can then provide their testimony.
3. Then we bring out the interest groups and stakeholders and lobbyists, who are allowed to engage the Citizens' Assembly in this formal setting.
4. After each round of testimony, the citizens can do some Q&A.
5. Then they can break into small discussion groups of 5-10 people to talk about the issues at hand.
There are various ideas on how expert panels could be chosen. Political philosopher Arash Abizadeh advocates for a 2 chamber system where the House of Representatives is elected but the Senate is selected by lot. In his system, the House of Representatives makes the proposals but the Citizen Senate has veto power. The House of Representatives is in charge of providing the expert panels. The majority and minority coalition are tasked with providing experts for and against the proposal.
Because I think elections are a bad tool for selecting leadership, I would eventually want to get rid of the elected House by slowly removing their voting powers. The House of Representatives would then remain as an advisory council (or play a ceremonial role like today's monarchs).
Who remains then to organize, moderate, and educate these random citizens? Well, the random citizens themselves. They'd be in charge of hiring staff, advisors and executive officers. They'd be in charge of job performance reviews and promotions and discipline, and they're free to delegate however many of these responsibilities to who they hire.
So who becomes the experts? The Citizens' Assembly itself chooses its own experts. That makes them different from lobbyists. You trust your own staff, whom you control their purse strings, more than you'd trust outsiders.
Then with sortition, in my opinion we get a *stronger* meritocracy than what we have now. In the status quo, we rely on the ridiculous circus and chaos of elections as the "meritocratic" mechanism. It is obviously flawed and constantly selects for incompetence. With sortition in contrast, normal citizens can carry out a typical job hiring procedure of resume reading, job interviews, etc. That means instead of choosing between 1-3 assholes in an election, a Citizens' Assembly can interview dozens to hundreds of people. The Citizens' Assembly can also carry out a yearly performance review. Citizens' Assemblies are able to facilitate rational and systematic accountability on the bureaucracy, whereas voters cannot do the same with elected officials.
A typical design of a Citizens' Senate rotates out for example 1/3 of its members per year, allowing the rest to pass on their traditions to each new batch of jurors. In addition, the bureaucracy - the executives and advisors - will also remain to reinforce institutions.
I know you've shared examples of Citizen's Assemblies suggesting policy on a single topic before, but are there any examples of what you're describing working at a large scale today? I'm vaguely aware of sortition existing in the Roman Republic, but I thought it involved only a few people set in managerial roles (I could be way off there). I doubt the average Citizen would have the motivation to go through interviewing and hiring experts, organizing these sessions, or working on such an Assembly for a year or more.
I can only see this sort of thing working on a much much smaller scale where a Citizen's Assembly is pulled into an already established and functioning government body for a limited period of time like a week to a month in a similar fashion to Jury Duty. You show up, everything is organized for you, your job is to sit back, listen to proposals and expert opinions, gather up into a working group and (like a jury) decide if you have more questions, need more expert opinion, and then you vote on your solution and some lawyers craft the language to make a Bill.
It's a struggle to get the average citizen to vote once every four years. Expecting that average citizen to participate in such an involved Citizen Assembly seems far fetched. A fun idea for sure. It always intrigues me.
Participation is an easy problem to solve. Just pay the jurors an excellent salary of $200K, plus free childcare and elderly care. Throw money at the problem. We're already paying Congressmen about that same salary; we would pay citizens similarly. I think lots of people would be jumping up and down to get a pay raise.
And like any other institution, we would have to build up typical practices and norms. Once things get going, you do just show up, and everything is already organized for you (due to the work and institution building of previous decisions made by the assembly). To ensure continuity, only a fraction of the sortition assembly is rotated out each year. Meanwhile the bureaucrats and advisors will stay.
With full time salaried Citizen Senators, they have around 1800 hours per year to solve all the logistical problems they might encounter. They're going spend at least 100 times more time working out the logistics compared to the time we've spent on this discussion. With literally the power of the state behind them, they have a lot of resources to be able to develop competence.
>but are there any examples of what you're describing working at a large scale today?
Paris has recently created a permanent Citizens' Council. Sortition is based on the Ancient Athenian practice of using sortition to select magistrates, form their court system, and form citizen councils that ran the daily affairs of the city.
But sure, what I'm proposing is new. Unfortunately in order to learn if something is effective it must be first tried. And it is being tried. We've already tried advisory only temporary Assemblies. Paris and Belgium are now trying permanent assemblies with agenda setting powers. And the next step is to demand a permanent assembly with legislative powers. You'll note it's being first tried in enlightened Europe, where many Americans believe they've already solved all the problems of democracy. Apparently many Europeans disagree.
Interesting article and sample schedule, thanks for sharing this.
However, when you write "A sortition-assembly is better in tune with constituents " and "A sortition-representative also would care little about what lobbyists say," I think you may misunderstand what lobbyists primarily offer. It's not funds, but a wealth of expertise to members, who, however they are put in place, presumably want to do a good job serving their constituents. "Better in tune with constituents" may or may not be true, but in any sort of diverse nation (unlike the electorate of the Framers' time, which was overwhelmingly White male farmers) any representative should be self-aware enough to recognize the gaps in their knowledge. Lobbyists fill in these gaps for the voting members. (I assume that in a sortition-assembly, all members vote on all legislative policies.)
Hi Brian, my problem with lobbyists is with their biases. Lobbyists are employed to further the interests of their employer. So while lobbyists may have greater expertise than Congressmen, the advice they offer is not impartial.
Common people neither have the time to lobby nor the funds to hire lobbyists. Reliance on lobbyists for expertise tends to advance the interests of the wealthy over the rest of the public.
If the government needs expertise, that expertise ought to be hired in-house. Nothing is coming for free.
Moreover, it is typical for many lobbyists to be associated with Political Action Committees, that just so happen to donate to the campaign when the interests of the lobbyist and the politician align. This legalized bribery once again favors the wealthy against the interests of the public.
Hi John, thanks for the response, and I hear where you're coming from. But having served in the legislature, I also see the gap between public perception and reality. The negative perception of lobbyists is generally deserved, for all the reasons you state. (I could tell you stories..)
When you say "If the government needs expertise, that expertise ought to be hired in-house" we come back to the knowledge gap: representatives (no matter how they get their office) often don't know what questions to ask in the first place, since they don't know the details of the issue at hand! The reality is, they should want to learn from people who know more, whether that be individual constituents or paid representatives.
Compare lobbyists to lawyers (whose negative perception is also well deserved) as an example of paid shills whose institutional knowledge make the judicial system run better than if every plaintiff and defendant had to learn the court's rules on their own, even though their biases introduce their own set of problems.
My solution, which can be implemented today without changing laws or rules, is for the common people with neither the time or funds to lobby for themselves to unionize as swing voters, leveraging their electoral power in exchange for legislative action. https://americanunion.substack.com/