Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly

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DESIGNING DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province’s electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitutionmaking and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens’ assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens’ assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice. M A R K E . W A R R E N holds the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy at the University of British Columbia.

is a Ph.D. candidate and Commonwealth Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

HILARY PEARSE

DESIGNING DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly

EDITED BY

MARK E. WARREN AND

HILARY PEARSE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521885072 © Cambridge University Press 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-38691-6

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

hardback

978-0-521-88507-2

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Tables List of Figures Contributors Preface Introduction: democratic renewal and deliberative democracy Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse 1 Who should govern who governs? The role of citizens in reforming the electoral system Dennis F. Thompson 2 Citizen representatives Mark E. Warren 3 Institutional design and citizen deliberation Hilary Pearse 4 Agenda-setting in deliberative forums: expert influence and citizen autonomy in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly Amy Lang 5 Descriptive representation in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly Michael Rabinder James 6 Do citizens’ assemblies make reasoned choices? Andre´ Blais, R. Kenneth Carty, and Patrick Fournier

page vii viii ix xi 1

20 50 70

85

106 127 v

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CONTENTS

7 Communicative rationality in the Citizens’ Assembly and referendum processes R. S. Ratner 8 Deliberation, information, and trust: the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly as agenda setter Fred Cutler, Richard Johnston, R. Kenneth Carty, Andre´ Blais, and Patrick Fournier Conclusion: the Citizens’ Assembly model John Ferejohn References Index

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166 192 214 232

Tables

2.1 2.2

Forms of accountability page 61 Assessing the Citizens’ Assembly model within the ecology of representative institutions 67 5.1 Comparison of demographic characteristics of the Citizens’ Assembly and the BC population 112 6.1a Assembly evaluations of criteria for judging electoral systems 131 6.1b Proportion of CA members with stable ratings (%) 132 6.2a Assembly comparative ratings of electoral systems 133 6.2b Proportion of CA members with stable ratings (%) 134 6.3 Evolution of preferences between MMP and STV (%) 134 6.4 The determinants of relative evaluations of SMP, STV, and MMP (OLS regressions) 137 6.5 Mean criteria and system evaluations by information level 142 6.6 The determinants of relative evaluations of STV and MMP by information level (OLS regressions) 143 8.1 Electoral system predispositions 173 8.2 Attitudes about the CA 175 8.3a–c Yes vote by general knowledge, STV knowledge, and CA knowledge 177 8.4 Populists vs. non-populists 179 8.5 Populism, awareness, and trust 179 8.6 Determinants of the vote – CA and STV 181 8.7 Knowledge 184

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Figures

3.1 8.1 8.2 8.3

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Spectrum of participatory styles Yes and No shares Awareness of CA & STV Referendum Yes vote probability by knowledge of STV. Vertical bars represent 95% confidence intervals

page 73 172 174 185

Contributors

Andre´ Blais is Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies, Universite´ de Montre´al. R. Kenneth Carty is McLean Chair in Canadian Studies, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and served as Chief Research Officer, British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Fred Cutler is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia. John Ferejohn is Carolyn S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Patrick Fournier is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Universite´ de Montre´al. Michael Rabinder James is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Bucknell University. Richard Johnston is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor of Political Science and Research Director of the National Annenberg Election Study at the University of Pennsylvania. Amy Lang is Killam Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia. Hilary Pearse is a doctoral candidate in Political Science, University of British Columbia, and served as a facilitator for the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. ix

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

R. S. Ratner is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia. Dennis F. Thompson is Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy, Government and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Mark E. Warren is Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy, University of British Columbia.

Preface

In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold experiment in institutional design: it empowered an assembly of 160 nearrandomly selected citizens to spend eleven months assessing the province’s electoral system. The government asked the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) to recommend a new electoral system if the Assembly concluded that the existing system could be improved. And the government committed to putting the recommendation of the BC Citizens’ Assembly to a referendum, and then to legislating the results of the referendum in to law, should it pass. Though citizen bodies have in the recent past served as advisory bodies to constitutional commissions, the CA represents the first time a government has responded to citizen discontent by empowering a citizen body to redesign fundamental political institutions. The case stands out for the care with which the experiment was conceived. The CA approximated the kind of process a political scientist might well design to test key propositions of deliberative democratic theory. The CA was conceived with deliberation in mind, and then given the time, power, support, and financing to return a credible, representative, and deliberate decision. The selection of CA members was designed to bypass the electoral system, and yet function as a representative body through the device of near-random selection. It was carefully insulated from established political interests. And, finally, the BC process operated not at the fringes of the political system – as do so many new democratic experiments – but within its center and focused on its most basic institutions. The CA was an innovative gamble: Is it possible to advance democratic renewal by designing a legitimate, fair, and deliberative process that would address a key element of democratic deficits, in this case, the xi

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PREFACE

design of the electoral system? Can democracy be used to renew democracy? Many practitioners have already answered with a qualified Yes: the model is being replicated elsewhere in Canada. It is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a means for constitution-making and constitutional reform, and in the US as a means for deliberative agenda-setting for referenda. For political scientists, political sociologists, legal scholars, and political philosophers, the CA was a natural experiment not to be missed, especially in light of the broad attention it was and is receiving. In January and June of 2005, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia convened interdisciplinary workshops to ask questions and provide findings, analyses, and assessments. In the end, the workshops focused on four kinds of questions: (1) What role should citizen bodies play in representative democracies generally, and what kind of legitimacy do citizen bodies have to decide questions of constitutional reform? (2) In what sense was the CA a representative body? How did CA design choices affect the representation of social groups within the Assembly and the empowerment, participation, and deliberation of CA participants? (3) Did the Citizens’ Assembly transform citizens into competent decision-makers? And, (4) How did deliberations within the CA relate to deliberation and decisionmaking by the broader public? The workshops did not address the question as to whether changes in electoral systems address democratic discontents, evidence for which is mixed at best, and goes beyond the case at hand. These questions are, of course, normative and empirical, as well as theoretical and practical. To address them required careful interdisciplinary integration. The CA itself was monitored through surveys and ethnographic techniques. Public opinion surveys were conducted during the public deliberation phase preceding the referendum. Newspaper and other media events were logged, as was public input at meetings, hearings, and through the internet. Workshop participants brought with them analyses of survey and polling data, ethnographic observations of the CA process, and assessments based in democratic theory and constitutional law. The workshops had access to CA members and included several CA staff. Drawing on these resources, workshop participants produced papers, many of which became the basis for this volume. Considered as a whole, the authors of this volume are far from uncritical of the CA process. But they lend strong support to the judgment that the CA represents the first time a democratic institution has been deliberately and relatively successfully designed to address a constitutional issue. And if there is a broad lesson, it is that new democratic institutions can be successful if their design is closely related to broadly legitimate goals as well as to the specific characteristics of the issue at hand. This volume was built on the wisdom, creativity, and hard work of many people. Most importantly, we thank the 160 members of the CA and the

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Chair, Jack Blaney, who demonstrated that democratic institutions, carefully crafted, can build uncommon intelligence out of inclusive representation. Gordon Gibson authored the report whose design recommendations became the basis for the CA. Premier Gordon Campbell provided the initial leadership, and without his personal dedication and enthusiastic support the CA would not have become a reality. The CA staff not only provided research and organizational expertise to the members of the CA, but their careful preparation, record keeping, publications, website (www.citizensassembly. bc.ca) and support for academic researchers enabled close study of the process. The staff included R. Ken Carty, Susanna Haas, Marilyn Jacobson, Don MacLachlan, Leo Perra, Campbell Sharman, Cathy Stooshnov, and Christina Wong. The workshop discussions were enormously productive and genuinely interdisciplinary, and we are indebted to the participants for their contributions. They included Bruce Baum, Andre´ Blais, James Bohman, Max Cameron, Kenneth Carty, Simone Chambers, Greg Clarke, Jennifer Clarke, Fred Cutler, Lynda Erickson, David Farrell, John Ferejohn, Patrick Fournier, Archon Fung, Heather Gerken, Gordon Gibson, Susanna Haas, Catherine Hirbour, Michael James, Richard Johnston, Amy Lang, David Laycock, Jane Mansbridge, Leo Perra, Robert Ratner, Philip Resnick, Campbell Sharman, Dennis Thompson, Alan Tupper, Ron Walberg, and Bob Westfall. Fiona Macdonald and Menaka Philips provided organizational support for the workshops. Dory Urbano supplied administrative assistance. John McAndrews assisted in preparing the index. Lesley Burns, Catherine Hecht and Emily Moore helped to prepare the manuscript for publication. We are very grateful for their dedication and competence. The book benefited enormously from the comments and direction of the anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press. Finally, we thank Bob Goodin and John Haslam for guiding this book through to completion. Workshops and manuscript preparation were supported by the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Foundation through the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Research was supported by the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Standard Research Grants Program and Dissertation Research Fellowships Program, the University of British Columbia Office of the Provost, and the University of British Columbia Faculty of Arts. MARK E. WARREN Vancouver, British Columbia HILARY PEARSE

Vancouver, British Columbia March 1, 2007

Introduction: democratic renewal and deliberative democracy Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse

Although electoral democracies have been spreading across the globe, democratic development in those countries where electoral institutions have been long established appears to have stagnated, their citizens beset by a democratic malaise with respect to the formal political institutions of representative democracy. The indicators are well known, including declining rates of voter turnout, disaffection from political institutions, and widespread judgments that politicians are untrustworthy and often corrupt. Over the last few decades, citizens have been increasingly likely to view governments as overly attentive to special interests, while also ineffective, wasteful, and inattentive to the public good (Nye 1997; Norris 1999; Putnam and Pharr 2000). The essays collected in this volume examine one example of recent responses to citizens’ discontents: the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA). The CA was an assembly convened over eleven months in 2004, consisting of 160 citizens chosen by a nearly random method. The Assembly was charged with examining the electoral system of the province, and empowered to propose a new system for a referendum, should they conclude that the system should be changed. The case has captured the attention of those interested in innovations in democratic institutions and governance: the CA represented the first time in history that ordinary citizens have been empowered to propose fundamental changes to political institutions to their fellow citizens.1

1

The BC model has since inspired two similar citizen assemblies considering electoral reform in the Netherlands and the Canadian Province of Ontario.

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These chapters share the view that the CA should be assessed within the context of democratic deficits in the developed democracies. The ‘‘deficit’’ concept suggests that we think about democratic malaise structurally, as a misalignment between citizen capacities and demands, and the capacities of political institutions to aggregate citizen demands and integrate them into legitimate and effective governance. The superiority of democratic systems resides, in large part, in their reflexive capacities for reform, responsiveness, and innovation. At the limit, democratic deficits undermine the capacities of democratic political systems to evolve and reform into evermore effective and legitimate agents of citizens. The notion of ‘‘democratic deficit’’ calibrates the problem: the misalignment is not a ‘‘crisis’’ of democracy – certainly not in the established democracies. Rather, the concept identifies long-term problems that, if left unattended, are likely to gradually erode the legitimacy and capacities of governments. Democratic deficits have gained a high profile not only within the media and among advocacy groups, but also among political elites who are faced with increasingly complex and politicized governance demands. These demands in turn increase the functional value of legitimacy, since legitimacy implies willing compliance from those with the capacities to implement as well as to obstruct policies. While there are many possible sources of legitimacy, the non-democratic sources such as nationalism and deference to authorities have increasingly eroded. From the perspective of governance, democracy is likely to be an increasingly important source of legitimacy, suggesting that democratic deficits increasingly undermine the capacities of government. The democratic deficit concept is not without challenge. There is disagreement as to whether the political disengagement of citizens should be attributed to the poor performance of political institutions (Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000) and the capacity of recent generations of better educated, more informed, less deferential citizens to be critical of those institutions (Dalton 1984, 2002; Inglehart 1990, 1997; Nevitte 1996; Norris 1999); to a broader civic phenomenon of declining participation in the social groups and networks that are vital to foster norms of trust and reciprocity (Putnam 1995, 2000); or to a fundamental popular distaste for the conflict-ridden messiness of politics and a general disinterest in public policy debates (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2001, 2002). Competing arguments over the sources of political disengagement are accompanied by alternative prescriptions for democratic renewal. Emphasizing that ‘‘political participation is embedded in social activity more generally,’’ Putnam advises Americans to rebuild social capital and community connectedness by reinventing organizations and associations to fit the modern technological, economic, and social climate (2001: 137). Conversely, Theiss-Morse and Hibbing argue

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that most voluntary group activity is apolitical and that promoting volunteerism will not encourage political participation (2005: 244), and, indeed, it is unlikely that whatever discontents exist could in any way be addressed through more democracy. Nonetheless, many elites believe that democratic deficits exist, and have responded with institutional innovations aimed at fostering citizen participation. And whatever the causes, the innovations are likely to take institutional forms, just because institutions are the kinds of things that can be changed directly, whereas cultures and psychological dispositions are less subject to collective intervention and experimentation. Innovations driven by legitimacy needs began in the administrative arenas a few decades ago, as evidenced by the rapid proliferation of ‘‘public engagement’’ devices including, for example, citizen juries and panels, advisory councils, stakeholder meetings, lay members of professional review boards, representations at public hearings, public submissions, citizen surveys, deliberative polling, deliberative forums, focus groups, and advocacy group representations (Cain et al. 2003; Smith 2005; Gastil and Levine 2005; Fung 2006a). Electoral systems have also undergone change in response to democratic deficits. During the 1990s, five established democracies experimented with major electoral reform, partly in response to challenges to government legitimacy (Norris 1997). Shugart identifies the common feature in the pre-reform electoral systems of all five countries as the existence of extreme outcomes in terms of either interparty or intraparty democracy (2001a). The political systems in the five countries were either ‘‘hyper-representative’’ (Italy and Israel), artificially majoritarian (New Zealand), ‘‘hyper-personalistic’’ (Japan), or ‘‘hyper-centralized’’ (Venezuela) (Shugart 2001b). Reform was also prompted by citizen outrage, either at lack of government responsiveness and accountability in New Zealand (Vowles 1995; Levine and Roberts 1997) or corruption scandals in Italy (Donovan 1995; Katz 2001) and Japan (Shiratori 1995; Reed and Thies 2001). All five countries moved toward mixed systems, combining an element of majoritarianism with an element of proportionality. Israel added a direct election for the prime minister to its proportional electoral system in 1992, while mixed electoral systems were adopted in Italy, Venezuela, and New Zealand in 1993 and in Japan in 1994. Electoral reform has succeeded in remedying the extreme elements of some of these systems – electoral competition has become bipolar rather than multipolar in Italy (Laver and Giannetti 2001) and a more proportional electoral formula has produced moderate multipartism in New Zealand (Barker and McLeay 2000) – but it is less certain whether electoral reform has helped to revive citizen participation in politics or challenge negative views of the political system. For example, although voter efficacy

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initially increased and the perception of government responsiveness became more positive in New Zealand, turnout has since continued its decline (Banducci, Donovan, and Karp 1999). Japanese voters have become disillusioned with their new electoral system’s dual candidacy rules that allow candidates who have narrowly missed out on election in a single member district to return to the Diet via the party list. Arguing that the new system protects incumbents, suppresses turnover, and still encourages personalistic candidate behavior, McKean and Schiner conclude ‘‘la plus c¸a change’’ (2000: 447). Developments such as these are indirect indications that electoral reforms, though they may alter the capacities of political institutions to reflect the preferences of citizens and convert them into legitimate and effective public policies, are not sufficient to resolve democratic deficits. Nor is the insufficiency surprising: given the complexity and scale of government within pluralized contexts populated by multiple powers and actors, it is unlikely that the standard model of representative democracy – voters elect representatives who develop policy guidelines and direct administrators to execute them – can ever again be adequate, if indeed it ever was. While the capacities of electorally based political institutions may no longer be sufficient to govern, they remain necessary, not least because they provide the ultimate source of power and policy, even when much of the political work of governance is delegated to other kinds of processes and institutions. Electoral institutions can set the broad parameters and goals of policy, enabling legitimacy-producing procedures elsewhere within the political system. And the ways these parameters are established will reflect, in part, characteristics of electoral systems. Within Canada, electoral institutions have come under increasing criticism for being insufficiently inclusive, responsive, or deliberative, so much so that they produce results of questionable legitimacy, further undermining governments already beset by levels of political congestion that challenge their governance capacities (Law Commission of Canada 2004). A highly visible symptom is the evolution of a convention during the 1990s requiring important constitutional decisions to be ratified using mechanisms of direct democracy at both the federal and provincial level. Canadian voters rejected an elite brokered constitutional accord in the 1992 Charlottetown Referendum (Johnston et al. 1996) and referenda have been used to decide questions of sovereignty in Quebec in 1995 and electoral reform in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island. The surging popularity of the Reform Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s was partly due to Reform’s critique of the party discipline imposed by Canada’s traditional political parties and its own emphasis on the delegate model of

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representation (Flanagan 1995). Applying Inglehart’s measures of postmaterialism to Canada, Nevitte finds that there has indeed been a ‘‘decline of deference’’ within the Canadian electorate and increasing confidence in the capacity of ordinary citizens to make important political decisions (1996). This development is particularly notable in a country that has been renowned for the degree of deference to authority engrained in the political culture (Lipset 1990). Recent Canadian Election Studies and the Canadian Democratic Audit series have identified two particular areas of concern: the disconnection of the Canadian electorate from the political parties that represent them in the national parliament and provincial legislatures and the development of a ‘‘democratic divide’’ in Canadian political participation. The membership of Canadian political parties is small and far from representative of the general population (Cross and Young 2004). Cross suggests that these characteristics are due in part to an electoral system that encourages parties to focus only on those regions where their support is geographically concentrated, resulting in little contact with supporters in other parts of the country (2004). Clarke and Stewart demonstrate that while partisanship has weakened over the past forty years in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, Canadians are four and five times more likely to declare a total absence of partisan ties than Americans or Britons respectively (1998: 368–69). As in other advanced democracies, turnout in Canada has declined in recent decades, reaching a record low at the federal level of 60.9 percent of eligible voters in 2004, although this did increase to 64.9 percent of eligible voters in the particularly competitive 2006 national election (Elections Canada 2006). The Canadian Election Study team attributes the broad pattern of decline to generational replacement, with post-baby-boom generations paying less attention to politics and being less likely to adhere to the civic norm of voting as a moral duty. This decline would be even greater were it not for the higher level of education in these generations that is positively correlated with turnout and ameliorates the effects of this shift in attitudes to voting and interest in politics (Blais et al. 2004). In addition, there appears to be a close relationship between diversity of values and support for electoral reform (Kanji and Bilodeau 2006). And most disturbingly, in their work for the Canadian Democratic Audit, Gidengil et al. identify an increasing ‘‘democratic divide’’: the poor, people with less formal education, Aboriginal peoples, migrants to Canada, and the young are less likely to be involved in civic or political life and less politically informed than older, wealthier citizens who were born in Canada and have attained higher levels of education (2004). Although every case has its proximate causes and historical specificity, from a broader perspective Canadian democratic deficits look very much

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like failures common in the consolidated democracies. Within today’s complex societies, for example, it may be more generally true that electoral systems need to bring more interests into the political system, and encourage more deliberation, than do the single member plurality (SMP; see page 130) systems of Canada, the UK, and the US. As trade blocs grow, elite-imposed economic orders find increasing resistance, which is in turn inducing new political institutions – some democratic – aimed at generating legitimacy. And as the European Union seeks to knit diverse regions into a constitutional order, elite consensus proposals for constitutional changes and innovations have, as in Canada, met with some spectacular popular failures. What is unique about the Canadian case is that multiple sources of discontent are coalescing into a public agenda, perhaps owing to a lull in the urgency of the national unity issues that have dominated Canadian politics over the last four decades (Howe, Johnston, and Blais 2005). Since 2001, five Canadian provinces – British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island – have considered changing their electoral laws, parliamentary procedures, or political party regulations, reforms that can be collectively understood as democratic renewal initiatives aimed at democratic deficits (Carruthers 2003; Comite´ Directeur sur la Re´forme des Institutions De´mocratiques 2003; Commission on Legislative Democracy 2004; Milner 2004). And yet most proposals for democratic renewal are elite-led, and so are subject to a legitimacy regress: the proposals for institutional reform that would, presumably, narrow democratic deficits lack legitimacy owing to their origins, namely, the very elites whose legitimacy is weak. Nor do there seem to be other collective agents with the capacities to engineer such fundamental changes to political institutions as seem necessary. The bold experiment in British Columbia, however, suggests an alternative: democratic agents of democratic renewal can be designed. Following through on an election promise, the provincial government empowered a body of 160 citizens who were near-randomly selected to assess the province’s SMP electoral system, and recommend a new system if they believed it necessary. The government precommitted itself to putting the recommendation of the BC Citizens’ Assembly to a referendum, and then to acting on the results of the referendum – possibly the first time a citizens’ body has ever been empowered to set a constitutional agenda. The CA met from January to November 2004 to learn about electoral systems, consult with the public, and deliberate. In December 2004, the CA issued a report recommending that the electoral system of BC be changed to a form of proportional representation (PR) called the single transferable vote (STV; see page 130). In a May 2005 referendum, the CA’s proposal failed to meet

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the double threshold set by the government for approval: 60% of the province-wide vote and a majority in 60% of the electoral districts. The proposal met the second threshold, passing in seventy-seven out of seventynine districts. But it fell 2.3% short of the first threshold, gaining 57.7% of the vote – a remarkable level of support, given that fewer than 60% of the public were aware of the CA and its recommendation (see Cutler and Johnston, Chapter 8, this volume). Recognizing both the broad support for change as well as flaws in the five-month period of public advocacy leading up to the referendum, the government announced in September 2005 that the proposal would again be put to a referendum in May 2009. But this time the government will fund Yes and No campaigns in an attempt to stimulate broad public awareness and debate. Our interest in this case is both general and specific, and does not depend upon the yet-to-be-determined fate of the CA proposal. With regard to its generality, the case represents a response to dissatisfaction with electoral systems and their results. British Columbians no doubt have a somewhat greater than average dissatisfaction with their system: the province is known for its fractious politics and its populism. But the citizens of BC want what most citizens want: a system that is fair, responds to voters, and gets the work of governing done. On average, they do not like ‘‘politics’’: that is, posturing and strategizing, pandering and waffling. They dislike political parties. They distrust politicians. They want interest groups and parties to work things out. In short, they want a political system with the capacity for legitimate governance – not unlike most citizens in the consolidated democracies. To the best of our knowledge, the CA represents the first time a government has responded to citizen discontents by empowering a citizen body to redesign political institutions so as to address democratic deficits (as compared to being consulted, as they were in the relatively recent cases of constitutional innovation in South Africa and Germany). Moreover, the case stands out for the apparent care and novelty with which the experiment was conceived – approximating, in many ways, the kind of process a political scientist might design to test certain idealized propositions of democratic theory. The CA was constituted as a deliberative body, and given the time, power, support, and financing to return a credible, representative, and deliberate decision. The CA was designed to bypass the electoral system, and yet function as a representative body through the device of near-random selection. It was carefully insulated from established political interests. And, finally, the BC process operated not at the fringes of the political system – as do so many new experiments – but within its center and focused on its most basic constitutional processes. The CA was an innovative gamble: Is it possible to advance democratic renewal by

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designing a legitimate, fair, and deliberative process that would address a key element of democratic deficits, in this case, the design of the electoral system? Can democracy be used to renew democracy? For political scientists, political sociologists, legal scholars, and political theorists, the CA was a natural experiment not to be missed. So in January and June of 2005, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia convened interdisciplinary workshops to ask questions and provide findings, analyses, and assessments. The broad question as to how and whether the CA addressed democratic deficits was, of course, too abstract. So the workshops disaggregated the question to ask more specifically about the following: (1) What role should citizen bodies play in representative democracies generally, and what kind of legitimacy do citizen bodies have to decide questions of constitutional reform? (2) How did CA design choices affect the representation of social groups within the Assembly and the empowerment, participation, and deliberation of CA participants? (3) Did the Citizens’ Assembly transform citizens into competent decision-makers? And, (4) How did deliberations in the ‘‘mini-public’’ of the CA relate to decision-making by the broader public? These questions are, of course, both normative and empirical, and so required careful interdisciplinary integration. The CA itself was monitored through surveys and ethnographic techniques. Public opinion surveys were conducted during the public deliberation phase preceding the referendum. Newspaper and other media events were logged, as was public input at meetings, hearings, and through the internet. Workshop participants brought with them analyses of survey and polling data, ethnographic observations of the CA process, and assessments based in democratic theory and constitutional law. The workshops had access to CA members and included several CA staff. Drawing on these resources, workshop participants then produced their analyses and assessments as chapters for this volume, using the CA experiment as an opportunity to advance our understanding of the theory and practice of democracy – especially deliberative democracy – within the context of representative democracy. Considered as a whole, the authors of this volume are far from uncritical of the CA process. But they lend strong support to the argument that the CA represents the first time a democratic institution has been deliberately and relatively successfully designed to address a democratic deficit at a quasi-constitutional level. The background of the Citizens’ Assembly The proximate cause of the BC Citizens’ Assembly was an election that returned the ‘‘wrong’’ results. In 1996, the Liberal Party won fewer seats in

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the legislature than the New Democratic Party (NDP), despite having won the popular vote with 41.8% to the NDP’s 39.5%, owing to the regional concentration of the Liberals’ support and the disproportionality of the SMP electoral system. Following this defeat, Liberal leader Gordon Campbell promised to establish a ‘‘citizens’ assembly’’ to assess the electoral system as part of a package of political reforms, should the Liberals come to power. The Liberals did indeed come to power in 2000, and the election returned another anomaly, albeit one more consistent with the bias of SMP systems: the Liberals’ 57.6% of the popular vote won the party 77 out of 79 ridings. The NDP’s 21.6% won them only two seats, and the Green Party’s 12.4% of the vote won them no representation at all, producing a Legislative Assembly with virtually no opposition, and therefore little institutional capacity for generating debate or accountability. While these electoral anomalies provided the opportunity for electoral reform, the ground was prepared by other actors as well. Groups such as Fair Vote Canada and the Electoral Change Coalition of British Columbia had advocated for change (Ruff 2004). And Green Party leader Adrienne Carr had attempted to use BC’s citizen initiative legislation, the Recall and Initiative Act 1996, to introduce her Proportional Representation Electoral Amendment Act, which would have introduced a compensatory mixed member electoral system in BC. Although Carr’s 2002 ‘‘Free Your Vote’’ campaign succeeded in collecting 98,165 signatures during the ninety-day period permitted by the initiative legislation, it fell short of the required 10 percent of all registered voters in every electoral district of the province (Elections BC 2002). Campbell, taking over as Premier in 2000, recognized that both elections failed basic and widely agreed criteria of democracy and kept his promise. He commissioned Gordon Gibson, a respected former leader of the BC Liberal Party, to recommend a process. After consulting widely with activists, politicians, public figures, and academics, Gibson wrote a detailed recommendation, which was tabled in December 2002 (Gibson 2002). The government adopted Gibson’s recommendation with very few changes, and in April 2003 asked the Legislative Assembly to support the creation of a citizens’ assembly on electoral reform. The Legislative Assembly did so unanimously, and established a special committee of the legislature to oversee the process. The government set up a secretariat with a budget of $5.5 million to create and support the CA, and appointed Jack Blaney, a former president of Simon Fraser University, to chair the CA. The CA itself was supported with eight full-time research, logistical, administrative, and communications staff, as well as part-time facilitators and notetakers. The infrastructure included offices and IT capacities, a UN-style

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deliberation venue (the Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in downtown Vancouver), and various meeting facilities around the province. When meeting in Vancouver, Citizens’ Assembly members were housed in an adjacent hotel. Each member was paid $150 a day for their time, as well as travel costs (British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform 2004b). The initial design of the CA, according to the Gibson Report, was intended to approximate a descriptive representation of the people of BC, to insulate the process from organized political interests, and to maximize the quality of deliberation and decision-making (Gibson 2002). Assembly design called for a near-random selection of 158 citizens from the voting rolls, with one woman and one man from each of the seventy-nine ridings in the province. Prior to selection, Elections BC launched a one-month campaign to update voter registration lists, and provided the CA staff with 26,500 randomly selected names, each of which received an invitation to attend a selection meeting. Of these, 1,441 indicated interest in attending a meeting, and 964 actually attended. CA members were drawn by lot from these selection meetings, resulting in an initial Assembly roster of 158. Despite the presence of Indigenous British Columbians at selection meetings, however, none were drawn. The Chair used his powers to select two additional Aboriginal members, both members of the Nisga’a Nation, resulting in a body of 160 plus the Chair (British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform 2004a). The result of this selection process was an Assembly that comprised a diverse range of British Columbians. While the process was specifically designed to ensure gender and regional parity as well as the representation of a range of age groups, near-random selection also resulted in diversity of ethnicity, formal education levels, and employment within the CA. Members of the CA were born in at least fifteen different countries and spoke a variety of languages other than English. Levels of formal education ranged from those who had not completed high school to those who had obtained Ph.D.s. Members were employed in a range of sectors, from restaurant owners, computer programmers, factory hands, and accountants, to retail sales people, teachers, ranchers, and child-care workers. Nevertheless, the CA was not strictly representative of the province as a whole. Owing to the element of self-selection involved in the process, CA members were more likely to be white, older, university educated, and employed in or retired from the professions than the British Columbian population as a whole (British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform 2004b; Statistics Canada 2001a, 2001b, 2001c; see also James, Chapter 5, this volume). CA members were also more likely to be members of community associations or volunteers than the average British Columbian. When asked directly about their community activity, 45 percent of British Columbians reported

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volunteering their time to charities or other non-profit associations in 2004 (Hall et al. 2006). In contrast, 55 percent of CA members mentioned their participation in community associations in the short profiles drafted on each member as part of the material distributed within the Assembly. Given the contrast in data collection methods – CA members were not responding to a direct question on their volunteer activity but chose to mention their memberships without prompting – the difference between CA members and the British Columbian population is likely to be understated. Not surprisingly given the element of self-selection involved in the process, most CA members were joiners – active members of their communities. The CA’s mandate was closely circumscribed: its task was to review and assess the province’s current electoral system, and to recommend, if appropriate, an alternative system. The Terms of Reference establishing the Assembly explicitly limit its assessment to ‘‘the manner by which voters’ ballots are translated into seats in the Legislative Assembly.’’ In addition, anticipating a referendum, the CA was required to return a single recommendation that could be put as a ballot question. The CA’s work was divided into three phases. The first was a learning phase consisting of six weekends from January to April 2004. During this phase, members were introduced to a variety of electoral systems. Members had a number of sources from which to learn, including lectures by staff experts and invited visitors, written materials, small discussion groups led by facilitators, and a web-based discussion forum. In addition, CA members laid the groundwork for later deliberations: they attended a workshop on the challenges of deliberation, and they practiced, as it were, listening, open-mindedness, respect, clear communication, and other dispositions necessary for deliberation. The plenary sessions were open to the general public. All but one of the small discussion groups were closed, on the theory that members needed to be able to converse freely and openly with one another, and that those less comfortable with public speaking would be more likely to talk in closed sessions. At the conclusion of the initial stage, the CA published an Interim Report, documenting their work so far and advertising opportunities for public input. The second stage of the CA’s work, a public hearing phase, was conducted in May and June of 2004. During this phase panels of four to sixteen CA members attended fifty public hearings around the province. Over 360 people made formal presentations at the hearings, to a total public audience of almost 3,000 people. In addition, 1,439 people made written submissions, mostly through the CA website, but also in hard copies which were scanned into the CA website. The final stage of the CA’s work was a deliberation phase conducted over six weekends from September to November 2004. Perhaps the most

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significant feature of the deliberation stage was a decision to organize the assessment of electoral systems, including the current one, in relation to basic values or goals. Out of a list of nine possible goals of electoral systems – stable and effective government, electoral accountability, a parliamentary check on government, fair representation for parties and groups, democratic political parties, voter choice, identifiable local representation, encouragement for voter participation, and equality of the vote – the CA ranked three as the most important. An electoral system should provide effective local representation; it should produce fair results by proportionally translating votes into seats; and it should maximize voter choice. Significantly, CA members did not place a high value on single party majority governments with clear mandates, a feature often touted as the key strength of SMP systems such as BC’s. Discussion in subsequent sessions focused on the kinds of electoral systems that would maximize these three values or goals. Once values were ranked, only two kinds of electoral systems were deemed appropriate – mixed member proportional representation (MMP; see page 130) and single transferable vote (STV). After constructing an ideal model of each system for BC and comparing the two, members selected the STV system by a vote of 123–31. The CA then assessed the current system, and voted (142–11) against recommending to retain it. Finally, the CA voted 146–7 to recommend to the citizens of BC a version of the STV system modified to reflect the uneven distribution of population in BC, with the number of members in a district reflecting the density of the population. Sparsely populated districts would be kept to a size enabling manageable local representation by having as few as two representatives, while more densely populated areas would have as many as seven. In accordance with its enabling legislation, the CA was dissolved in December 2004, having released a Final Report and formulated the question that would be put to the voters in May 2005: ‘‘Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform?’’ With little funding for public education and the public debate focused largely on the upcoming provincial election, the STV proposal did not assume high public visibility, and failed to reach the supermajority threshold of 60 percent of the overall vote in the referendum held on May 17, 2005. Nonetheless, the proposal garnered a strong majority throughout the province and across the political spectrum. Premier Gordon Campbell interpreted the results as an indication of widespread unhappiness with the current system, and as a mandate to extend the public deliberation. In September 2005, Campbell announced that voters would have another chance to judge the work of the CA as

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a referendum item in the May 2009 general election. This time, however, the government has promised funds to groups to advocate for and against the proposal. Rarely are we privileged with such clean experiments in democratic institutional design. Yet even relatively clean examples are complex, and this one is no exception. The chapters in this volume rise to the challenge, formulating a broad range of normative assessments and integrating these with empirical findings. The legitimacy of deliberative citizen bodies Is it normatively desirable for non-elected deliberative bodies to make major constitutional decisions on behalf of other citizens? How do we assess whether citizen bodies are representing us well? How do we hold citizen representatives accountable when they are selected or self-selected rather than elected? In Chapter 1 of this volume, Dennis Thompson asks ‘‘who should govern who governs?’’ and argues for the desirability of delegating the choice of electoral system to citizen bodies. Thompson evaluates the CA process using norms of liberty and equality. By both measures, the CA did well: members were sufficiently free to consider a wide range of options and to make their decision without undue external influence. And the selection, deliberation, and referendum processes were reasonably egalitarian. Although the CA process had flaws, Thompson concludes that it was precedent setting in showing that a constitutional reform decision made by citizen bodies can be both normatively desirable and successful in practice. While the CA process involved broader popular participation in decisionmaking than traditional forms of representative democracy, using the term ‘‘participatory democracy’’ to characterize citizen deliberative forums such as the CA misleadingly suggests that large numbers of citizens are participating in self-rule via these bodies. In fact, citizen bodies consist of relatively small numbers of citizens who are selected or self-select as representatives of other citizens. Many new forms of citizen participation and engagement would be better understood as representative bodies where lay citizens, rather than professional politicians, represent other citizens. In Chapter 2, Mark Warren seeks to understand the representative nature functions of these citizen bodies, contrasting the considerable body of theory available to us to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of representative institutions with our limited understanding of the role of lay citizen representatives. Warren suggests criteria with which to evaluate citizen representative bodies and illustrates the criteria by using them to assess the CA.

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The influence of design on representation and participation in deliberative citizen bodies To what degree did the initial choices about membership selection, mandate, and design influence the process and outcomes of the CA? Certain kinds of initial constraints were intended to empower: had the CA been permitted to return, say, two recommendations, any proposed reforms would be likely to fail a referendum, splitting the reform vote (Gibson 2002). Likewise, for the CA to have any power, it had to be constituted by political elites, with a manageable mandate, structure, and resources. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to ask – indeed, it was sometimes asserted in the media – that the CA, having been brought into existence by elites, was also manipulated by elites, primarily through the guidance of the staff as well as initial design choices. In Chapter 3, Hilary Pearse analyzes the influence of institutional design on the deliberation process and, in particular, on the ways in which participants came to understand their roles. In Chapter 4, Amy Lang assesses the relative influence of CA staff and CA members over the agenda for deliberation. Lang describes the Assembly’s formal agenda-setting process as consultative rather than reflexive. Her analysis is based on seventeen months of fieldwork observing CA meetings, staff meetings, and public hearings and conducting interviews with both staff and members. Lang concludes that while the CA staff were receptive to feedback from Assembly members as the agenda evolved over the course of the meetings, citizen participants did not have the final authority over several pivotal decisions that ultimately influenced their choice of electoral system. Similarly, Pearse notes the importance of initial design choices and subsequent CA staff decisions on the participation of Assembly members, the influence of the public on the Assembly’s decision, and the process of collective will formation. However, citizens still exercised considerable agency within these constraints. Lang examines the process of informal agenda formation, contrasting the Assembly’s concern for rural representation with members’ ambivalence over the impact of electoral system selection on women’s representation. She attributes the influence of rural representation concerns on the final choice of STV to successful individual advocacy, the responsiveness of other members to the issue, and the effective mobilization of staff resources by Assembly members. Despite considerable staff concern to equalize opportunity for participation through education and facilitation of group discussions, Pearse notes a spectrum of styles of participation among CA members. Although variations in individual attributes certainly made a difference, she argues that the institutional settings

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provided cues as to whether participants should understand their roles as being primarily ones of individual reflection, public consultation, or collective decision-making. Pearse suggests that the structure of the CA process alternately promoted each of these three facets of deliberative involvement. Ultimately, individual members were left to reconcile conflicts between their individual preferences, their perceptions of the collective preference of the CA, and their view of the common good of the citizens of BC. The institutional structure guided but did not determine the ways in which individuals crafted – indeed, invented – their roles as citizen representatives. How did design choices influence social representation within the Assembly? In theory, random selection of its membership should result in a more socially representative sample of the population than is typical in elected bodies. With regard to the issue of electoral reform, ordinary citizens do not hold the same vested interest in the translation of votes into legislative seats as political parties and professional politicians. Both of these attributes depend on choices that are made about the membership of deliberative citizen forums. In Chapter 5, Michael Rabinder James examines the choice to design the CA selection process to ensure representation of the gender, age, and geographic distribution of the provincial electorate, but not ethnic composition. James argues that the legitimacy of the CA would have been enhanced had visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples not been under-represented in an assembly design that was otherwise committed to descriptive representation. For James, the ideal number of group representatives is dependent on the type of decision-making process involved. He argues that when decision-making is aggregative, as in equally weighted individual voting, group representation should be proportional. However, deliberative decision-making requires a critical mass of group representatives sufficient to overcome isolation of group members within a larger body and to communicate the diversity of viewpoints within the group. The failure of the CA to have critical masses of visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples may have biased the CA away from MMP – a system that is arguably more minority friendly because, unlike STV, it uses candidate lists which can be composed by parties to increase minority representation within a legislative body. Citizen transformation within deliberative citizen bodies Delegating complex policy decisions to bodies such as the CA involves considerable trust in the competence of citizens to make reasoned choices, as well as confidence that learning and deliberation can overcome initial variations in competence. The CA was a gamble that ordinary citizens can

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become knowledgeable in a somewhat complex issue – electoral reform – and that their recommendation would be at least as well reasoned as those of experts. It was also a gamble with respect to education and political sophistication: the selection of members screened only for interest and commitment; the process was to be counted upon to generate the necessary expertise and learning. How did the CA do? To assess the learning and reasoning process involved in the CA’s decision, Andre´ Blais, R. Kenneth Carty, and Patrick Fournier conducted thirteen distinct surveys of CA members over the course of the Assembly process, reported in Chapter 6. They were particularly interested in the CA’s decision to recommend an STV system, especially as the system is not generally favored by political elites. Blais et al. attribute the CA’s decision to the consistent emphasis of members on the importance of voter choice – a criterion that is rarely privileged by elite reformers – as well as to members’ evaluations of the impact of both STV and MMP on local representation and the proportionality of election results. Their findings lend support to the view that ordinary citizens can make reasoned choices with sophistication, particularly in connecting their values to institutional mechanisms that support these values. In addition, members reported significant increases in their interest in politics and their sense of being informed about politics as a result of their participation in the Assembly. This chapter speaks as well to critics of deliberative democracy, who commonly argue that inequalities in political sophistication of citizens, often linked to socio-economic status, ethnicity, and gender, will result in deliberative processes dominated by better educated or more knowledgeable participants. Blais, Carty, and Fournier find no evidence that the most informed members led the decision-making process for other members. They conclude that there were no systematic differences between the more and less sophisticated members with respect to their processes of judgment and final preferences, implying that institutional design – particularly the learning phase of the CA – compensated for, rather than exaggerated, these initial inequalities. In Chapter 7, R. S. Ratner looks at the learning and deliberation processes from the perspective of sixty of the CA members who took an active role in public debate after the CA was dissolved. He asked them to compare their deliberative experiences within the CA with their deliberative experiences within the broader public sphere, using the concept of an ‘‘ideal speech space’’ to measure the quality of each. These sixty CA members tended to view their CA experiences in idealized terms: the debates were respectful and informed; members sought the public good, even if they had differing interpretations of what it might be. In stark contrast, when

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they entered the public sphere, CA members viewed the deliberations as ‘‘uneven, riddled with stubbornly held assumptions, and often dominated by voices representing the business, labor, or political communities.’’ CA members found their public sphere experiences to be particularly challenging, as most had anticipated that their role during the referendum campaign would be one of educating and deliberating as representatives of the public interest – an extension, perhaps, of expectations formed within the protected deliberative environment of the CA. They were unprepared for their roles as advocates within the context of political conflict and low information, suggesting that the differences between mini-publics and the public sphere are not simply of quantity and quality, but also differences in kind. Public trust in deliberative citizen bodies Part of the appeal of granting small deliberative bodies such as the CA the authority to make decisions on our behalf is that they are designed to be insulated from the distortions and bias of public debate in mass democracies. In this sense, they are much like ‘‘deliberative polling’’ which seeks to identify what public preferences would be, if people had sufficient information on the issue and the opportunity to form opinions through deliberation with others (Fishkin 1991). It was precisely the success of the CA in this respect that opened a cleavage between the mini-public of the Assembly and the broader public sphere. But does this distance the final decisions of such bodies from the preferences of a largely uninformed electorate in a way that compromises the likelihood of their public ratification? Or do voters trust the judgment of citizen representatives, even if their understanding of the proposal is not informed by a similar process of education and deliberation? Responding to concerns that voters lacked sufficient information on BC-STV to make informed choices, in Chapter 8, Fred Cutler, Richard Johnston, R. Kenneth Carty, Andre´ Blais, and Patrick Fournier (Chapter 8) find that voters who lacked information about the STV proposal based their judgments on a different kind of information: they were focused on the integrity of the CA as a process for setting the electoral reform agenda. Analyzing a public opinion survey designed to track the public deliberation period, Cutler et al. find that a relatively small number of voters based their decision on a thorough understanding of the STV system – although most knew something, and when they knew something, their choices aligned with their values and predispositions. The important finding is that when voters knew something (and fewer than 60 percent of the general public knew anything at all either about the CA or STV), they compensated

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for lack of knowledge about the STV proposal by focusing on the process that produced the proposal. Voters classified as distrustful populists – the majority of voters – wanted to know whether CA members were ordinary citizens with the interests of BC in view. More educated voters also wanted to know whether CA members were competent. In both cases, the more voters knew about the CA, the more likely they were to trust both the intentions and the competence of the CA. And if voters trusted the CA, they tended to vote Yes for the STV proposal. It is likely, Cutler et al. argue, that the same proposal, had it been put forward by an elite body such as a legislative committee, would have garnered far less support. In short, whereas CA members focused their judgments on electoral systems and expected voters to do the same, most voters focused instead on the representative qualities of the Assembly. These findings suggest the limits of direct and participatory theories of democracy when extended to mass publics, and underscore the need to think in new ways about the democratic functions of citizen bodies. Importantly, the high levels of trust in the CA by the attentive public (relative to commonly low levels for legislatures) suggest that the CA may have actually closed a democratic deficit by functioning as a new kind of representative institution. At the same time, Cutler et al. warn against generalizing the relative success of the CA on the issue of electoral reform to other issues, especially those about which opinion is already formed. Does the failure of the May 2005 referendum to reflect the near consensus support for STV within the CA undermine the claim of the CA to speak for the broader public? Based on survey findings, Cutler and Johnston argue no. They attribute the gap between the preferences of the electorate and CA members to voters’ lack of information about the CA – findings that reinforce the importance other authors place on connecting the mini-public of the CA to the public sphere. Conclusion The BC case provides important new evidence on the relationship between institutional design and deliberative decision-making, the actual and potential political sophistication of citizens, transformations of interests and identities through deliberation, and the dynamics of political trust and process legitimacy. In the concluding chapter of this volume, John Ferejohn proposes two further uses for the CA model. While he is quick to acknowledge that multiple single-issue citizen assemblies are hardly a desirable replacement for multipurpose legislatures, the CA model might be used selectively to supplement the institutions of representative democracy. There are issues other than electoral reform that are better decided

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by ordinary citizens than by professional politicians – campaign finance, electoral district boundaries, and term limits, for example. Ferejohn also suggests using the CA model to remedy the deficiencies of modern forms of direct democracy, such as the referendum, particularly as we are likely to see more rather than less use of this device. Citizen initiatives could automatically be referred to a newly convened citizen assembly for deliberation and possible amendment, thereby minimizing the influence of special interests and making the amended initiative more attractive to the median voter. In this way, carefully designed deliberative bodies of ordinary citizens might contribute not only to the renewal of representative democracy, but to the renewal of direct democracy as well.

1 Who should govern who governs? The role of citizens in reforming the electoral system Dennis F. Thompson1

If in a democracy the people have the authority to choose their representatives, then it would seem to follow that they should have the authority to choose the procedures by which they choose their representatives. Yet in nearly all democracies the procedures that govern elections have been established by officials or representatives themselves (Farrell 2001: 176–81; Pilon 2002: 6–13). Legislatures, courts, and commissions rather than popular initiatives or constitutional conventions created and continue to control the electoral process in most democracies. Until recently, attempts to make major changes in any electoral system were rare and rarely succeeded (Norris 2004: 4–6). But in the past decade, electoral reform has been gaining a place on the political agenda in many democracies. In the 1990s, many newly emerging democracies designed their own systems, and nine established democracies made far-reaching changes in their existing systems.2 Although many of these reforms have been carried out by elites, usually in reaction to contingent political circumstances rather than in the service of a plan to improve the system, citizens themselves have

1

2

I benefited from comments on an earlier version of this chapter from Ken Carty, John Ferejohn, Archon Fung, Gordon Gibson, Amy Gutmann, Hilary Pearse, R. S. Ratner, Thomas Scanlon, Sam Scheffler, Eric Rakowski, and Mark Warren. The countries that appear on most lists are: Bolivia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela. See Shugart and Wattenberg (2001: 1–8 and passim); Farrell (2001: 176–81); Norris (2004: 4–6); Pilon (2002: 14–25). More generally for comparative analyses of the origins of electoral reform in various countries, see Boix (1999: 609–24); Sakamoto (1999: 419–38); Dunleavy and Margetts (1995: 9–29).

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increasingly demanded, and in some cases won, a significant role in the process of reform.3 The question of who should choose the electoral system – and more specifically the role citizens should play in that choice – is thus timely. Posing it also creates an opportunity to raise some issues in democratic theory and practice that have been often neglected. In this chapter, I construct a theoretical justification for popular participation in the choice of electoral systems, and consider several objections to such participation. To give the objections (and the replies) institutional content, I draw on the experience of a recent case – the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The process instituted in British Columbia in 2004–2005 represents the first time in the history of democracy that a body of randomly chosen citizens have been authorized to recommend a major change in a state’s electoral system. Why the electoral system matters The justification for granting citizens authority to choose their electoral system rests at root on the values of political liberty and equality that support democracy. It takes the form of a simple inference. If citizens have the right to choose representatives, then they have the right to choose the system by which they choose representatives. The validity of the inference depends in part on how close the connection is between the key term in the premise and its counterpart in the conclusion. In this case, the question is the degree of similarity between the right to vote and the right to select the voting system. The connection is not only analogical, but also causal. The electoral system affects how one votes and who is elected. Furthermore, the justification relies on claims that go beyond both the analogy and the causal connection. To see exactly what the justification requires, we need to consider each step of the argument separately. The conclusion requires at least four premises. The first premise is that citizens have the right to choose their representatives. The justifications for this right are various, but most can be expressed in terms of the values of liberty and equality. If persons are 3

Among recent reform efforts, only Japan adopted a new voting system without significant popular input (Pilon 2002: 26). Five of Canada’s ten provinces are currently re-examining their voting systems; several of them intend to hold referenda and two have established citizens’ assemblies (Milner 2004: 19–27; Law Commission of Canada 2004: Ch. 6). But referenda are unusual: only Italy (for a minor reform) and New Zealand held such a vote on the national level. In nearly all cases the legislature played the major role in bringing about the change (see the cases described in Shugart and Wattenberg 2001: 55–278).

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regarded as free and equal moral agents, they have a right to political liberty, which implies the opportunity to influence power that is exercised over them and laws to which they are bound.4 This right can be exercised only in concert with one’s fellow citizens, and its collective result binds all citizens. It should therefore be granted to all citizens equally. The right to vote is not the only institutional manifestation of this more general right, but it is, practically, the essential right in democracies. Free elections are a necessary condition of democracy in the modern world. The second premise makes a claim that is partly empirical. The type of the electoral system significantly affects the value and range of choices that citizens enjoy when they exercise the right to vote. Political scientists generally agree, and a recent study of some thirty-two democracies confirms, that plurality systems (such as those in the US and UK) produce quite different electoral options than do proportional systems (such as most of those in Western Europe; Norris 2004: 254–61). Plurality systems tend to produce fewer parties (usually only two or three), weaker cleavages (more broadly based party programs), lower turnout, and fewer opportunities for women and minorities. As James discusses in Chapter 5 of this volume, the choice of electoral system strongly affects descriptive representation within legislatures. Within a given system, many other features also affect the value of a voter’s choice, including the nomination process, registration procedures, redistricting authority, and campaign regulations. The claim of the second premise is only partly empirical. Granting that electoral systems make a difference, we still have to assess its normative significance. If we had evidence showing that different electoral systems produce different policies in some broad way (for example, policies that are more liberal or more conservative), we could say with greater confidence that the difference is normatively significant. But the evidence is not likely to be compelling because the effects of a system on policies are difficult to isolate. Too many factors intervene between the system and the outcomes. It is true that factors other than the electoral system also influence the number of parties and the other consequences mentioned above, but the connections between the system and these consequences seem closer, and more firmly established. Although it might be clearer that the difference between systems is normatively important if it produces different policies, it is hard to deny 4

See, most prominently, Rawls’ principle of equal participation, which holds that ‘‘all citizens are to have an equal right to take part in, and to determine the outcome of, the constitutional process that establishes the laws with which they are to comply’’ (Rawls 1999: 194). For other justifications, see Dahl (1989); Christiano (2002); Dahl, Shapiro, and Cheibub (2003); Gutmann and Thompson (2004: Ch. 1).

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that having a choice between only two parties presents a significantly different kind of political act than having a choice among several parties. Citizens may prefer the more limited choice because they believe it brings greater stability and accountability, or they may prefer the greater range of choice because they believe it produces a wider range of representation and more diversity in candidacies. The preference in either case expresses a normative judgment – a decision to give more weight to one set of values compared to another. The decision in favor of one system also creates a distinctive political environment in which citizens exercise their political liberty. A two-party system, for example, may create stronger obligations of cooperation and compromise within the parties, while a multi-party system requires more collaboration across party lines. Why politicians should not choose the electoral system It is not sufficient to show that different electoral systems create significantly different environments for the exercise of political liberty and the realization of political equality. It could still be argued that some body other than the citizenry would be better suited to bringing about these goals. A third premise is necessary: no other body can be trusted to have final authority over the choice of the electoral system. This premise too has an empirical aspect. It describes the likely behavior of institutions, and in principle its predictions could be tested. But in practice the premise is usually – and I believe appropriately – treated as a regulative principle. It may be seen as a guide for institutional design, which prescribes that we try to avoid risks of highly damaging abuses of power, even if they are not highly probable. Drawing on historical experience and the distinctive features of the institutions in question, we can identity specific pathologies (including but not limited to the abuse of power) to which certain institutions are more prone than others. These pathologies can impair the capacity of the institutions to make reliable decisions in many areas of policy, but in the case of decisions about the electoral system, the pathologies are more closely connected to the function of the institution itself, and cannot be easily remedied without also adversely affecting the ability of the institution to carry out its main function. Each of the three leading candidates – legislatures, courts, and commissions – has an institutional characteristic, different in each case, that renders it unreliable to serve as final authority over the electoral system. The choice of electoral systems and their reform has most commonly been left to legislatures. This is historically understandable, but ethically odd (Thompson 2002: 133–34, 166–68, 179–80). Like members of most

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institutions, legislators generally approve of the mechanisms by which they were selected. Electoral reform is less likely to receive consideration on its merits if those who are deciding whether to undertake it are the same as those whose electoral future it would determine. A prudent principle of constitutional design is that decisions about rules that affect who is elected should not be controlled by individuals who have a preponderant interest against (or for) change in the membership of the institution in question. Courts do not suffer from this institutional disability. They are more likely to be independent and impartial. They have an important role to play in regulating the electoral process: they are well suited to protecting individual rights, such as equal protection and free expression in the US Constitution. But questions about change in the electoral system itself – to what extent it should preserve a two-party system, for example – raise issues that are less about individual voters than about institutional structures and the nature of democratic representation itself, on which courts are not well placed, and are usually reluctant, to adjudicate. Furthermore, courts are expected to respect precedents, and therefore are bound, more than other institutions, to the will of past majorities and to the decisions of supermajorities in constitutional ratification. The virtues of the judiciary without its jurisdictional disabilities can be found in the institution of the independent commission. Several countries have successfully used such commissions to deal with the otherwise contentious problem of redistricting.5 A well-composed commission is better placed than either courts or legislatures to give due weight to all the relevant considerations that should be considered in the choice of an electoral system and its reform. Members of commissions can view their role not as registering preferences of constituents, or even acting on their own conscience and convictions, but as working together to identify and express the will of the appropriate majority. But the ideal of an independent commission that could choose and govern the electoral system from a

5

Australia (since 1902) and Canada (since 1964) have relied with evident success on nonpartisan commissions for this purpose; see Courtney (2001); Australian Electoral Commission Information Center (2003). The Boundary Commission for England is chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons, but it has functioned in a relatively non-partisan way; see Rallings and Thrasher (1994: 387–404); McLean and Butler (1996), which also includes some discussion of the Australian and New Zealand systems. In the US, six states now authorize commissions to redraw their own legislative districts, and eight more states use commissions to revise congressional as well as legislative districts; see the state government websites of the individual states; National Conference of State Legislatures, Redistricting Law 2000 (Denver, January 1999), Appendices E, F.

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perspective completely outside of politics is not only unrealistic but also undesirable.6 Legislative leaders typically appoint the majority of the commission members (though sometimes from a restricted pool of candidates nominated by a judicial committee). It may be possible to keep the appointment process more independent of current politics, but to the extent that members are distant, they are also too removed from the experiences of citizens. This deficiency highlights the other problem of commissions: they are less directly accountable than legislatures. Even if a commission’s recommendations are presented to the electorate via referendum, the accountability is still deficient because the problem of distance remains. The link between members and voters is tenuous because members are chosen for their expertise, not for any connection or similarity to ordinary citizens. Are citizens competent to choose the electoral system? Even if we are wary of granting politicians and other officials final authority over the electoral system, we might still doubt that citizens are capable of exercising that authority themselves. Thus, a fourth premise is necessary: it assumes that citizens are competent to make major decisions about electoral systems. Blais, Carty, and Fournier test this premise in Chapter 6 of this volume. Notice that this assumption is not, and does not have to be, very demanding. It does not say that citizens must be more competent than legislatures, courts, and commissions, or even that citizens must be as competent. If we assume that other institutions are not reliable as overseers of the electoral system (the third premise), citizens need only to display a level of competence that is sufficient for the task. The standard states a threshold of adequacy, not a test of comparative superiority. It is true that the third premise refers only to a risk that the other institutions might abuse their authority (or fail in other ways to protect the electoral process). That might suggest that we should try to design the process to produce an optimal balance between the risk of the abuse and the risk of incompetence. But the comparison of incommensurable values such as these is difficult in any case, and still more problematic in the case of institutional design projected over an indefinite period of time. Furthermore, by giving such great weight to the risk of abuse, the regulative principle that the premise expresses in effect creates a strong presumption in favor of citizen control. It suggests that they should be granted this authority unless there is a 6

On commissions as a mode of electoral reform, see Thompson (2002: 168–79).

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compelling demonstration that they are not capable of exercising it at all. They need only enough competence to do the job. What then is an adequate level of competence for this job? Participants in the process of choosing or reforming an electoral system should satisfy at least five criteria. First, they should be interested in the project. Their interest should not be the same kind as legislators and party officials have. That would create a conflict of interest. But it should be sufficient to sustain a commitment to gain the information necessary to make sensible judgments about the electoral system. Second, citizens should be able to formulate some standards or goals that the electoral system should fulfill. These may be fairly abstract, but they should be specific enough to guide choice. Equal representation, for example, is not such a goal, because without further specification it does not distinguish one system from another. Preservation of local representation is such a goal because some systems better fulfill it than do others. Third, citizens should be able to understand the basic characteristics of electoral systems. They do not have to know the details, such as the advantages and disadvantages of the d’Hondt rule in proportional representation (PR) systems. But if the job is to consider whether a new system should be adopted, they need to know the salient features that distinguish the major systems from one another (such as the option of ranking candidates in preferential systems), and the political consequences of each (such as the tendency of PR systems to produce more parties than plurality systems). Fourth, they should be able to connect the goals with the systems. They should understand, for example, that district-based systems usually provide more effective local representation, and PR systems usually produce more diverse representation. All the criteria mentioned so far apply to decision-making that individual participants could in theory conduct on their own (though in practice they may need to talk to others in order to acquire the required knowledge). We need a criterion that takes into account the interaction among the participants. The choice of an electoral system and decisions about its reform affect all citizens. That means not only that should each have a voice in the decision, but also that each should consider the views of other citizens when making the decision. On some conceptions of democracy, citizens should engage in a deliberative process in making any major political decision because all will be equally bound by the laws that result. But there is a further reason in the case of electoral systems. An electoral system defines the terms by which individual choices become the collective choice of the polity. It is a choice about how to choose. Because the electoral system governs how citizens act together to make collective choices, citizens should choose a system in a process that takes into account, as far as

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possible, the views of all citizens. Thus the fifth criterion: when choosing an electoral system, citizens should be prepared to engage in a process of deliberation with one another (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: Ch. 1; Thompson 2002: 185–97). They should openly present their own views, consider seriously the views of others, and seek to reach agreement that is mutually acceptable. Pearse examines this process of deliberation within the Citizens’ Assembly in Chapter 3 of this volume. This criterion should not be taken to suggest that the only acceptable process is consensual. As we shall see, the members of the Citizens’ Assembly actually disagreed about whether they should try to reach a consensus. Lang recounts this debate within the Assembly in Chapter 4 of this volume. Nor does the criterion require that all or most of the proceedings be conducted in a deliberative mode. An assembly could decide to adopt an adversarial approach. Some of the presentations on the advantages and disadvantages of alternative systems in fact took this form in the Citizens’ Assembly. But to respect the criterion, an assembly that proceeded in an adversarial mode would have to decide to do so by deliberative means. Otherwise, the process would not be justified as mutually acceptable. Taken together, these criteria, though less demanding than those to which we might hold legislators, judges, and commissioners, are nevertheless formidable. Most citizens most of the time probably do not even meet the first criterion. They are not interested in electoral reform, and have rarely thought about differences among systems (Banducci and Karp 1999: 217–38; Farrell 2001, 183–90). They become interested only if mobilized for other reasons – usually dissatisfaction with the government, the major parties, or the disparity between their own party’s share of the vote and number of seats it holds in the legislature. With respect to the second and third criteria, surveys do not produce helpful results because most citizens do not understand the differences among systems. However, studies that take an indirect approach provide more encouraging results (Bowler and Farrell 1996; Dunleavy et al. 1997; Farrell and Gallagher 1999: 293–316; Farrell 2001: 183–90). Respondents were able to express definite preferences that did not simply endorse the status quo. Even though most of these studies were conducted in countries with plurality systems, respondents tended to prefer proportional systems. Also, some surveys indicate that, after a new system has been adopted, voters show an ‘‘impressive ability’’ to understand and operate it (Farrell 2001: 187). The implication of the empirical studies is that, although most citizens do not now come close to satisfying the criteria set out above, some may develop sufficient competence under the right conditions. I consider below whether they could do so under conditions such as those created by the institution of the Citizens’ Assembly.

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Reviewing the argument so far, we can see that the four premises together strongly suggest, though do not require, the conclusion that citizens should choose the system by which they choose their representatives. On balance it seems more justifiable than its opposite, which would validate the present state of affairs in which citizens rarely exercise any authority at all over their electoral systems. Why then have the people in democracies so rarely chosen or changed their electoral processes? No doubt part of the answer is that politicians and other elites have prevented or discouraged citizens from initiating such reform. Electoral systems have consequences for the distribution of power. Those who have been successful in a system are rarely eager to change it – at least not in ways that reduce their chances of future success. But this explanation is at best incomplete if it is taken as the basis for criticizing the failure to engage citizens in electoral reform. There are principled objections to citizens choosing the electoral system. Even if we accept that citizens have a right to govern the electoral system, we have not yet shown that they have a justifiable way of doing so. This is not simply the empirical question of whether there are feasible methods for exercising the right. The question has a significant normative component. The feasible methods may have characteristics or consequences that violate important principles. Even if the people retain that authority in some ultimate sense (they could call a constitutional convention or instigate a revolution), there may be good democratic reasons – reasons that come from the value of democracy itself – that show that they should not exercise it. We can see more clearly what these objections are and how they can be addressed by examining the most promising methods for citizens to exercise authority over the electoral system. Why a referendum is not sufficient When citizens have been granted this authority in the past, it has been exercised via referendum, as in New Zealand in 1992 and 1993 (Hawke 1993; Levine and Roberts, 1994; McRobie 1993; Vowles and Aimer 1994; Vowles 1995, 2006) and more recently in the Canadian provinces of Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Voters were asked to choose between the status quo and an alternative electoral system selected after extensive public consultation by a government appointed commission (Carruthers 2003; Commission on Legislative Democracy 2004; Royal Commission on the Electoral System 1986).7 However, because the electoral system affects 7

In the Netherlands, as in British Columbia, a citizens’ assembly was charged with proposing electoral reform, but unlike the BC process, the proposal goes to the government rather than directly to a referendum; http://snider.blogs.com/citizensassembly/location_netherlands_ national_government/index.html

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and in some cases determines the range and kind of choice that voters have in the general election, we might reasonably argue that citizens should have more opportunity to frame the alternatives in an electoral referendum than they do in a general election.8 If citizens have the right to choose their electoral system, they should have a voice in deciding not only the types but also the particular forms of each type that is to be proposed. They should be able to make sure that each type appears in the form that is most attractive, and that none has avoidable features that would disqualify it in the eyes of most voters. It is possible that a commission could achieve this result, but because most voters are not likely to be able to assess the decisions made at this level of detail, they may reasonably doubt whether the commission has framed the alternatives and made the necessary compromises that they as citizens would prefer. Indeed, as Cutler and Johnston discuss in Chapter 8 of this volume, the fact that the British Columbian referendum question had been drafted by fellow citizens rather than political elites favorably predisposed some voters toward the Assembly’s chosen electoral system. These considerations suggest that we should supplement the referendum, not with a royal commission, but with a process that gives ordinary citizens an opportunity to formulate the propositions presented to voters. Because such a task cannot be carried out in a mass meeting, only some citizens can take part. But the citizens who serve on such a body could act as representatives of their fellow citizens. (Warren analyzes this concept of selected ‘‘citizen representatives’’ in Chapter 2 of this volume.) These citizens would serve in the role of commissioners – as commissioners not only for the people but of the people. Instead of royal commission, it would be a people’s commission.9 The argument so far leads to the conclusion that democracies should establish such an institution to govern their choice of electoral systems (and 8

9

This is far from the only criticism of the use of such mechanisms of direct democracy. For discussion of the serious practical problems exposed by the use of initiatives in the US, see Bowler and Donovan (1998: 7–20); Cronin (1999: 70–77); Garrett (1997: 17–36); Sabato, Ernst, and Larson (2001). For a more favorable perspective on initiatives, and some evidence that money and special interests are not so influential as is usually assumed, see Garrett and Gerber (2001: 73–96). For criticisms of direct democracy vis-a`-vis representative democracy, see Cain and Miller (2001: 33); Campbell (2001: 131–64); Clark (1998: 434–81); Linde (1998a: 391–419 and 1998b: 1735–60). The argument here is intended to show only that a citizens’ assembly should have the authority to govern the electoral system. The deficiencies of legislatures cited in the third premise, for example, are specific to control of that system. But since some of the deficiencies of referenda mentioned above appear in voting on a wide range of public questions, a citizens’ assembly might well be useful as a supplement to all referenda, especially where (as in California) referenda are used frequently and without adequate filters.

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also to oversee major reforms of the system once chosen). It is preferable, for pragmatic and constitutional reasons, that the institution be established by the legislature or some regular procedure of government. But the conclusion, based as it is on a right of citizens, would grant citizens themselves the authority to create such an institution (acting through an initiative or other direct means) if they have exhausted normal procedures. The conclusion that citizens have a right to govern their electoral system would have remained a theoretical ideal, had not British Columbia established its Citizens’ Assembly in 2004. With the creation of the Assembly (and the similar institutions to follow in some other Canadian provinces), we have an opportunity to assess the conclusion in an actual case. By examining a project that so far comes closer than any other to realizing the conclusion, we can assess the most important democratic objections that may be raised against citizens choosing their electoral system.10 Anyone watching the sessions of the Assembly, reading the material distributed to members, and browsing through their discussions on the web is bound to be impressed with the seriousness with which the leaders, staff, and members approached their task.11 The quality of the deliberations was uneven, but it was significantly higher than skeptics and some sympathetic supporters had anticipated. But even assuming that organizers and participants performed as well as anyone could under these conditions, we may still raise objections to the conditions themselves. I consider two sets of objections, each reflecting a core value of democracy. The first (invoking the value of liberty) questions whether genuine choice is possible or desirable; the second (appealing to the value of equality) casts doubt on the fairness of the distribution of the opportunities for choosing. These objections are especially significant because the values on which they rest

10

11

My account relies on the material presented on the Assembly’s website, videotapes of some of the sessions, the various reports issued by the Assembly, articles written by social scientists who observed the process, a short book by one of the members, and presentations by staff and some Assembly members at a workshop at the University of British Columbia in January 2005. The website is: www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public. The videotapes are available on DVD disks: ‘‘The Learning Phase’’ (13 disks); and ‘‘Citizens’ Assembly Plenary Meetings’’ (‘‘Decision Weekend’’ of the Deliberation Phase, October 23–24, 2004) (3 disks). The principal reports are: Citizens’ Assembly (2004a); Citizens’ Assembly (2004b); Citizens’ Assembly (2004c); Gibson (2002). The articles include: Ratner (2004: 20–26); Ratner (2005: 24–33); Ruff (2004: 235–48). A valuable first-person account by one of the members is MacDonald (2005). The most useful videos record the deliberations on ‘‘Decision Weekend’’ (‘‘Citizens’ Assembly Plenary Meetings,’’ October 23–24, 2004). The small group discussions were not taped, though there are notes taken by the staff of some of the sessions.

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are the same as the values that ground the justification of the right of citizens to choose the electoral system. How free is the choice? To assess the objection that the choices of the Assembly members were not sufficiently free, we need to consider two different aspects of choice – the range of options offered (the scope of the objects of choice), and the kind of influences exerted (the autonomy of the subjects who choose). The scope of choice A choice is not generally regarded as free if only one option is presented (a Hobson’s choice). But neither can we say that a choice is more free the more options that are presented (a Chinese menu). We have to make some judgment about the significance of the options. Significance to whom? We should say: ‘‘a reasonable chooser,’’ a standard that seems more justifiable than purely subjective or objective criteria. Significance is a function not only of the value of each option considered alone, but also of the degree of the difference between them. The difference should be great enough that the consequences of the choice matter to the chooser, but not so great that the chooser regards one option as obviously dominant (but less attractive than another feasible alternative that is not offered). The options the Assembly considered fell within this range. The three systems on the agenda – SMP (the single member plurality system in current use), a mixed member proportional (MMP) system, and a single transferable vote (STV) system (see page 130) – produce quite different consequences (and offer quite different modes of choice themselves). The political significance of the choice is greater than that typically offered between the candidates in systems where two parties dominate. Critics may raise doubts about the scope of the choice at earlier and later phases of the process, however. At earlier phases, the objection in its most general form points to the danger of a regress. If citizens have the right to choose the electoral system, then they should have the right to choose how they choose the electoral system (and so on). Specifically, neither members nor citizens had any choice about whether to create the Assembly, and then too little choice about which options were placed on the agenda. The potential regress can be forestalled by appealing partly to pragmatic considerations (the marginal benefits of creating yet another level of decision are likely to be small relative to the costs), and partly to normative considerations (free and equal citizens should not object to stopping the process at the level of an assembly). Unlike institutions at earlier or later

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stages of the regress, an assembly of citizens stands in a privileged position: it constitutes the first opportunity for any popular institution to decide whether to establish another assembly or some other process to decide how to decide. This Citizens’ Assembly did not happen to have the formal authority to create another institution, and showed no inclination to seek such authority. But if the danger of regress were to come to be regarded as a serious practical problem, there is no reason why a future assembly could not have the responsibility for resolving it. The agenda is another matter. By the Terms of Reference, the Assembly’s assessment of the electoral systems was to be ‘‘limited to the manner by which voters’ ballots are translated into seats in the legislative assembly’’ (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 107) In his report on the constitution, Gordon Gibson explicitly excluded a number of issues about which many voters were concerned: electoral boundaries, campaign finance, reserved legislative seats, and compulsory voting (Gibson 2002: 27). He argued that including such issues would ‘‘complicate the Assembly’s work’’ and ‘‘muddy the waters of any referendum and thereby endanger the rendering of a clear public verdict.’’ Assembly members probably agreed that they had ‘‘enough to do without further complexity.’’ Gibson was also surely correct to insist that the referendum should pose a single clear question. Multiple options not only create the potential for voter confusion but also for strategic manipulation.12 For these reasons most states in the US have a legal requirement that initiatives can include only one subject (though what counts as a single subject is sometimes disputed; Campbell 2001). Admittedly, most citizens might not consider the partisan disparity between votes and seats their highest priority among problems calling for electoral reform. Voters could have been asked to rank the problems. But is it desirable to accept the priorities that citizens directly express, without any mediation through further deliberation? Their priorities might well be mistaken even if the objective is maintaining popular control of the electoral system. In the US most voters evidently care more about term limits than any other reforms of the electoral system (Thompson 2002: 126–32). Yet term limits would most likely have the effect of shifting control to lobbyists and the other ‘‘permanent’’ members of the political community in the capital cities. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that members’ choice about the priorities of reform was limited. Some of the members sought to overcome this limitation by expressing their reservations in the Technical report (mostly in parenthetical comments). A more effective measure would 12

Gordon Gibson, electronic communication to the author, April 24, 2005.

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have been to grant the Assembly formal authority to recommend items for the agenda of a future assembly. Within the terms of reference and informal constraints imposed by the staff, the Assembly members had substantial control over the options on their agenda.13 While it might appear that members were artificially limited to the three models earlier described, they were invited during the learning phase to consider a full range of alternatives. The Chair suggested that they could narrow the range by identifying and ranking the criteria they believed any adequate system should satisfy. But only through deliberation among themselves did they limit the alternatives they would consider further. Once they had decided on their three criteria (proportionality, local representation, voter choice), they could reasonably reject PR list systems (inadequate local representation), most majoritarian systems (non-proportional representation in the legislature), and mixed member systems that lacked proportionality, such as Japan’s (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 91; see also MacDonald 2005: 32–36). Lang questions the decision to limit the choice to three criteria. In Chapter 4 of this volume she suggests that excluding the criterion ranked fourth by members (‘‘social and cultural representation’’) affected the discussion and possibly the conclusion. Nevertheless, because they believed that both STV and MMP satisfied the three criteria better than the current system, members agreed to concentrate on them. Even so, many choices still had to be made, as there are many versions of each of these systems. Although members relied on expert advice to decide on some of the issues (few had strong feelings about the Droop quota or the weighted inclusive Gregory method), they participated fully in the framing of the final versions of each of the models. At this stage their control of the agenda and the choice of the alternatives on which they would later vote should be seen as relatively free. The autonomy of the choosers The objection takes a different form at the later stages of the process – the point at which members were coming to conclusions and making final recommendations. Here the issue is not the scope of their choices but the influences that could distort their decisions. One kind of influence is political pressure. Certainly, members heard many impassioned appeals from concerned citizens (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 71–87). At the public hearings, strong views were expressed, and on the Assembly’s website, spirited submissions posted. But members were not subjected to most of 13

On the influence of the staff, see Lang, Chapter 4 this volume.

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the usual political pressures that might cause concern. Public officials at all levels of government (including judges, party officials, and recent candidates for public office) were not eligible for membership in the Assembly. Although the plenary sessions were public, the members voted by secret ballot. Neither of the major political parties took a strong stand for or against any of the alternatives. The media mostly stayed neutral as well. Unlike campaigns in general elections, money did not play a significant role. Only one organized effort was made to lobby members. The Green Party at public hearings and in publications pressed the case for a version of MMP and against STV, but the campaign faltered when the Party’s representatives at public hearings around the province could not answer detailed questions from members.14 A more subtle form of pressure may have been present, however. The very existence of an Assembly with the mandate it had may have predisposed members – not toward any particular model, but against the status quo. To many members, it might well have seemed a failure if after all this work they had come to the conclusion that the existing system should be retained. For a similar reason, there may have been some unintended bias in the selection of members. Those who were content with the status quo were probably less likely to want to participate in this project. The selection process favored volunteers, and may have also attracted citizens less sympathetic to major parties than the general electorate is. Even so, a substantial minority, including some of the most articulate members, defended the existing system. Seven voted for it in the end despite pleas for consensus from their fellow members. This pressure toward change, insofar as it existed, did not seem to be of the kind or degree that should make one doubt that the final choice was less free than it should have been. The more serious question that may be raised about autonomy concerns not too much pressure but too little information.15 Critics may object that the decisions were not sufficiently free because members were not adequately informed or did not satisfactorily process the information they received. Many political scientists probably do not understand the intricacies of electoral systems. How can one expect ordinary citizens to comprehend the details necessary for making an informed choice among systems? Furthermore, without some prior views or partisan cues, members would not have much basis on which to make connections between the choice of a system and political values about which they cared. The absence of 14

15

Ken Carty, Chief Research Officer of the Citizens’ Assembly, electronic communication to the author, March 20, 2005. The distinction recalls the traditional criteria of compulsion and ignorance to characterize unfree action; see Aristotle (350 BC [1963]: 1109b–1111b).

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partisanship and the exclusion of politicians, intended to encourage the members to be judicious, removed the passions and interests that usually are necessary in politics to motivate people to care about the judgments they need to make, and to learn what they need to know to make sensible judgments. Although members were not tested on the knowledge they acquired during the ‘‘learning phase’’ of the process, they were asked to assess how much they had learned. The average response to the question ‘‘How informed about electoral systems do you feel?’’ rose from 4.3 at the beginning to 9.11 at the end of this phase (on a ten point scale; Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 68). Their ‘‘interest in politics’’ and the extent to which they felt ‘‘informed about politics’’ also increased significantly. Their interest in the work of the Assembly was also confirmed by the remarkably high rates of attendance throughout the process, even though many had to travel long distances and spend time away from their family. Only one member resigned during the intensive eleven-month process. In Chapter 6 of this volume, Blais, Carty, and Fournier analyze survey data gathered from members. They conclude that the evolution of members’ electoral system preferences over the course of the Assembly process demonstrates both considerable learning about systems and the capacity of members to apply this knowledge logically and coherently. Perhaps the most convincing evidence comes from observing the videos of the discussions and reading the exchanges on the websites. On most of the five criteria of competence set out earlier, the members seemed to do well, at least those members who spoke or wrote. In general, most presented their views as provisional, open to change, but they were not hesitant to express their opinions and declare their particular political interests. The discussions were not without passion. One of the most contentious issues was the representation of the Northern Region, and members from that region pressed their case vigorously. They kept reminding the members of the value of effective local representation. Lang examines ‘‘How the North Was Won’’ in Chapter 4 of this volume. As for standards, the members did not enter into the deliberative phase without principles to guide their choice. Instead of prior partisan affiliations or partisan cues, they appealed to the three criteria they had developed in the earlier discussions – proportionality, local representation, and voter choice. Although the criteria may seem rather simplistic, they evidently helped members reject some systems (party lists, for example), and systematically rank the alternatives (STV and MMP looked better on fairness; and STV dominated MMP on voter choice). Blais, Carty, and Fournier’s analysis of members’ responses to surveys at various points during the process suggests that they made a ‘‘reasonable choice’’ in the

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sense that STV best satisfies the criteria they considered most important (see Chapter 6 of this volume). Because members devoted several sessions to designing what they regarded as the versions of STV and MMP most suitable for the province, they came to understand a great deal about the details of each, and their specific differences. In the deliberations in person and on the web, the discussion most often centered on how each system promoted or failed to promote the three goals. Typically, a member would try to show that a preferred system is optimal: though it might not promote one goal as well as the rival systems, it does not fall fatally short, and it performs significantly better on other goals. Without making their method explicit, many found ways to compare incommensurable values; they made trade-offs among values, and reached thoughtful all-things-considered judgments. One member argued this way in favor of MMP: ‘‘It optimizes local representation and proportional representation. It makes it a more meaningful choice. I can vote for a candidate who knows local issues, and I can vote for a party representative as my second vote. I think it offers an incentive for parties to clean up their act.’’16 Another pro-MMP member commented: ‘‘And it produces Proportional Representation by design, not by coincidence, and with more reliability.’’ Many STV proponents emphasized a different and more familiar aspect of voter choice – the opportunity to choose representatives without the intervention of the parties. One said: ‘‘It comes down to democracy to me . . . Elections to me are about somebody who is representing me and my interests. I haven’t yet found a party that really represents me and what I believe in. I see STV as allowing me to vote for a candidate who most closely represents what I like and what issues I would like brought forward.’’ Added another pro-STV member: ‘‘And the person is accountable to us and not to the party.’’ The discussions were not entirely limited to whether the alternative systems satisfied the three criteria. Members introduced other relevant considerations, some quite sophisticated. Arguing against MMP, one member pointed out that a candidate can lose in the constituency but win a seat in the legislature (as a result of holding a high place on the party list).17 The candidate would then represent voters who had not elected him or her. Another member asserted that citizens need strong parties to accomplish major policy changes, and explained why she thought that STV would

16

17

The quotations in this paragraph are from: ‘‘Assembly’s recommendation to B.C.,’’ News Release, October 24, 2004, available at Citizensassembly.bc.ca/public/news/2004/ 10/dmaclachlan-3_0410241345-701. Douglas Waller (of Prince George), ‘‘Citizens’ Assembly Plenary Meetings,’’ (‘‘Decision Weekend’’), Tape 5 at 16:40.

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undermine party discipline.18 In another exchange, two members disagreed about the effects of the differences in the number of representatives that citizens would have in each system. Brad Yee argued that under MMP a citizen has one ‘‘go-to guy,’’ someone who is specifically his representative, and whom he can hold accountable. Under STV, the citizen’s representation is diluted, spread out among as many as seven legislators. In a brief reply, Craig Henschel observed that under STV, a citizen has as many as seven representatives to whom to ‘‘go to get his point across.’’19 Not all the arguments were cogent. One member made a point comparing the economic success of Germany under a MMP system with what he believed was Ireland’s relative lack of success under a PR system.20 He did not acknowledge that many other factors probably account for any such difference, and that in any case the difference in economic performances of the two countries has reversed in the past decade. Another member said that she had favored STV until the previous weekend, but had just switched because of a ‘‘a gut level intuition, what my body tells me’’ about the ‘‘competitive nature’’ of STV. Some people do not like competition and will be discouraged from participating in politics under this system. She did not explain why she thought the MMP system would be less competitive.21 When the time came to decide between STV and the current system, SMP defenders of the status quo were few in number, but forceful in argument. One supporter argued: ‘‘Under First Past the Post [or SMP], we elect the government. We elect a majority, and it gives the government the strength to form policy and carry it out . . . Under coalitions and minority governments (which are more likely under STV) the policies are made behind closed doors, and we will lose transparency. The tail will wag the dog.’’22 But the considerations advanced by critics of the current system – its lack of proportionality, the government-dominated legislature, and abrupt swings in policies when governments change – carried more weight with more members (Citizens’ Assembly 2004a; see also MacDonald 2005: 17–30). Yet another potential constraint on the autonomy of members is pressure to reach a unanimous decision. On some views of deliberation, the aim of participants should be consensus. In that spirit, many speakers made a point of saying that they saw virtues in both systems, and sought to minimize their disagreements with their opponents. Members typically 18 19 20 21 22

Cheryl Blaschuk (of Cloverdale), Tape 5 at 17:50. Brad Yee (of Coquitlam) at 25:40 and Craig Henschel (of Burnaby), Tape 5 at 27:00. R. B. (Bob) Herath (Surrey), Tape 5 at 11:20. Tanis Dagert (Lantzville), Tape 5 at 9:40. ‘‘Assembly’s recommendation to B.C.’’ (see note 16).

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gave their preferred system only a ‘‘slight advantage’’ over its rival.23 In a speech on the last day that many later praised, Ray Spaxman captured this spirit quite well. He said he had listened to the speeches, read the web pages, and had tried to remain open-minded, and believed that others had also done so.24 He had gone ‘‘back and forth’’ about his conclusion, and could still ‘‘waver,’’ but was inclined to vote for STV. He then observed that STV seemed to have gained the most support, and he urged others who might not have a strong preference to recognize the need to send a clear message to the electorate. In effect, he was appealing for a consensual decision of the kind that some deliberative democrats seek. The spirit of the discussion, especially on ‘‘decision weekend,’’ was indeed deliberative (MacDonald 2005: 81–82).25 But as other deliberative democrats have pointed out, successful deliberation does not require consensus, only mutually respectful consideration of views (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 26–29). As if to signal that complete consensus was not desirable, several members declined Spaxman’s implied invitation to make the recommendation unanimous. Sheri Keller, for one, announced that despite her sense that opinion was running against her, she would remain faithful to MMP.26 She may have believed that the Assembly would present a more credible message to the electorate if the genuine differences among members were clearly expressed in the discussion and revealed in the final vote. When Bob Herath the next day explicitly called for a show of ‘‘absolute unity’’ and ‘‘100 percent support’’ for STV, it was Spaxman himself who said that he did not now seek ‘‘unanimity’’ and urged his fellow members in the majority supporting STV to ‘‘reach out to accommodate the minority.’’27 The fact that the final votes in the Assembly were by secret ballot further reduced the pressures toward unanimity.28 It may have also created a less stressful atmosphere in the deliberations, and thereby improved the quality 23 24 25

26 27

28

Tanis Dagert (Lantzville), Tape 5 at 11:00. Ray Spaxman (West Vancouver), Tape 5 at 5:35. The deliberative processes of the Assembly shares some similarities with the deliberative juries that James Fishkin has championed (see Fishkin 1995). But the Assembly’s process differs in several important respects. Its members were selected according to specific criteria to represent a whole province, deliberated not about policies but about the electoral system, participated for nearly a year rather than a weekend, and most importantly were authorized to make a formal decision. For other types of deliberative forums in governance, see Archon Fung (2003: 338–67). Sheri Keller (of Kelowna), Tape 5 at 15:20. R. B. (Bob) Herath (Surrey), Tape 7 at 14:30 and Ray Spaxman (West Vancouver), Tape 7 at 40:34. The secret ballot was neither part of the mandate of the Assembly nor the result of a vote by the Assembly itself. Some members of the staff believe that it was adopted as a natural but unintended consequence of using paper ballots, the main purpose of which was to

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of discussion in the Assembly. But it did so at a serious cost in transparency. Unlike ordinary voters, the members were acting at least in part as representatives. Even – or especially – if they were representing not any particular group or constituency but the general public, they should have been willing to defend their own votes in public. To settle for only the collective responsibility of the Assembly is to let members abdicate their individual responsibility. Some members did of course express their views in public, but the absence of recorded votes made it more difficult for citizens later to challenge the actual decisions of members. Warren analyzes the accountability of selected citizen representatives further in Chapter 2 of this volume. The voting procedures in the Assembly were in another respect not designed to encourage consensus. Members decided by simple majority vote, with no opportunity to rank preferences, presumably because that method parallels the electoral system that exists in the province and therefore has a prima facie claim to legitimacy.29 Evidently for the same reason, the choices in the referendum on the Assembly’s recommendation were also limited to a Yes or No vote. As Gordon Gibson observed: letting voters rank alternatives would ‘‘in effect be adopting a new voting system (preferential) to change the status quo (FPTP [first past the post]) . . . the logic of the existing system should in fairness be used in its assessment, which . . . implies [offering only the option of] ‘yes’ or ‘no.’’’30 But in another respect – which turned out to be decisive in the final result – the rules for referendum did not follow the majoritarian procedures of the status quo. The legislature had stipulated that, unlike other referenda, this one would need to win the support of at least three-fifths of the electorate to pass. The rationale seemed to be that ‘‘any fundamental change to the electoral system is tantamount to a substantial constitutional change and therefore must have very strong levels of support’’ (MacDonald 2005: 8). As a result, the 57 percent of the voters who supported the Assembly’s proposal did not get their way. The bar was set higher than for other electoral reforms in the province, and arguably set excessively high. We should not judge how well members performed (or the extent to which they were autonomous) by whether they reached the right conclusion. All of the alternatives on which members voted are within a range of reasonable disagreement. None violates basic liberties or fundamental rights. The Assembly’s process is closer to a case of pure procedural justice, in which there is no independent criterion for what counts as a correct

29

avoid any confusion or inaccuracy in the tabulation of the votes (Ken Carty, electronic communication to the author, March 20, 2005). Gordon Gibson, electronic communication to the author, April 24, 2005. 30 Ibid.

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outcome.31 In that kind of case, if the procedure itself is just and functions properly, whatever outcome results is ipso facto just. But the Assembly’s process does not quite fit this paradigm either. We can still criticize the conclusion by showing that STV does not satisfy the goals the Assembly set as well as another system does, or by showing that the goals themselves are mistaken or incomplete. Yet unless we are prepared to try to persuade the Assembly to change its collective mind (assuming we could call it back into session), we are not justified in substituting our view for that of the Assembly (assuming we had the power to do so). We have the right to criticize its conclusion in the public forum. But only the Assembly under these conditions had the right to put its conclusion before the electorate. How we judge the overall quality of the deliberations depends on the standards of comparison we employ, as well as on our prior expectations. If we measure the performance against the models prescribed by decision theory, we may not give the members high marks. But if we compare their level of information and the quality of their reasoning to that found among voters in a referendum or even the average legislator voting on electoral reform, we should be encouraged. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that to achieve this relative success required a substantial commitment of resources (money, time, and effort) and a fortunate recruitment of talent (leaders and staff) that would be difficult to match in many other democracies that might wish to undertake electoral reform. How equal is the choice? Critics of the Citizens’ Assembly may object that the process does not give citizens an equal opportunity to participate in choosing the electoral system. The objection and the possible replies to it can be better appreciated if we have a clearer idea of what a principle of equality should demand of electoral systems in a democracy. Any such principle should rest on the fundamental idea that the democratic process should respect all citizens as free and equal persons. Elsewhere I developed such a principle for application to the right to vote (Thompson 2002: 9–10, 19–21, 25–29, 37–38, 51–53, 61–64, 187–88). The core of the principle is that the electoral process should provide citizens with equal opportunities to have their votes equally counted, unless respectful reasons justify unequal treatment. The reasons are respectful if they could be mutually accepted by free and equal citizens, and thus only if they affirm, or at least do not deny, the equal civic standing of citizens. For example, inequalities that result from geographic 31

For the distinctions between pure, perfect, imperfect, and procedural justice, see Rawls (1999: 74–75, 242–43).

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variation are acceptable to the extent that they do not create or reinforce other unjustifiable social inequalities. Citizens have more control over where they live than who they are, and where they live does not necessarily carry any irremediable stigma. But inequalities based on ascriptive characteristics such as race and gender are not acceptable unless they can be shown to benefit citizens disadvantaged because of those characteristics. Applying the principle of equal respect to the process of choosing the electoral system itself, we can say that each citizen should have an equal opportunity to participate in the process unless a respectful reason can be given for exclusion.32 It is true that some of the institutional obstacles to equality in the process of voting do not exist or are more easily overcome in the process of deciding on electoral reform. But in the case of an institution such as the Citizens’ Assembly, there are also other reasons to reject the stricter interpretations of equal opportunity, such as those that would require a purely random selection of members. The Assembly was supposed to be deliberative and representative, and therefore needed members who could bring different perspectives to the discussion, and who could credibly express the views of major interests or groups in the society. To appreciate the force of the equality objection to the Assembly’s process, we should therefore not interpret it as demanding strict equality of opportunity. Rather, we should understand it as holding that certain specific inequalities that arose at various stages in the process are not acceptable. The objection takes different forms at different stages of the process: the selection of the members, the participation in the deliberations, and the conduct of the referendum. Equality in the selection of members Members of the Assembly were not chosen purely randomly. Although the Terms of Reference called for the names of potential members to be ‘‘drawn at random from the principal voters’ list,’’ the final composition of the Assembly was to be ‘‘broadly representative of the adult population of British Columbia, particularly respecting age, gender, and geographical distribution’’ (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 31). By stratifying the samples by age, selecting a man and woman from each district, and conducting the selection on a district-by-district basis, the organizers managed to produce 32

This principle of equal respect requires less than do the ideals of equality that theorists typically propose to define electoral justice (e.g. Rawls 1999: 194–95). Any adequate principle should make room for the possibility that the inequalities inherent in many electoral systems can be justified in terms that free and equal citizens could accept (Thompson 2002: 20–21).

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an assembly that reasonably closely matched the population on those dimensions.33 The initial process of selection produced one member who was a ‘‘status Indian through marriage,’’ and a second who had ‘‘recently discovered Metis ancestry,’’ but the Chair decided they did not sufficiently represent the Aboriginal point of view. With the approval of the government, he added an Aboriginal man and woman to the Assembly; both had participated in the selection meetings but had not been chosen out of the hat at the time (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 39). The objection that this process did not show equal respect to persons comes from two different directions (both similar to criticisms that have been raised in controversies about group representation; see Barry 2002; Gutmann 2003; Kymlicka 1995; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Williams 1998). Critics who think that prospective members should be treated solely as individuals object to the assumption that one has to be a member of a group to be able to understand and defend its interests. Non-Aboriginals should recognize and support the legitimate claims of Aboriginals as vigorously as Aboriginals themselves. To deny that possibility is to disrespect members of both groups. Furthermore, the critic may continue, we should not assume that all these groups have different interests. It is disrespectful to both men and women to suggest that they do not both equally want a fair electoral system. In this form the objection does not seem convincing. The use of group categories to select members does not necessarily convey the message of disrespect that the critic alleges. In the actual experience of the Assembly, it was striking that many members usually did not express only views that their ascriptive status would lead one to expect. The effect of the diversity in the Assembly was to show that citizens of very different backgrounds could hold similar views. Neither the disagreements nor the agreements typically tracked the group identifications, although James suggests in Chapter 5 of this volume that members from visible ethnic minorities were more likely to support MMP than STV. Consequently, the diversity probably enhanced the respect for individual persons. Furthermore, to maintain its legitimacy, the Assembly needed to have this kind of descriptive representation. However representative the substance of the deliberations might be, it could never be as transparent as the composition of the Assembly itself.34 Another consideration is that different groups in society have different 33

34

However, the Assembly had fewer representatives at the youngest cohort (18–24) and the oldest cohort (71þ) than the population as a whole (though not the voters’ list; Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 40). See Table 5.1 of this volume for further comparison of the demographic characteristics of the Assembly and the BC population as a whole. For a defense of descriptive representation, see Williams (1998).

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interests in electoral reform. Even if women were not the only members to speak to the point, one requirement of a fair electoral system is that it gives women candidates a fair chance of winning. Women have this distinctive interest in the system. They may be more likely to recognize the need to increase the opportunities for female representation. Conversely, they may also be more sensitive to the dangers of special representation. According to one member, ‘‘several women in the Assembly reacted negatively to the idea that special measures should be put into place to increase the representation of women, seeing such an approach as condescending and patronizing’’ (MacDonald 2005: 49). The objection from the other direction asserts that the group representation did not go far enough. James advances such an argument in Chapter 5 of this volume. If the selection criteria recognize the claims of women, Northerners, the young and old, and Aboriginals, why not also those of citizens of Asian origin, religious minorities, and lower-class citizens? Some of these groups are no less disadvantaged and no less vulnerable to discrimination than those who were guaranteed representation in the Assembly. Some also have distinct perspectives that are not likely to be understood or appreciated by other members. In this form, the objection has some force at least in theory. To the extent that some of these other groups suffer discrimination that is relevant to the choice of an electoral system, they may also have an equal claim to representation. Some of their claims and their perspectives were sufficiently met by virtual representation. The Sikhs have an interest in making sure that the electoral system gives minorities their due, but so do many other members of the Assembly (including the Aboriginals). But virtual representation is usually not regarded as sufficient by those who are virtually represented. The most plausible justification for limiting representation to the four groups the Assembly recognized is practical. Among groups that are potentially disadvantaged, these four are defined by criteria of membership that are more objectively ascertainable. Who is a woman is less contestable than who counts as poor; who is a Northerner is clearer than who is Asian enough to qualify for that ethnic group. (Aboriginal status raises similar problems, which is probably why it was not included as a criterion in the original terms of reference.) The practical objection has a moral dimension if, as seems likely, further extensions to other groups would create more unjustifiable inequalities than would keeping the representation limited to the four. The difficulty of determining which individuals qualify for which groups would be likely to provoke divisive discussion and lead to inequitable misclassifications. Yet another objection to the selection process asserts that equality has gone too far. Equal opportunity is important, but so is competence and the

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quality of the deliberations. In the original proposal for the constitution of the Assembly, Gibson recommended that, after the initial random draw of names, the potential members should meet together in each district, and engage in ‘‘detailed and in-person dialogue’’ about the work of the Assembly (Gibson 2002: 16–17). The participants themselves would then vote (by preferential ballot) to select the members for the Assembly. Gibson evidently hoped that participants would be inclined to select the more competent and trustworthy candidates. (He also believed, on the basis of two field tests, that the discussions could be structured so as to produce sufficient diversity; the groups would not choose only the ‘‘older articulate authority figure’’; Gibson 2002: 19.) The government and legislature rejected this proposal (one of the few changes they made in Gibson’s proposal). The reason evidently was that ‘‘voting by peers introduces an element of electioneering into the process and moves away from the random model’’ (Citizens’ Assembly 2004c: 112). These concerns seem overstated. Given the limited time and informal circumstances of the selection meetings, prospective members would have had little opportunity to conduct anything remotely like a campaign. Nor can it be argued that (approximately) random selection at this stage fulfilled the value of equality respect better than Gibson’s peer selection procedure. Equal respect does not preclude, and indeed under appropriate circumstances may favor, letting individuals participate on equal terms in selecting some of their peers for higher office. That is, after all, the nature of a democratic election. Equality in the deliberations It is not surprising that some members spoke more often and at greater length than others in the Assembly. Although no quantitative estimate is available, the impression one gains from watching the plenary sessions is that men took a more active role in the discussions than did women, and that minorities held the floor less often than did other members.35 (Northerners seemed to have captured more than their share of air-time.) The small group discussions, where more members were able to talk and more interaction was possible, may have displayed less unequal patterns of participation. Pearse discusses the strategies employed to encourage participation in small group discussions in Chapter 3 of this volume. Members also had 35

One social scientist who observed most of the sessions in person believes that this impression of gender disparity is ‘‘exaggerated.’’ He reports that ‘‘many of the women were quite active in both the plenaries and the discussions, and some were among the leading speakers in the Assembly. Particularly as time passed, I had less and less sense of any asymmetry’’ (R. S. Ratner, personal communication, April 16, 2004).

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many opportunities for informal discussion during meals, coffee breaks, Friday evenings at the bar, and in the web chat room. Even so, it is likely that the Assembly’s deliberations in general were not so different than what has been observed in juries, town meetings, legislatures, and other public forums (See Hans and Vidmar 1986: 215; Hastie, Penrod and Pennington 1983: 162).36 Some people talk more than others, and the talkers come disproportionately from the relatively advantaged groups in the society. Do such inequalities violate equal respect? Even strict egalitarians should not want to insist on completely equal participation. Even if it were possible to achieve, the elaborate rules and artificial constraints it would require would hardly show respect for the otherwise disadvantaged members. But equal respect does require that some positive steps be taken to ensure that the opportunities to speak are as equal as possible, and that the occasions for speech are as supportive as possible. The Chair of the Assembly made creditable efforts to create an environment that encouraged extensive participation. He informally solicited members’ views and encouraged them to speak in the public forums. In most of the sessions, before recognizing the more active members, he made sure that first-time speakers had the chance to participate. Nevertheless, more could have been done to make participation more nearly equal. Although the aim should be equal opportunity (not equal participation), some measures to equalize the participation may be necessary in order to make the opportunities more equal. (Enforcing equal results now is sometimes the only means of ensuring equal opportunities later.) To convince women and minorities that they would be taken seriously if they spoke, more needed to be encouraged and perhaps required to speak. To this end, the Assembly could have adopted some simple procedures, such as authorizing the Chair to call on members rather than waiting for them to volunteer. The Chair could also have distributed assigned tasks more widely – for example, by asking less vocal members to take responsibility for preparing short reports for the Assembly or the website. Equality in the referendum The last phase of the formal process came to a close in May 2005 when the BC electorate voted on the Assembly’s recommendation to adopt STV. Despite the legitimate complaints about inequality in the Assembly, the opportunities it provided were more nearly equal, and more consistent with the principle of equal respect, than those found in the electorate as it 36

More generally on the possible inegalitarian aspects of deliberative processes, see Sanders (1997: 347–76).

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prepared to vote in the referendum. As in most systems, the opportunities to acquire information, express opinions, and even to cast ballots were not distributed evenly across the province or among the electorate. Such inequalities also characterize ordinary elections, but they are more pronounced in referenda.37 These inequalities could be mitigated by an energetic campaign and a sustained educational program, such as those mounted before the New Zealand referenda (Electoral Referendum Panel 1993). The difficulty is that the kinds of campaigns that are most likely to increase turnout involve a contentious competition between political parties and their candidates. In the BC referendum, as in many other votes on electoral systems, the parties did not participate in the campaign, at least not openly. Yet it is probably fortunate that the major parties abstain in electoral referenda. Despite the views of the occasional public-spirited party leader, the major parties usually have a strong interest in maintaining the current system. Given the lower levels of interest and wider disparities in competence generally found in an electorate for a referendum, the campaign before a referendum is less likely to realize equal respect than the campaign before a general election. But in this case the process for choosing the proposal to submit to the electorate in this referendum probably better promoted equal respect than the process for nominating candidates in most general elections. If so, we may conclude that on balance the entire process – the Assembly together with the referendum – satisfies the equal respect principle at least as well as does the process that constitutes the typical general election. There is another, less obvious inequality in this last phase of the process. Partly because the Assembly process is more egalitarian than that of the referendum, the relationship between the Assembly and the electorate is inherently unequal. The members engaged, on relatively equal terms, in a process of deliberation that the electorate could never hope to match. Members enjoyed an opportunity that their fellow citizens could not share. They were changed by the experience in ways that set them apart from the electorate. They reached conclusions for reasons that most ordinary voters could not fully appreciate. Even by the time of the public hearing phase, when they were ostensibly soliciting the views of their fellow citizens, they had evidently already concluded that the current system 37

See references in note 10 above. In the BC referendum, pre-referendum surveys found very low levels of interest in the referendum, attention to media and internet information, and discussion with fellow citizens. Blais, Carty, Cutler, Fournier, Johnston, and Warren, ‘‘British Columbia Electoral Reform Study, 2005,’’ BC-STV Study Frequency Table, Final Results – All Interviews, January-May 16, unpublished survey results.

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should be rejected. The Assembly’s Preliminary Statement to the People of British Columbia, which some members believed should be a neutral request for information, proclaimed: the Assembly ‘‘wants to hear if [British Columbians] agree with it that a more proportional system would better reflect the basic values of our province’s population’’ (Citizens’ Assembly 2004a: 159).38 The members began as ordinary citizens but ended as nascent experts. Designed to reduce the gap between citizens and experts, the process itself reproduced the problem that it was intended to overcome. The greater the success of the deliberative process in the Assembly, the greater the gap between the Assembly and the electorate. The inequality that this gap creates is not as objectionable as it might seem, however. Some discontinuity of this kind is inevitable in any representative system in which some people consider complex questions and act on behalf of others. The gap between the electorate and institutions such as legislatures, courts, and expert commissions is likely to be even greater than that between a citizens’ assembly and the electorate. In the case of an assembly, we should pay more attention to inequalities in the selection of representatives, the process in which they engage, and the opportunities to vote on their recommendations or their continuation in office. Furthermore, the gap has a positive aspect, which can support equal respect. The discontinuity provides an opportunity for a mutually respectful relationship between voters and members of the Assembly – different from a relationship in which all participate equally, but no less consistent with equal respect. If members take seriously their obligation to explain the process to voters, and voters are prepared to trust the judgment of members, the moral gap disappears, even if the competence gap remains. A voter can say to an Assembly member not only, ‘‘I trust you because you engaged in a process that seems fair and reasonable’’ (which might be said to any representative), but also, ‘‘I trust you because you are a person not so different from me, and you decided as I can imagine that I might have done in similar circumstances.’’ As Cutler and Johnston discuss in Chapter 8 of this volume, this positive evaluation of the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of CA members was particularly important for populist voters. Unlike members of expert commissions and similar bodies, Assembly members not 38

[Emphasis added.] One member of the staff reportedly said that this departure from neutrality was an editorial mistake made under the pressure of deadline, rather than an authentic expression of the Assembly’s view. But the Assembly probably did not at this time have a collective view about what the Preliminary Statement should say (Ken Carty, Chief Research Officer of the Citizens’ Assembly, personal communication, March 20, 2005).

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only were ordinary citizens before they served but also resumed that role after they served. Their service exemplified a pure form of rotation in office. In these ways, voters and members remained equals. Although the Assembly’s proposal failed to secure the 60 percent required for adoption, substantial majorities voted for the proposal – more than 57 percent in the province, and at least 50 percent in all but two of the electoral districts. This strong support demonstrates that many voters trusted the judgment of the Assembly.39 Some may have decided on the basis of an independent assessment of the merits of STV compared to the current system.40 Others may have cast their vote in favor of STV simply as a protest against the status quo.41 But, as Cutler and Johnston suggest in Chapter 8 of this volume, it is more likely that most of those who supported the recommendation based the decision on their confidence in the members of the Assembly and the process by which they arrived at the recommendation. Although many voters were probably not well informed about the Assembly, they did not need to know much more than that the members were ordinary citizens who spent many months deliberating about the question in a fair process before making the final recommendation.42 Some may wish that the deliberative process in which the Assembly engaged could have been replicated or at least approximated in the electorate at large. But any attempt to reproduce that process in a wider public forum probably would have created such a pale imitation that any electoral conclusion, even one favorable to the Assembly, would have been suspect. More realistic and, under normal conditions, more justifiable, is a process involving a clear division of political labor: an assembly of citizens that recommends (after deliberating about the merits of alternative proposals), and an electorate that decides (after assessing the way the assembly deliberated). The attempt to reduce the gap – to make the deliberative process in 39

40

41

42

Elections BC, Preliminary Referendum Results, www.elections.bc.ca/elections/ge2005/ refresults.htm. Pre-referendum surveys did not ask for a direct comparison of STV with the current system, or anything about MMP (Blais, Carty, Cutler, Fournier, Johnston, and Warren 2005). Although a majority (53 percent) of respondents in the pre-referendum surveys regarded as ‘‘unacceptable’’ the feature of the present system that allows a party to win a majority of seats without winning a majority of votes, a larger majority (64 percent) expressed satisfaction with ‘‘the way democracy works in British Columbia.’’ Only 10 percent said they were ‘‘not at all satisfied’’ (Blais, Carty, Cutler, Fournier, Johnston, and Warren 2005). The fact that only 42 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the work of the Assembly may be largely the result of the low levels of knowledge about the Assembly in the months before the referendum. Some 43 percent answered ‘‘don’t know’’ to the satisfaction question. Only 16 percent were ‘‘not very’’ or ‘‘not all’’ satisfied (Blais, Carty, Cutler, Fournier, Johnston, and Warren 2005).

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the electorate come closer to that in a citizens’ assembly – may have the tendency to undermine both. The more we try to bring the quality of the electorate’s deliberation up to the level of an assembly’s, the less we need to find ways to increase the electorate’s trust in the assembly. The more we improve the quality of deliberation in an assembly, the less reason we have to rely on the independent judgment of the electorate. To some extent, the gap is not only practically unavoidable but also normatively desirable. But given the low level of public understanding of the electoral process, educational efforts to improve the electorate’s knowledge before a referendum have a long way to go before they would significantly reduce the need for trust in a high-quality deliberation in the assembly. The failure of the Assembly’s recommendation to win the required supermajority does not diminish the significance of the Assembly’s achievement. The defeat did not permanently kill the Assembly’s proposal. After the referendum results were announced, the Premier commented: ‘‘citizens have been pretty clear that there’s a fairly strong mandate there for electoral reform . . . There’s clearly some hunger to see an improvement’’ (Bains 2005). With that ‘‘mandate’’ in mind, and in the belief that the educational campaign had been flawed, the Premier proposed that a second referendum be held in 2009. Whatever the outcome of that referendum, the Assembly’s work and the close first vote have encouraged electoral reformers in other provinces in Canada (Howlett 2005: A10). The Assembly’s influence is likely to extend well beyond Canada. The deliberative process in which the BC citizens engaged stands as an exemplar that can guide future efforts to give citizens greater control over their electoral systems. As a result of the Assembly’s achievement, no democracy can now responsibly undertake electoral reform without seriously considering an assembly of citizens as part of the answer to the question, who should govern who governs?

2 Citizen representatives Mark E. Warren

Democratic theorists commonly distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy.1 In a direct democracy, citizens rule themselves, while in a representative democracy they elect representatives to rule on their behalf. Today’s democracies are all representative in structure – a form dictated by scale and complexity – with some direct elements such as initiatives and referenda, as well as some forms of citizen engagement. The concept of participatory democracy usually refers to these latter two elements: direct decision-making as well as citizen involvement in decisionmaking within representative structures. If, however, we consider these two forms of participation from the perspective of representation, the first involves citizen participation in government or other formalized decisionmaking, on the assumption that citizens represent themselves within these processes. The second involves citizens themselves serving in representative capacities: lay citizens represent other citizens. I shall refer to these roles as citizen representatives – a form of representation that is increasingly common in practice, but almost untheorized in democratic theory.2 To be sure, the idea that citizens are best represented by other lay citizens serving as representatives is an old democratic ideal. It justified early notions that elected representatives should be salaried so as to enable ordinary citizens – not just the rich – to serve in public office, as well as the more 1

2

I am indebted to Lisa Disch, David Laycock, Hilary Pearse, Dennis Thompson, and members of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly workshops at the University of British Columbia for their comments and criticisms. I am grateful to Menaka Philips and Hilary Pearse for research assistance. The two exceptions are Stephan (2004) and Brown (2006).

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recent idea that term limits will prevent elected representatives from becoming professional political elites. These and other devices are based on the presumption that when citizens represent other citizens, the representative relationship is secured through common experience. The presumption is not a good one, however. Common experience usually gives way to the realities of running for and holding office, which subjects lay citizens and professional politicians alike to the same constraints of campaigning, brokering, and responding to interest group pressures, and leads to very similar behaviors (Fisher and Herrick 2003). Moreover, as Max Weber noted almost a century ago, governing complex societies provides little room for amateurs and dilettantes, who are at best ineffective and at worst more easily manipulated by interest groups and bureaucrats than are professional politicians. Over the last few decades, however, new forms of citizen representation have been rapidly evolving (Brown 2006; Fiorino 1990; Row and Frewer 2000; Warren 2003). These forms involve non-professionals who are selected or self-selected rather than elected for representative purposes. The oldest form of citizen representative is the legal jury, which represents the considered judgment of peers within courtroom proceedings. We can now add to this limited form more recent experiments with citizen juries and panels, advisory councils, stakeholder meetings, lay members of professional review boards, representations at public hearings, public submissions, citizen surveys, deliberative polling, deliberative forums, focus groups, and advocacy group representations (Fiorino 1990; Fung 2006b; Rowe and Frewer 2000). Citizen representatives typically function not as alternatives but rather as supplements to elected representative bodies or administrative bodies in areas of weakness, usually having to do with limitations of communication, deliberation, legitimacy, governability, or attentiveness to public norms and common goods (Brown 2006). Although it has been common to refer to these forms of political activity under the category of ‘‘participatory democracy,’’ the term fails to identify what is perhaps their most important feature: each involves a form of representation that depends upon the active participation of a relatively few citizens who function as representatives of other citizens. Thus, whereas the notion of participatory democracy suggests that most citizens participate in self-rule – a worthy ideal – what is most important about these new forms is their representative qualities. Accordingly, they should not be measured by how many citizens are enabled to participate through these forms (although this remains a valid measure of democracy), but rather by the nature and quality of democratic representation achieved through these forms. Theories of participatory democracy are not equipped to guide these judgments (Urbinati 2006).

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This theoretical deficit is highlighted by the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (CA), precisely because it was constructed as a body of non-professional citizens who would represent other citizens in the fundamental constitutional matter of assessing and designing an electoral system. In this chapter, I address this theoretical gap first by highlighting deficits in democratic representation through elected legislative bodies. Second, I suggest that strategies for increasing citizen participation often frame the democratic deficit problem in ways that are unlikely to be successful. At the same time, the lens of participatory democracy tends to obscure the increasingly important concept of representative relationships among citizens – usually, between the active few and the passive many. Third, if we approach citizen-based political venues through the framework of representation, we can ask about how well emerging forms of citizen participation measure up as citizen representatives: who authorizes citizen representatives? How egalitarian are their effects? How are they held accountable? Using these criteria, I assess the CA model as a citizen representative body. Considered as a representative body, the CA shows strengths in areas where both elected legislatures and other kinds of citizen representative bodies tend to be weak. Finally, I conclude that owing to certain weaknesses of CA-style citizen representative bodies – particularly with respect to accountability to constituencies – they should be viewed as supplements to, rather than replacements for, other forms of representation. Representation deficits Most conceptions of democratic electoral representation share certain formal features, which in turn indicate criteria in terms of which the quality of representation might be judged (Mansbridge 2003; Pitkin 1967; Warren and Castiglione 2004). The most recognized of these features is the role of elections in authorizing representatives to represent those who inhabit geographic constituencies. Electoral representation is held to be egalitarian and inclusive owing to the universal franchise. Every member of an electoral unit, excluding those unfit or not yet fit to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship, is entitled to an equal number of votes. Subsequent elections function to hold representatives accountable for their performance while in office. As is well known, democratic linkages between citizens and representatives can and do break down in numerous ways (see, e.g., Fung 2006a). Citizens may have unstable preferences that are neither adequately formed by the electoral process, nor communicated by the blunt instrument of the vote. Voting may not serve as a sufficiently strong incentive to hold representatives accountable, especially when voters are inattentive,

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information is incomplete, and other forms of power permeate the system, including actors who can provide or withhold economic resources, or administrative officials who have knowledge that representatives cannot match. Electoral mechanisms such as single member plurality systems may function to disadvantage or exclude minorities. Where there are descriptive differences between representatives and their constituents, distinctive group experiences and disadvantages may not be represented at all (James, Chapter 5, this volume). And because pressure groups tend to represent those with the resources to organize and who care intensely about a single issue, constituency communication may systematically disadvantage public will formation around common goods. Finally, citizens may demand contradictory things from government, such as first-rate health care and schools combined with low taxes. Each of these possibilities are, of course, common in the developed democracies. The concept of an institutional representation deficit is poorly developed in theories of electoral democracy, in part because the very notion of representative institutions serving as collective representatives of the people is poorly developed, with the exception, of course, of political parties. However, people tend to expect legislatures to do their work – deliver decisions – in ways that are responsive, competent, and fair. And there is a sense in which the kind of accountability that attaches to these expectations is quite different than the expectations leveled at individual representatives. Voters are quite willing, as the 2006 mid-term elections in the United States demonstrated, to use their vote for individual representatives to hold the institution to account as an institution. Theoretically, there are at least two distinct senses of accountability at the institutional level. The first is, simply, whether the institution can ‘‘do its job’’ – deliver legislation. Its capacity for accountability in this sense will depend upon its institutional capacity to handle conflict by avoiding stalemate, as well as its capacity to handle the high levels of complexity that come with many legislative decisions. The second sense of accountability has to do with whether the institution can provide public justifications for its decisions. No doubt there are trade-offs between these dimensions of institutional accountability: the ability of a legislative body to broker complex agreements, for example, may mean that its capacity to justify its decisions as a body to the public is quite low. Certainly citizens are increasingly likely to believe that representative linkages are not working well. Nor, to judge by the American case, do they believe that legislative institutions are doing a good job of representing the public interest. Approval of Congress, for example, rarely rises above 50 percent, and is typically in the 30–40 percent range (National Election Studies 2007). As Dalton (2004), Norris (1999), and others have argued,

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the developed democracies now contain a new group of ‘‘critical citizens,’’ who tend to be educated and have post-material values and high democratic expectations. These citizens appear to be on the leading edge of political disengagement and distrust, and are more likely to view the gap between politicians, government, and citizens as wider than ever. Citizens’ expectations are increasingly difficult to meet, it appears, the more complex and politicized the governing environment. In Dalton’s view, ‘‘contemporary democracies do not suffer from a surfeit of interest articulation, but from a lack of institutions and processes that can aggregate and balance divergent interests into a coherent policy program that participants can accept’’ (2004: 205). It seems, then, that the traditional and recognizable forms of democratic representation – elected officials convened in representative assemblies such as legislatures, parliaments, and councils – are no longer sufficient to carry out the functions of democratic representation, at least not as stand-alone institutions. Many of the problems are probably intrinsic to the electoral form of representative democracy under contemporary conditions, and include the following:

 Owing to the electoral context, representative institutions respond better to intense and well-organized special interests than to latent interests, unorganized interests, and public goods.  Because representatives function within a context that combines public visibility and adversarial relations, they must weigh the strategic and symbolic impact of speech. Thus, representative institutions have limited capacities for deliberation, which requires a suspension of the strategic impact of communication in favor of persuasion and argument.  Because of electoral cycles, representative institutions have limited capacities to develop and improve public policies over long periods of time.  Because representatives must attend to vested interests, representative institutions have limited capacities for innovation and experimentation. The nature of the electoral system will affect the degree to which each of these limits holds. Indeed, this is what the CA was charged with investigating. Its recommended single transferable vote (STV; see page 130) electoral system might very well lead to improvements in the first three of these areas. However, even the best electoral institutions will remain limited by the electoral form of accountability – which, even when it serves accountability, produces a structural bias toward aggregative accountability at the expense of deliberative accountability. I hasten to add two points.

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First, it is not the initial authorization, but the subsequent electoral form of accountability – the serial nature of elections – that produces these tendencies. Second, for key aspects of democratic government, there are no good alternatives to elected representation. The questions are, therefore: (a) How might we reform the electoral systems to provide for better representation? This was the mandate for the CA, but not the topic of this chapter. (b) How might we supplement the electoral form of representation with other forms of representation so as to produce a system in which institutions complement one another according to their strengths and weaknesses? This is the question I am addressing here. Democratic deficits in the participation response These observations are not new. What is new is that decision-makers have increasingly identified ‘‘democratic deficits’’ as an issue in all of the consolidated democracies. We have thus seen a number of initiatives aimed at increasing governability – initiatives which aim, varyingly, at more trust in government, more legitimacy, more efficiency, and less political gridlock. These initiatives often include increasing ‘‘citizen participation,’’ ‘‘citizen involvement,’’ and/or ‘‘citizen engagement’’ as ways of closing the gap between what citizens want and what government provides. It is surely interesting that the initiatives have come mostly from the administrative/policy arenas rather than from representative institutions – with the CA a notable exception.3 Perhaps the administrative sources of these initiatives are to be expected: the first concern of elected representatives is to be re-elected – not to govern. Those who do govern – administrators – must square legislated goals with resource constraints, personnel, organizational structures, and then fit these with citizen expectations and, often, the resistance of organized interests. So perhaps it is also not surprising that, as governance strategies, citizen ‘‘participation’’ and ‘‘engagement’’ tend not to be understood as political processes of representation and decision-making (the exceptions, perhaps, being democratic corporatism based on functional constituencies in Sweden, Norway, Austria, and Germany). In most democracies, ‘‘politics’’ has been understood as a legislative matter, with legislative results turned over to administrators to execute. Administrators typically understand ‘‘participation’’ as a strategy for gaining advice, coopting pressures, and improving services, in this way seeking to increase the legitimacy of their policies (Brown 2006). They are looking for citizen ‘‘engagement’’ and ‘‘involvement’’ – not citizen decision-making. There is, 3

The 1989 Oregon Health Reform Plan is another exception.

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no doubt, often much professionalism and little ill-will toward citizens. But the frameworks remain administrative rather than political, and citizen participation is viewed as a matter of advice-giving rather than empowered participation. But because the new experiments are political, it is not surprising that the conceptions of ‘‘participation,’’ ‘‘involvement,’’ and ‘‘engagement’’ prove insufficient, so much so that we can now see a number of democratic deficits in what was thought to be the most democratic of activities. At the system level, expanding opportunities for participation can actually exacerbate deficits in democratic representation. Many kinds of new opportunities, for example, are based on self-selection, and therefore tend to favor those who are better educated and wealthier. On a system-wide level, more participation may increase the overrepresentation of those who are already well represented, generating the paradox that increasing citizen opportunities for participation may increase political inequality (Dalton, Cain, and Scarrow 2003). At the institutional level, unmediated participation tends to suffer from a number of defects. Because participants self-select, the most intense interests and loudest voices often dominate, leading to under-representation of those who are less organized, less educated, and have fewer resources (Mansbridge 1980). Participatory venues can increase the neglect of public goods or increase the unjust distribution of their burdens by empowering local resistance by well-organized groups. Forms of participation that merely aggregate existing opinion (e.g. public submissions and hearings) contribute little to the deliberative formation of preferences and policy. And participation without power can lead to more disaffection, as citizens go through the exercise of engaging, only to have decisions taken elsewhere and for other reasons (Abelson and Eyles 2002: 8ff., 16; Irvin and Stansbury 2004: 58–60). Citizen representatives Owing in large part to the lens of participatory democracy, it has largely escaped notice that with respect to most citizens the functions of these participatory institutions are less participatory than they are representative (cf. Stephan 2004; Brown 2006). Most participatory institutions are, in fact, designed in such a way that some citizens represent others, either directly, or – more often – through claims to represent perspectives, considered opinions, goods, interests, and values of those who are not present in the process (Fishkin 1995; Hanley et al. 2001; Lenaghan 1999; Parkinson 2003; Smith and Wales 2000; Ward et al. 2003). Because most citizens do not participate through these institutions – subject, as they are, to the same

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constraints of scale and complexity as other institutions – we should be conceiving of them as representative bodies. The defining criterion of a ‘‘citizen representative body’’ is that members are selected or self-selected, or authorized through initial election alone – rather than functioning as professional elected representatives. In this way, members are freed, as it were, from the imperatives of the election cycle that produce representative deficits. At the same time, precisely because of this freedom from electoral accountability, the kinds of questions that apply to elected representative bodies are more urgent, especially if citizen representatives have influence or power, as was the case with the CA. For these reasons, we should apply the criteria of democratic representation to citizen representatives, looking for the functional equivalents of electoral authorization, egalitarian inclusiveness, and accountability. Authorization Elected representatives and bodies benefit from the clear authorization of the electoral process. In contrast, the initial authorization of citizen representatives is often ambiguous. For most non-governmental (civil society) associations and forums, there are no authorization procedures beyond self-selection. Groups initially claim to represent (in the sense of ‘‘speak for’’) citizens or issues, and these claims are ‘‘authorized’’ only retrospectively, usually as a consequence of a representative claim attracting a following. Formal advisory processes are explicitly authorized, often with a representative mandate to include, for example, ‘‘community representation.’’ In part because such terms are vague, in practice authorization can be arbitrary. In contrast, the CA was a body legislated into existence by an elected government. Authorization was explicit, coming in the form of enabling legislation that specified the manner in which CA members would be chosen, the task, and the timetable for completion. With respect to formal authorization, the CA is more comparable to citizen juries than to other kinds of citizen representatives. It is another question as to whether the citizens of BC perceived the Legislative Assembly’s formal authorization of the CA as representative authorization. In the CA case, the level of trust – a key indication of authorization – expressed by citizens far exceeded the level of trust they typically place in politicians and legislative bodies. Theoretically, trust in the CA might be based on (a) perceptions of convergent interests, and/or (b) descriptive similarities between the body and the citizenry (James, Chapter 5). Survey findings presented in this volume (Cutler and Johnston,

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Chapter 8) suggest that most citizens viewed the CA and its members as ‘‘ordinary citizens’’ who had the public interest in view in their deliberations and decision-making. Two mechanisms seem important to this result. First, the near random selection produced a large number of ‘‘ordinary citizens’’ with no apparent vested interests. And the screen against organized political interests and professional politicians assured that the body would not incorporate those with immediate stakes in the outcomes. While cases of designed democratic corporatism in Europe suggest that a screen against politicians and organized interests is not generally necessary for legitimacy, the case of electoral reform is distinct, since politicians and closely identified interests would be in a clear conflict of interest (Thompson, Chapter 1). The CA experience suggests that nearrandom selection performs at least as well as elections to authorize representatives, and in some ways better. Egalitarian inclusiveness If a representative body is ‘‘democratic,’’ then it will include ways and means of representing all affected interests. One way of including affected interests is through descriptive representation – and this was the key mechanism of inclusion in the CA (Gibson 2002). The egalitarian inclusiveness of citizen representatives is often suspect, since most are constituted through self-selection, thus favoring the intensely interested and those with political resources – particularly education, but also time, experience, and income (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). In the case of some public hearings, public submissions, and single-issue advocacy groups, self-selection combines with the natural exclusions that follow from the issue. In most cases, egalitarian inclusiveness is not even an aim of elected representatives: their interests reside in representing citizens with similar or convergent interests. This aggregative pattern of citizen representation achieves egalitarian inclusion only when the range of representatives in the public domain is sufficient to include the interests of every citizen. In practice, these conditions are rarely if ever met. But it is possible for citizen representative bodies to be constituted in such a way that they are egalitarian and inclusive of all affected interests, either through random selection or initial stratification. These techniques are used to constitute legal juries, citizen juries, and deliberative polls. The CA used both: geography and sex were used in such a way that each riding was represented by a man and a woman. Other descriptive categories such as race and ethnicity, religion, income, education, and age were left to the process of random selection, though the Chair was empowered to add members of groups under-represented in the sample – a power he exercised

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in adding two Aboriginal members who had agreed to serve, but were not among the final 158 who were drawn at random. Several features of the process introduced some bias. First, the voter rolls were used as the basis for random invitations to serve. Second, those who received letters had to respond affirmatively if they were interested in serving. Third, fluency in English was a requirement of service. These features no doubt produced the overrepresentation of people with more education, more income, and more time (e.g. retired people), and an under-representation of less educated, lower-income, younger, and recently arrived citizens, which in turn produced an under-representation of visible minorities. These likely biases were known and justified in advance: Gibson argued that they were necessary to produce a group of capable people sufficiently committed to the process (Gibson 2002: 12–13, cf. James, Chapter 5, this volume). The direct effects of income inequality, however, were mitigated with modest pay for service and reimbursement for expenses. While the CA might have been more inclusive and egalitarian (see James, Chapter 5, this volume), when compared to two other alternatives it looks very inclusive indeed. Elected representation tends to produce bodies with highly biased demographic characteristics, while those forms of citizen representation that rely on self-selection magnify the biases of education, income, time, and ethnicity. Accountability Taken at face value, the democratic accountability of the CA appears to be problematic. On the one hand, the CA lacked the formal accountability mechanisms of re-election or removal from office. On the other hand, these forms of accountability would seem to be more important in the case of the CA than with other citizen bodies for two reasons. First, the CA was involuntary from the perspective of the citizens it represented. Thus, the market-like accountability mechanisms at work in the case of advocacy group representation – members ‘‘vote with their feet’’ by exiting if they feel they are misrepresented – could not function in this case. Citizens of BC could opt out of being represented by the CA only by moving from the province. Second, with the exception of legal juries, the CA was unique among citizen representative bodies in being empowered to set the agenda for electoral reform. To be sure, the CA’s recommendation went to a referendum (and will do so again in 2009), allowing citizens to exercise a check over the CA’s power. But the CA was empowered to set the agenda, which is a nice bit of power indeed. Under democratic expectations, when representation is involuntary and empowered (as with states),

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the normative requirements for democratic accountability increase – and this is what makes the lack of formal accountability mechanisms apparently troubling. At the same time, what it means for a representative or representative institution to be ‘‘accountable’’ is multifaceted. It is a peculiar strength (or so I shall argue) of the CA model that it includes forms of democratic accountability that do not depend on election of representatives, and would be undermined by electoral accountability. To see this, we need look no farther than the conflicting features of accountability within elected legislatures, which will both identify the senses in which the CA was accountable, and identify the ways in which the CA model might complement electoral accountability. Elected representatives are accountable not only to the constituents who elected them, but also to the public purposes of the legislative bodies in which they serve – a complexity that has been covered, inadequately, by the distinction between the delegate and trustee roles of representatives (Pitkin 1967; Mansbridge 2003). In addition, there is an accountability that attaches to the institutions themselves: people expect legislatures to do their work with effectiveness and fairness. They will use their votes for individual representatives against the institution if they perceive that it is not performing, or is performing in ways that are unfair or corrupt. To develop these dimensions of accountability sufficiently to assess the CA, I shall combine a distinction borrowed from theories of deliberative democracy between the aggregation and deliberation of interests and values (e.g. Habermas 1994), with the observation that the individual representatives and the legislative institution each define distinct loci of accountability. Although not commonly discussed in theories of electoral democracy, individuals should not only be able to have their interests, values, and positions formulated and represented by members of representative bodies, but also formed into decisions by those same bodies, in a way that citizens can recognize the outputs as representing either their aggregated and negotiated interests and values, or a public will (Urbinati 2006). So for their part, legislative bodies may be accountable for brokering agreements among the interests represented by representatives, or for forming public wills through deliberation. From the point of view of process, the distinction between the accountability of representatives and the accountability of institutions is roughly parallel to a distinction now common in discussions of the European Union between ‘‘input legitimacy’’ based on democratic inputs and ‘‘output legitimacy’’ based on institutional performance, so we might also speak of ‘‘input accountability’’ through representatives, and ‘‘output accountability’’ of the institution. Combining these distinctions, we can speak of four kinds of accountability, two of which attach to

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Table 2.1. Forms of accountability Aggregative Member (input) accountability Institutional (output) accountability

Deliberative

(A1) Accountability for interest (A2) Discursive and value representation accountability to constituents (A3) Accountability for decision- (A4) Public accountability making (institutional (institutional capacity to capacity to deal with justify decisions) conflict and complexity)

individual representatives, and two of which attach to representative institutions, as summarized in Table 2.1. Thus, (A1) accountability for interest and value representation identifies the relationship between the representative and her constituents’ interests and values. In this role, the representative articulates her constituents’ interests as she best understands them, and votes accordingly. (A2) Discursive accountability to constituents identifies the representative’s role in representing positions and arguments both within legislatures, and before constituents. In this role, the representative engages in persuasion, serving as a pivot between the public arguments and positions of constituents, and the processes of argumentative persuasion within legislatures. (A3) Accountability for decision-making identifies the institutional responsibility for aggregating interests sufficiently to produce compromises and brokered agreements, based on inputs of constituents’ interests and values as articulated by representatives. This responsibility depends on institutional capacities not only to manage conflict, but also to manage complex decisions. (A4) Public accountability identifies an institutional responsibility as a public forum, for producing agreements that reflect considered public opinion refined through debate and deliberation. Ideally, all four modes of accountability are present and empowered in democratic institutions, varying, of course, by the nature of the issue, levels of interest definition, mobilization, polarization, and citizen interest and involvement. So how does the CA measure up in each of these four modes of accountability? (A1) Member accountability: accountability for interest and value representation Precisely because of the lack of constituency-based electoral accountability, we should expect accountability to the values and interests of defined constituencies to be minimal. But it was not absent:

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although no member of the CA was subject to electoral recall or removal from office, the product of the CA was subject to the stricture that it had to be approved not just by a 60 percent majority, but also in 60 percent of the ridings, thus introducing an element of accountability to interests of geographically defined constituencies – evidenced, for example, in the emergence of ‘‘the North’’ as an interest group within the CA (see Pearse, Chapter 3, this volume). Still, the CA was designed in large part to sever these ties: not only were there no formal constituent accountability mechanisms, but ties to specific constituencies were weakened by the exclusion of organized interests and politicians. These exclusions together with the demographic inclusiveness of the Assembly, the internal deliberative structure, and the explicit and narrowly defined mandate from the Legislative Assembly, were all factors that limited members’ accountability to specific constituencies, while focusing their attention on the CA and its task. Member accountability for representing the interests and values of constituents is best achieved by other means of representation. Electoral representation, for example, is responsive to constituencies with the power to elect or remove from office. And for issue-specific representation, civil society groups are likely to be superior, unconstrained as they are by mandates or timetables, and under no particular pressure to deliberate or otherwise compromise the full range of interests and values within society. At the same time, from a normative perspective we should not be too worried about low accountability to specific constituencies, in part because this kind of accountability often trades off against public accountability. If one of the aims of the CA design was to avoid the weaknesses of legislative bodies in this respect, then weak accountability to specific constituencies was both necessary and appropriate. (A2) Member accountability: discursive accountability In the dimension of discursive accountability, the CA fares better. In contrast to representation that reflects the values and interests of specific constituencies, the CA structure provided incentives for members to develop and represent discursive arguments and positions. This particular representative role was not explicitly defined for members. But it was, as it were, ‘‘discovered’’ as members sought to make sense of their tasks and responsibilities (see Pearse, Chapter 3, this volume). During the first stage, members learned about electoral systems. There were no distinct accountability issues in this stage, simply because it was unclear to most members what the impacts of their potential decisions would be. In the second stage, members engaged in public hearings in their ridings, and the CA office collected public submissions. During this stage, members were faced with the question of what, exactly,

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their representative roles required (Pearse, Chapter 3, this volume). Some simply saw their task as one of learning from others and then making informed decisions as individuals – much as would a professional public official who holds a ‘‘public trust’’ and acts as a trustee. Others saw their tasks in more complex, ‘‘political’’ ways: they actively organized public hearings and created, as it were, constituencies for electoral reform that they would later represent within Assembly deliberations. In such cases, representation was about discovering the common good through learning and deliberation. Finally – and perhaps most interesting – in the deliberation phase members were careful to create an atmosphere of deliberation. Most chose not to show their hand, presumably so they would not contribute to the formation of interest blocs within the Assembly. Importantly, the effect was to maintain a representative relationship between the CA and the public considered as a whole rather than as an aggregate of constituencies. The only apparent compromise with a partial constituency involved the rural areas of BC – ‘‘the North’’ – for whom the STV recommendation was altered to provide for closer geographic proximity of elected Members of the Legislative Assembly. (A3) Institutional accountability: delivering the decision In what ways was the CA accountable as an institution responsible for delivering a specific outcome? From a legal perspective, this dimension of accountability is quite clear. The legislation that created the CA provided it with a specific performance mandate: to return to the people of BC a judgment about the suitability of the current electoral system, and, if necessary, a proposal for change. Had the CA not met this mandate, presumably its accountability to the legislature would have been breached. In this sense, the CA as a body was accountable to the Legislative Assembly for a specific performance, within a specific period of time. Behind this form of accountability, however, is the question of institutional capacity to deliver on a formal mandate. Of particular relevance to representative political institutions are their capacities to handle conflict and complexity, which are necessary conditions of accountability. With respect to conflict, voluntary organizations tend to externalize conflict through exit. In contrast, involuntary organizations must develop ways and means of handling the conflict that cannot be externalized (Warren 2001: 96–109). The CA falls on the ‘‘involuntary’’ side of the spectrum, in the sense that although members chose to serve, they did not choose to be grouped with others who were chosen, and those others represented a broad range of interests and values in the province. For this reason, the CA developed rules of conflict management as its first agenda item, which included norms of civility and rules of discourse. No doubt

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possible and legitimate conflicts were dampened by these rules (Lang, Chapter 4, this volume). Nonetheless, the CA managed conflict sufficiently to produce a near-consensus decision on schedule. With respect to complexity, the CA’s mandate was not as complex as, say, most areas of health-care policy. But neither was it simple, as the design of electoral systems has aspects that are relatively technical. The fact that the CA was structured with a learning period was crucial to its ability to render a decision, and, indeed, the decision was a learned and sophisticated one. Most members transformed themselves from lay citizens with little knowledge of electoral systems into experts over a period of several months, a process assisted by the generous staffing of the CA office (Pearse, Chapter 3, this volume; Blais, Carty, and Fournier, Chapter 6, this volume). That the CA was designed to have high capacities to handle conflict and complexity was no doubt essential to the fact that it was able to deliver its product – a referendum item – on time and within budget, complete with reports and other materials to showcase the process and back up its reasoning. It is not clear that these capacities would translate into other issue areas: the CA benefited from the fact that few members had specific preferences about electoral reform prior to serving in the CA. No doubt matters would have been different with higher-profile, more volatile issues such as health care. At the same time, experiments with citizen juries and deliberative polling suggest that citizen representatives might be constituted in ways that may be successful in these kinds of arenas as well (Fishkin 1995; Smith and Wales 2000). (A4) Institutional accountability: forming the public will Perhaps the highest threshold for accountability is ‘‘public’’ in nature: does the output of the representative body represent a formation of the public will? Was the CA able to give a public account of its reasoning and decisions? Did it seek to motivate the public by providing reasons and justifications? From one perspective, the CA was, perhaps, not successful in forming a public will: by the time of the referendum, only slightly more than half of the BC electorate was aware of the CA and its work, leading to an important gap between the mini-public of the CA, and the public at large (Cutler and Johnston, Chapter 8; Ratner, Chapter 7, this volume). The last word is not yet in, however, as the Province of British Columbia will fund advocacy aimed at forming public opinion with respect to CA results in the period prior to the 2009 referendum. From the perspective of institutional design, however, the CA seemed optimally structured for public accountability. Its mandate was to provide an assessment and proposal in the interests of ‘‘the people of BC,’’ as was

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certainly appropriate for a fundamental issue of constitutional change. And the members sought to represent the justifications for the collective decision of the CA to the people of BC. The motivations, capacities, and incentives for public accountability were part of the CA design. With respect to motivations, two design factors were especially important: organized interests were screened out, while self-selection into the pool of potential CA members biased the Assembly toward public-spirited individuals (Warren and Pearse, Introduction, this volume). These factors created a strong likelihood that members of the Assembly would understand themselves as accountable to the people of BC as a whole rather than to particular constituencies. From the perspective of the CA’s capacities for public accountability, broad inclusions of interests and values combined with a deliberative structure provided necessary material and opportunity for discerning the public interest. In addition, the CA sought several forms of public input, including public hearings and internet submissions. These circumstances meant that members of the CA had to create representative roles for themselves that would bridge, as it were, input from particular constituencies with the common good. But because of the lack of any particular constituency-based accountability mechanisms, the members were free to translate particular representations into a common position. Viewed in this way, the lack of formal, constituency-based accountability may be a condition of public accountability (see, e.g., Mansbridge 2004). A further design factor provided a powerful incentive for the public orientation of the CA: the body did not have power over the outcome, but rather over the agenda. As a body, the CA naturally developed a strategic interest in its (close to consensus) recommendation. But because the CA did not have power over the outcome, its sole means of influence was to explain and justify its proposal to the public – that is, engage in discursive public will-formation. In this way, the design of the process introduced a relationship of accountability between the CA and the public, based on public argumentation and justification. This relationship between the mini-public of the CA and the BC public was not well supported in the period before the referendum. But it is precisely this relationship that the province will fund in the period before the 2009 referendum. With respect to democratic accountability, then, the combination of initial constitution, deliberative structure, and mission, produced a kind of citizen representative with weak accountability of members to individual constituents, but strong discursive accountability of members to the public, as well as strong institutional accountability for forming and delivering a publicly justifiable decision.

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Assessing the Citizens’ Assembly model within the ecology of representative institutions The theoretical frame of citizen representative, I am arguing, highlights the novelty of the CA, which was designed at the outset as a new kind of representative institution focused on electoral reform, much as if it was a special single-issue legislature constituted by lay citizens. Considered as a representative institution, should it be put to other uses? This question is, in part, now answered: the CA model can carry out some kinds of democratic representation, and it may even carry these out better than other kinds of institutions. Yet because the CA model is a non-elected, purpose-built institution, it cannot cover all the representative requirements of a democratic system. But then neither can any other institution. So we should think about the CA as a complementary form of representation, best aimed at two kinds of problems: (1) those that are so intractable or so important that they require broad public deliberation and consensus; or (2) those that pose a clear conflict of interest for elected bodies, as is the case with electoral reform. This claim, however, depends on a more systematic comparison of the CA model to other representative venues, in terms of which we might identify its niche role in democratic systems. While a full comparison is beyond the scope of this chapter, Table 2.2 is indicative of what a comparison might look like. The table combines a set of structural and functional distinctions across the top, with the normative criteria of representation listed in the left-hand column. The theoretical claim is that the structural and functional distinctions across the top have an impact on the kind of representative functions a venue might serve within a democratic system. The cells represent the expectations, with a summary reason for the expectation. The most obvious distinction is between bodies that are elected and regularized, and the bodies and venues that serve as citizen representatives. Within the class of citizen representatives, we can distinguish between formal and informal venues. Formal representatives are constituted by governments, and serve as complements to the formal political, administrative, and judicial systems. Informal representatives are non-government, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), associations, and devices such as deliberative polls. The importance of this distinction is that, on average, formal venues will be more successful at integrating public interests and opinion into policy, just because they are designed for particular kinds of governmental purposes. Informal venues will be more sensitive to emerging issues and existing exclusions and injustices, just because they do not need to reflect government purposes.

High (voting)

Authorization

Deliberative

High (explicit authorization procedures)

Deliberative

Aggregative

Informal (non-governmental bodies)

Low (‘‘marketstyle’’ authorization)

Low (self-selection produces exclusion)

High (low institutional threshold for voice)

Mixed to Low (ambiguous or ‘‘market’’ authorization) High (selection often random, subject to screens)

Mixed (lay sensitivities limited by elite agendas)

Public hearings, Single issue public submissions, Deliberative polling, advocacy, interest citizen surveys deliberative forums group brokering

Aggregative

Formal advisory

Citizen juries, advisory councils, Citizens’ Assembly, stakeholder legal juries meetings

Deliberative

Formal empowered

Citizen representatives

Mixed (explicit Low (no authorization; authorization often vague procedures) directives for representation) Egalitarian Mixed to Low High (near-random Mixed to Low Mixed (low where inclusiveness (universal franchise selection, subject (selection by self-selection limited by SMP to screens) elites and selfproduces majoritarianism selection do not exclusion, high and responsiveness assure for random to organized inclusiveness) sampling) interests) Member Mixed (responsive Low (externally Mixed to Low High (low accountability to organized fixed agendas) (externally fixed institutional (interests) interests) agendas) threshold for voice)

Elected legislatures, councils, boards

Criteria of democratic representation

Elected representative bodies

Forms of representation

Table 2.2. Assessing the Citizens’ Assembly model within the ecology of representative institutions

Elected legislatures, councils, boards

Deliberative

Deliberative

Aggregative

Informal (non-governmental bodies)

Mixed (advocacy stimulates public debate)

Mixed to High Low (conflict leads (rules for to exit; no interaction limit context or conflict; high incentives for capacity to deal learning or with complexity deliberation) through learning) High (deliberative Mixed (advocacy structures stimulates responsive to public debate) common goods)

High (deliberative influences dominate processes)

Public hearings, Single issue public submissions, Deliberative polling, advocacy, interest citizen surveys deliberative forums group brokering

Aggregative

Formal advisory

Citizen juries, advisory councils, Citizens’ Assembly, stakeholder legal juries meetings

Deliberative

Formal empowered

Citizen representatives

Forms of representation

Member Mixed (responsiveness High (deliberative High (deliberative Low (expressions accountability to organized influences influences of revealed (discursive) interest competes dominate dominate preferences with public decision decision rather than justifications) processes) processes) reasons) Institutional High (specialized for Mixed to High Mixed to High Low (no accountability conflict; handles (rules for (rules for mechanisms (capacity for complexity interaction limit interaction limit for deliberating delivering through internal conflict; high conflict; high conflicting decisions) divisions of labor) capacity to deal capacity to deal positions; no with complexity with complexity context or through through incentives for learning) learning) learning) Institutional Mixed (deliberative High (deliberative High (deliberative Low (expression structure) of segmented accountability structure limited by structure and partial (public willresponsiveness to without preferences) formation) organized interests organized interests) and electoral exigencies)

Criteria of democratic representation

Elected representative bodies

Table 2.2. (cont.)

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In addition, we should distinguish between empowered and nonempowered venues. Empowered venues, such as legal juries and the CA, are more immediately consequential, and for this reason must be more carefully designed to ensure democratic authorization and inclusion. Venues that are not empowered – and this includes most citizen representative bodies and venues – are freer to reflect particular interests, as well as to engage in broader public deliberation and debate because they are less constrained by agendas, timetables, and processes. Finally, it is important to distinguish deliberative from aggregative venues. Aggregative venues such as public hearings and surveys collect existing preferences. Deliberative venues, such as juries and deliberative polls, form, inform, and solidify preferences, a condition for producing stable and legitimate collective decisions. We can then ask about the representative capacities of each kind of venue, using the dimensions of accountability applied to the CA in the discussion above, and make some rough judgments as to what we might expect of each kind. The judgments in Table 2.2 are only indicative – their purpose is to suggest that we understand the CA as a potential part of the ecology of democratic institutions, and then judge its contributions to democratic representation in terms of its relative strengths and weaknesses. Nonetheless, by combining a number of expectations about representative functions into a single table, it is easy to see that the CA model ranks higher on most dimensions than other forms of representation, while ranking much lower in one dimension. The CA form is particularly weak in constituency accountability, which implies that it must be externally constituted by bodies that are inherently responsive to emerging issues – legislatures under pressure from civil society groups, for example. But importantly, once constituted, the CA form is likely to have representative strengths where legislatures, advisory groups, and civil society groups are weak – or so the expectations represented in Table 2.2 would suggest. In sum, if the judgments in Table 2.2 are credible, then we should see the CA as a uniquely powerful form of democratic representation. But we should also understand the CA model as a potential supplement to, rather than replacement for, other democratic institutions and practices within a broader ecology of democratic institutions and practices.

3 Institutional design and citizen deliberation Hilary Pearse1

Charged with the task of evaluating the existing electoral system and deciding whether to recommend its retention or selecting a superior alternative, members of the Citizens’ Assembly drew on three primary sources of information as they reached their decision: educational material distributed during the ‘‘learning phase,’’ written submissions and oral presentations made by members of the public during the ‘‘listening phase,’’ and the preferences of their fellow Assembly members voiced and debated during the ‘‘deliberation phase.’’ The CA model had been explicitly designed to expose members to these three forms of counsel but they were left to decide for themselves how to reconcile the overwhelming support for a mixed member proportional (MMP; see page 130) system expressed by members of the public with their own evolving preference for a single transferable vote (STV; see page 130) system. Conflicting messages sent to Assembly members by particular institutional features of the process made this decision more difficult. On the one hand, the members’ intensive education on electoral systems made them more informed on the topic than most of the members of the public they consulted, while on the other, the members were conscious that the first step in adopting any new system required the support of at least

1

I would like to thank Mark Warren for his invaluable advice on an earlier version of this chapter, as well as the participants of the Designing Democratic Renewal Conference at the University of British Columbia, June 10–11, 2005. I would also like to thank the members of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform for the tremendous privilege of working with them.

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60 percent of voters in a referendum with no significant public funding committed for a pre-referendum public education campaign. As they deliberated, the Assembly members were particularly concerned that their only chance to persuade the public of the wisdom of their decision to pick a little-known and technically complicated electoral system was to be in the distribution of one copy of the final report to every household in the province five months prior to the actual referendum. Why then, did the CA pick STV over MMP? If, as Blais, Carty, and Fournier tell us in Chapter 6 of this volume, the majority of members marginally preferred STV to MMP but significantly preferred MMP to the single member plurality (SMP; see page 130) system in use in the province, why risk proposing a system that would be difficult to promote successfully to 60 percent of the electorate and potentially result in a referendum failure that would maintain the status quo? If you ask the CA members themselves they will tell you that they chose STV because they understood their task as being to select the best electoral system for the province, rather than the system most likely to reach the referendum threshold. Institutional features of the deliberative setting can shape the behavior of participants and potentially affect the outcome of deliberation. Understood as ‘‘the rules of the game,’’ institutions constrain actors and provide incentives to behave in particular ways. For example, deliberators may reach a different decision by majority vote than they would if required to achieve consensus and the nature of deliberation may vary according to the size of the assembly and the publicity or secrecy of its debate (Chambers 2004; Elster 1998: 104–17; Ferejohn 2000; Gutmann and Thompson 1996: Ch. 3). Institutional design determined, to a large extent, which sources of information members were exposed to and provided cues for each member as to what was considered important to take into account when making a final decision. Different elements of the Assembly process emphasized education, individual reflection, public consultation, and collective will-formation. But within the constraints of the institutional setting, members exercised some discretion, both in delineating their personal roles as participants in this unique process, and in deciding how much weight to accord to potentially contradictory personal, public, and collective preferences as they reached their decisions. In this chapter, I catalogue five roles undertaken by members of the Assembly during the weekend meetings of the learning and deliberation phases. Depending on the personal predilections of the individual and his or her own understanding of the responsibilities entailed in membership of the Assembly, members could participate primarily as learners, speakers, researchers, advocates, or ambassadors. This variety in participation meant that each member was weighing slightly different sets of information as he or she evaluated the province’s electoral system.

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I argue that the institutional design of the CA – the initial blueprint designed by consultant Gordon Gibson (2002), the changes to Gibson’s recommendations executed by the BC government and the structural decisions made by Assembly staff, evoked and structured different kinds of deliberation while providing latitude for a number of different participatory styles. Members were required to attend all CA weekend meetings and at least three public hearings. They were also expected to read supplementary educational material and at least some of the 1,500-odd written submissions. Beyond these minimum requirements members were free to participate in ways that were distinct but complementary. For example, more extroverted members could take a vocal role in plenary discussions while shy people could participate in alternative forums where they felt comfortable, protected by institutional structures from being dominated in discussion. This was not always successful. A small number of the members interviewed by Ratner in Chapter 7 of this volume felt that some of their colleagues exerted more influence than was fair, and Lang makes the important point in Chapter 4 of this volume that the salience of issues considered by the Assembly was effectively determined by the chance presence or absence of strong advocates for each issue. Nevertheless, this latitude also enabled Assembly members to make important decisions about their own representative roles, to choose to act ultimately as trustees rather than delegates. During my employment as a facilitator and rapporteur for the Assembly I moderated small discussion groups for the twelve weekend meetings of the education phase and deliberation phase and recorded the public presentations and audience discussions at twenty-three of the fifty public hearings held around the province during the public consultation phase. This allowed me to observe the influence of the Assembly structure on the deliberation that took place during periods of facilitated small-group discussion each weekend, as well as providing ample opportunity for less formal interaction with members. This chapter traces the connections between the design of the Assembly process, the different forms of participation among Assembly members, and the reconciliation of individual, public, and collective preferences to reach a final decision. Individual participation Deliberation in the Assembly took place in open plenary sessions and in small discussion groups that were mostly closed to the public.2 Discussion 2

During the education phase, members of the public were able to observe one of the small discussion groups each weekend. However, during the deliberation phase, all discussion groups were closed to the public.

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Learners —— Speakers —— Researchers —— Advocates —— Ambassadors Figure 3.1. Spectrum of participatory styles

groups ranged in size from nine members to twenty, and changed in composition each weekend. The structure of the CA echoed the French Constitutional Assemblies of 1789 and 1848, where plenary sessions were also combined with discussions in small bureaux. Elster describes the bureaux as promoting impartial, substantive, and inclusive discussion due to their small size, random composition, and freedom from the public gaze (1998: 109). The small discussion groups of the CA were each moderated by a facilitator to ensure that members had equal opportunity to participate. Facilitators also clarified concepts from the plenary lectures and discussions, and answered members’ technical questions on electoral systems. Through the education of members, the facilitation of group discussion, and the rotation of group membership, the Assembly hoped to avoid patterns of inequitable participation found in previous deliberative bodies (Phillips 1994; Sanders 1997). Even with these mechanisms in place, participation varied considerably among members. The range of individual participation can be represented schematically as a continuum or spectrum (see Figure 3.1). At one end lie the members whose participation was more passive. Learners absorbed information on electoral systems, listened to and considered the views of other members, and reached a private, individual decision on the best option for BC. Closer to the middle of the continuum lie the members who perceived their role to involve an obligation to participate in group discussions, regardless of whether or not they were initially comfortable doing so. Speakers felt a responsibility to ensure that as many perspectives as possible were considered during the deliberative process. Moving along the continuum, some members undertook additional research on electoral systems. These researchers would often share their findings with other members, both during group and plenary discussions and over the Assembly’s online discussion forum. More active members felt it was important not only to express their views during discussion, but to persuade other members of the need to consider particular issues when making their decisions. While members avoided explicitly declaring their personal preference for a particular electoral system until late in the deliberation phase, some members acted as advocates for particular values, such as local representation or minority representation. At the far end of the continuum lie the members who felt a responsibility to engage the public in the work of the Assembly, described as ambassadors in the Assembly’s final report (CA 2004b: 99). Not only did these members actively

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participate in Assembly meetings, they also spent considerable time and effort between meetings promoting the Assembly in their local communities. These categories are far from mutually exclusive. For example, some members who were active in their local communities also undertook extensive personal research on electoral systems. Learners Some members spoke very little during small-group discussions and did not ever speak in the plenary sessions. Informal conversations with these members revealed a variety of reasons for their preference to listen rather than speak during group discussions. Some were shy or more reserved by inclination and began to speak more as they got to know other members and become more comfortable in their company. Others were not entirely confident in their own understanding of more complex points and were hesitant to ask questions, particularly in groups with members who were especially passionate about the more technical aspects of electoral system design. Others simply understood their role as being to learn about electoral decisions and then cast a private individual vote for the system of their preference. For these members, the Assembly process involved listening to the ideas presented by other members, reading the educational materials presented by staff, attending public hearings, and then evaluating this information in order to make an informed personal decision. Speakers Most members were considerably more vocal during group discussions. While for some individuals this clearly reflected their comfort with speaking in a group environment, others who were initially less confident felt that their membership of the Assembly entailed a responsibility to contribute to the deliberative process. For these members, the privilege of the opportunity to participate in such a forum, the importance of the issue, and a personal sense of acting on behalf of the province all created an obligation for active participation. This participation took a variety of forms. For some, it meant speaking in group discussions, either to promote a particular idea or defend a view of personal importance, or playing devil’s advocate by presenting an alternative perspective on an issue even if this was not necessarily a view personally held by the member. Some members had a deep sense of personal conviction on particular issues, such as rural alienation, the importance of minority representation, or the failings of political parties, and felt it was important to express these views during small-group discussions in order to influence the selection of a system to address these

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issues. Members were conscious that some individuals spoke more frequently and at greater length than others. Particularly during the deliberation phase, some more vocal members clearly made an effort to restrain themselves from dominating group discussions, while others encouraged quieter group members to share their views. Researchers A number of members spent a considerable amount of time undertaking their own personal research into electoral systems, going well beyond the learning materials provided by the Assembly staff. This research included seeking out additional information on electoral systems, calculating possible provincial election results using different systems, and considering possible provincial electoral district boundaries under alternative systems. Members shared this research with each other, referring to their findings during group and plenary discussions, recommending sources for further reading, and occasionally distributing documents to the Assembly. Some members were interested in seeking additional information purely to expand their knowledge of particular aspects of the topic. However, later in the deliberative process these data were used to defend particular systems. For example, one member’s calculations of the potential proportionality of BC election results under different systems were used to argue that election results under STV would not be significantly less proportional than those under MMP. To test the claim that STV encouraged local representation, another member searched for the home addresses of all members of the Irish Da´il to determine whether these corresponded with the constituencies they were elected to represent. Advocates Members’ commitment to ‘‘open-mindedness’’ as one of their shared values agreed in the initial Assembly session (CA 2004: 68), translated into a convention during group discussions that they would not openly state their preference for a particular system. Members later told me that they were far more open about their preferences with each other during informal conversations. Nevertheless, most members did not declare their support for MMP, STV, or SMP in small-group or plenary discussions until the fourth weekend of the deliberation phase. For this reason, group discussions did not often involve explicit attempts by members to persuade each other of the superiority of a particular electoral system, but did involve debates over the relative priority to be accorded to certain criteria for selecting systems. Several members from large rural ridings in the North

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and Interior of the province were vocal in both small-group discussions and the plenary sessions about the importance of local representation for rural voters. There was a sense that members from densely populated metropolitan ridings might not be aware of rural issues and should be encouraged to consider the particular requirements of rural BC when evaluating systems. Ambassadors The most active Assembly members perceived their participant role to extend beyond the meetings of the Assembly to include community outreach. They sought to publicize the work of the Assembly by speaking to local community groups, writing articles for local newspapers, being interviewed by local media, and discussing the Assembly with friends, family, and colleagues. These members actively promoted the public hearings to be held in their local communities, with one member even attaching home-made billboards to his truck advertising the Port Alberni public hearing. Some of these members were already active in their local communities and promoted the Assembly through their existing social networks. Others were encouraged to become active by the Assembly’s communication staff, who would direct requests from community groups and local media to the closest member in each area. Although members were selected to represent the Province of British Columbia as a whole, frequent contact with local community organizations created a link between members and their electoral districts. Members acted as a conduit of information between the Assembly and their home regions, giving presentations on the Assembly process to local groups and reporting feedback from these sessions during discussions on Assembly weekends. As we move from left to right on the participation spectrum, members’ exposure to competing perspectives on electoral reform also increases. Some members were content to reflect on the learning material provided by the Assembly and the views they heard expressed by others in discussion groups and public hearings. Other members put considerable time and energy into accessing additional research on electoral systems, attending multiple public hearings, reading public submissions, or canvassing local community perspectives. While members shared their findings with each other, the information on which they based their final decisions was far from uniform. This variety of forms of participation posed challenges for the smallgroup facilitators. Our training had emphasized the importance of encouraging all members to speak and ask questions of clarification. The purpose of employing facilitators to moderate small-group discussions was

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to ensure that there were opportunities for members to express their views when they would otherwise have felt hesitant to speak up in a fast-paced and at times technically complex debate. Few members had any knowledge of electoral systems at the beginning of the Assembly process but some members were initially more at ease speaking in groups than others. As previous research would predict (Phillips 1994; Sanders 1997) these members were, with some exceptions, older, white, men with more formal education who were accustomed to holding positions of responsibility within the community. The membership of discussion groups was varied each weekend in order to avoid entrenching patterns of participation. Over the course of the year members became more conscious of their own behavior in discussion groups and began to moderate their own participation. In addition to discussion groups, the web forum served three important roles as an additional venue for deliberation. It allowed members who were less comfortable speaking in face-to-face discussions or who were prevented from expressing themselves as eloquently as they desired by a physical disability to present their views using an alternative medium of communication. The web forum also enabled members who were interested in the technical intricacies of electoral systems and who had undertaken further personal research to identify each other and continue these discussions in the social forums at the Assembly. Despite changing the composition of the discussion groups each weekend, the small size of groups inevitably meant that members did not necessarily meet each other in these sessions. The web forum provided a way for members who had not been in the same small groups to meet each other. The majority of members who belonged to the web forum joined in order to read others’ discussions rather than post contributions themselves. This provided an additional source of information for members who wanted to learn more between Assembly meetings. The web forum was an effective supplement to the face-to-face discussion forums of the Assembly. In Chapter 7, Ratner suggests that most members were satisfied with their opportunities to participate in the deliberative process, although Lang (Chapter 4) raises significant concerns about staff control of the deliberation agenda. Public consultation For an exercise in small-scale citizen deliberation, the emphasis on public consultation in the CA process is unusual. An extensive body of research has documented that citizens’ preferences are transformed by their participation in deliberative polls (Fishkin 1995; Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell

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2002; Hansen and Andersen 2004) and citizen juries (Crosby, Kelly, and Schaefer 1986; Smith and Wales 2000; Goodin and Niemeyer 2003). Although participants begin as ‘‘ordinary citizens,’’ education and deliberation expose them to a diverse range of views and create a level of expertise that eventually distances their views from those of the general public. A requirement for public consultation distinguishes the CA from the deliberative poll and citizen jury models, both of which emphasize the transformation of citizens into nascent experts rather than responsiveness to public opinion. Instead, CA members were required to balance their increasingly expert views on electoral reform with their desire to respond to public concerns, a balance common to most modern representatives seeking to act as Burkean ‘‘trustees’’ while maintaining the responsiveness of the ‘‘delegate.’’ Public consultation is more typical for the expert commissions and blue ribbon panels that traditionally consider issues of electoral reform in Canada (Carruthers 2003; Comite´ Directeur sur la Re´forme des Institutions De´mocratiques 2003; Commission on Legislative Democracy 2004). In Que´bec, for example, the Steering Committee on the Reform of Democratic Institutions visited twenty towns, held twenty-seven public hearings and brought a thousand people together in Montreal in February 2003 to deliberate on a range of democratic reform issues including changing the electoral system. The BC government specified in the Assembly’s Terms of Reference that the CA ‘‘must consult with British Columbians and provide British Columbians with the opportunity to make submissions to the Citizens’ Assembly in writing, and orally at public meetings.’’ Accordingly, the CA held fifty public hearings across the province in May and June of 2004, attended by a total of approximately 3,000 British Columbians, including the 383 members of the public who made formal presentations to panels of between four and sixteen Assembly members. In addition, 1,439 people made 1,603 written submissions to the Assembly (CA 2004: 78–81). Working within the government’s Terms of Reference, the consultant charged with designing the CA, Gordon Gibson, had originally conceived the Assembly as setting the agenda for public consultation and being more responsive to public opinion. He suggested that the Assembly’s goal at the end of the educational phase should be to make a shortlist of three or four preferred alternative electoral systems and to publicly distribute a brief initial report describing the strengths and weaknesses of these systems in order to make the public hearing process more ‘‘manageable’’ (2002: 24). Presumably, presenters would restrict their advice to the Assembly to their evaluations of these models. Gibson also recommended that the Assembly’s budget include funding for public opinion polling during the deliberative

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phase to test the public’s response to particular options. He makes reference to the electoral reform process in New Zealand, where an initial indicative referendum presented the public with four alternative electoral systems, followed by a binding referendum held one year later in which the options were restricted to a choice between the most popular alternative and the status quo. By suggesting that the public hearing process best be used to gauge public opinion on a shortlist of systems selected by the Assembly, Gibson effectively recommended replicating the two step New Zealand process, albeit with public hearings in place of the initial indicative referendum. However, members were reluctant to restrict the agenda for public feedback. As Lang documents in Chapter 4, a significant proportion of the Assembly did not want to state any specific electoral system preferences in their Preliminary Statement released prior to the public hearings in case this gave the appearance of having prematurely reached any conclusions without public consultation. Members did not want to undermine their credibility as a public body and at this stage in the process and were not yet confident in their authority as experts. In their discussion groups, members expressed hope that either the public hearings or written submissions would reveal a new viable electoral system option that they had not already considered, potentially relieving them of the responsibility for making difficult decisions about value trade-offs. During their last meeting prior to the public hearings, members discussed strategies for dealing with technically complex or politically loaded questions from presenters or audience members. Both the anxiety about difficult questions and the reluctance to publicly express any system preferences prior to public consultation suggest that some members questioned their expertise on electoral systems in relation to that of the broader public. Ironically, the public hearing process may have contributed to the members’ eventual confidence in recommending a system that appeared to disregard the public preference by revealing the distance between the members’ informed understanding of electoral systems and the more limited knowledge of many members of the public. During the debriefing sessions that members held at the end of each public hearing they expressed far more confidence in their technical expertise and the breadth of their understanding of the trade-offs involved in selecting an alternative electoral system. While some of the public presentations made to the CA demonstrated considerable technical proficiency and extensive knowledge of electoral systems, many did not. When CA members met in Prince George at the end of June 2004 to discuss the public hearings, they raised a number of concerns about the factual accuracy of some submissions, the relevance of many presentations to the Assembly’s mandate, and, most

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importantly, questioned how representative these oral and written submissions were of the views of the provincial electorate. The Assembly’s recommendation in favor of STV did not correspond with public opinion as represented either by written or oral submissions. The Assembly’s Technical Report suggests that ‘‘somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of [written] submissions which identified a particular electoral system favored MMP of some kind’’ (CA 2004c: 84). Similarly, presentations made at public hearings that specifically discussed MMP outnumbered those on STV by a proportion of roughly nine to one (CA 2004: 65). Precise figures are difficult to gauge for a number of reasons, including inconsistent terminology, but the overall impression given to Assembly members was unmistakable: the vast majority of oral and written submissions advocated electoral system change and MMP was clearly the preferred alternative system. What then was the value of public consultation? For many CA members, the public hearings and written submissions were valuable mechanisms for gathering information about the political values that British Columbians considered to be important. Members listened carefully as the public communicated their values and concerns, but felt increasingly confident in their own capacity to select the best system to match those values. However, as the members’ focus shifted from education to deliberation, they also became increasingly conscious of the potential conflict between selecting the system they genuinely considered to be best for British Columbia and selecting the system most likely to pass the high public referendum approval threshold, particularly in the absence of government funding for a public education campaign. Members discussed the complexity of the ballot counting process in STV electoral systems and worried that this would confuse voters or make them suspicious of the transparency of the voting process. Even members who felt confident in their own understanding of the more technical elements of the STV system spoke of the difficulty they had explaining STV to friends, family members, and colleagues when they returned home between Assembly meetings. Others described their anxiety about being asked to explain the STV ballot counting process by curious members of the public when they were speaking at community meetings. Still others expressed confidence that this would not be of concern to the public, with analogies such as ‘‘I don’t need to understand how an engine works to choose a new car.’’ By the second and third weekends of the deliberation phase, when members began constructing the MMP and STV systems that they would potentially recommend to the public, my sense from the discussion groups was that this issue had been largely resolved for most members, who collectively interpreted their task as being to pick the ‘‘best’’ system for the province

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rather than attempting to predict which system would be easiest to ‘‘sell’’ to a hypothetical electorate. Collective deliberation Democratic deliberation involves both ‘‘internal-reflective’’ and ‘‘externalcollective’’ components (Goodin 2000: 81). Although there is some evidence that internal-reflective processes, such as learning more about a topic, may have a greater influence on the outcomes of deliberation than external-collective processes, such as group discussion (Goodin and Niemeyer 2003), the focus of much of the deliberative literature remains on the latter. Gutmann and Thompson’s definition of the practice of deliberation as ‘‘an ongoing activity of mutual reason-giving, punctuated by collectively binding decisions’’ is representative of this emphasis on deliberation as a collective exercise (2000: 168). From the beginning of the Assembly process, there was an emphasis on ‘‘teambuilding’’ and the creation of a collective organizational identity. The first task undertaken by members in the small discussion groups was the creation of a set of shared values to guide their deliberation throughout the year, such as respect, open-mindedness, and inclusivity (CA 2004: 68). These were synthesized in a plenary session and adopted by consensus. Posters listing the values were displayed in all discussion rooms during the education and deliberation phases of the Assembly. Name tags and place cards for staff and members all highlighted their first names, and there was much use of solidarity-building plural pronouns, for example, ‘‘when we make our recommendation.’’ Sornig argues that this use of informal and encompassing language can create ‘‘an atmosphere and feeling of shared situational assessment, natural understanding and common destiny’’ (1989: 104). In his blueprint for the Assembly, Gibson suggests that consensual decision-making would be ideal but accepts that the Assembly may need to reach its final decision by majority vote (Gibson 2002: 25). Recourse to a majority vote recognizes that there is not a single solution to the question of electoral reform, but rather a variety of trade-offs to be made between competing priorities. While the CA agreed in the first weekend of the deliberation phase that effective local representation, greater voter choice, and fair election results through proportionality were all desirable attributes in an electoral system, members disagreed as to whether those values were better delivered by MMP or STV. Some members placed such weight on local representation that they were willing to forgo gains in proportionality and voter choice to retain the existing SMP system. Mansbridge cautions that seeking consensus in a situation of conflicting interests

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produces an ‘‘impasse’’ and insistence on unanimity will lead to ‘‘conservative stalemate, unhappy compromise, or acquiescence under social pressure’’ (1980: 263). The CA displayed many of the characteristics of a consensual collective body. Deliberation in the CA certainly involved respect and was largely conducted in person, with the exception of the web discussion forum. All members of the CA shared a common interest in determining the best electoral system for their province, even if they reached different conclusions as to which system this was. Many members formed close friendships. These were people who spent at least thirteen weekends together over the course of eleven months, and whose interaction extended well beyond the formal deliberation forums of the plenary sessions and small discussion groups. Members ate their meals together, traveled to Vancouver with other members from their region, and shared accommodation. Most of them attended public hearings far away from their home towns, involving more travel and interaction with other members. Many were in contact between meetings, either via the web discussion forum or speaking to community groups with the other member from their electoral district. The members’ voluntary formation of an Alumni Association is evidence of this strong collective bond. In Chapter 6 of this volume, Blais, Carty, and Fournier make reference to the ‘‘temporal dimension’’ of the Assembly process as they map the shifting preferences of members over time. The temporal dimension is also important for understanding how the individual members of the Assembly came to view themselves as part of a collective body. As members’ knowledge of electoral systems and passion for reform increased, so too did their sense of a shared experience and their perception of the gulf of expertise that now separated them from most other British Columbians. When the public thought of the Citizens’ Assembly at all, they viewed it as a collective body expressing a single recommendation (see Cutler et al., Chapter 8). Members were not held individually accountable for their performance in the CA in the same way that legislative representatives may be, not only because they were not elected or seeking re-election, but also because the use of secret ballots meant that members did not ever make a public declaration of their individual views on BC-STV or the current system. The results of the Assembly’s final votes were public, however, and this was partly what motivated members who had supported MMP or the existing SMP system to back the Assembly’s eventual recommendation in favor of STV. Having established STV as preferable to MMP by 123 votes to 31, and having voted against recommending the retention of the current system (142 to 11), the Assembly held a final vote on whether to recommend the STV system to the people of BC. For this final vote,

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146 members voted in favor and only 7 against. Most supporters of MMP and the current system ratified the recommendation for STV in this final vote as a statement of solidarity with the preferences of the majority of Assembly members. In the discussion groups that weekend, some members suggested that the numerical result of this final vote was important for the credibility of the Assembly’s recommendation. A recommendation supported by all, or nearly all, Assembly members would be more publicly persuasive than a recommendation that was opposed by a significant minority. Conclusion Recent experiments in deliberative democracy, such as deliberative polls, citizen juries, and community dialogues, combine ‘‘internal-reflective’’ and ‘‘external-collective’’ deliberation. Citizen deliberators are educated on the topic for deliberation, may hear presentations from a number of experts who are carefully selected to provide balanced perspectives on the issue, and then draw on this information to engage in reasoned debate. Such exercises typically take place over a weekend or a period of several consecutive days. The design of the CA differed from this template in three crucial ways. The deliberative structure was expanded to include more public consultation, not only via the public hearings and submissions but through the ambassadorial relationship between CA members and their home communities. The deliberative process was temporally extended over a period of eleven months, enhancing the collective identity of the CA through social bonds and arguably increasing the concern of some members for symbolic unity. Finally, the CA was not merely an advisory body, but had the authority to set the agenda for a provincial referendum on electoral reform. Assembly members were aware that the product of their informed deliberation would be subject to the approval of a largely uninformed electorate. The design of the CA increased the complexity of the Assembly’s final decision, requiring members to reconcile competing individual, collective, and public preferences. Elements of the Assembly model directed members to understand the final recommendation as being a private decision reached by each individual, such as the use of secret ballot voting and the provision that the decision required only the support of a majority of members rather than consensus or a unanimous decision. Other characteristics of the design promoted consideration of public preferences when putting forward the final recommendation, including the requirement for ratification by provincial referendum and the supermajority threshold, the public hearing process, the solicitation of written submissions from

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the public, and the development of quasi-representative relationships between some members and their local communities. By the time of the final vote, members were aware that there was internal division within the CA between a majority that preferred STV, a minority that preferred MMP, and a small number who wanted to retain the status quo. They knew that the majority of members of the public who had made presentations at public hearings or written submissions advocating the adoption of a specific electoral system favored MMP. They were also aware that communities within the province gave different weight to certain attributes of electoral systems: generally voters in the North and Interior of BC were more concerned about local representation while voters in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island wanted greater proportionality in the translation of votes into legislative seats. How did the Assembly members weigh these competing imperatives? Members made three decisions that tipped the balance in favor of STV. First, they decided that their technical proficiency and expertise gave them the authority to ignore an apparent public preference for MMP, as long as they selected a system that responded to the political values expressed in submissions and during their contact with their communities. Second, after much discussion on the issue, members came to understand their task as being to select the best electoral system for the province rather than the system most likely to pass the high referendum threshold for approval. Third, advocates of STV within the Assembly were able to convince other members that STV provided a better balance of local representation, proportionality, and voter choice than MMP. As Blais, Carty, and Fournier demonstrate in Chapter 6, members preferred MMP at the end of the education phase but by the fourth weekend of the deliberation phase they voted in favor of STV over MMP at a ratio of four to one. Despite the inclusion of features in the CA process promoting individual judgment and public consultation, the Assembly’s major choices were ultimately collective decisions as to which electoral system best served the interests of the province.

4 Agenda-setting in deliberative forums: expert influence and citizen autonomy in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly Amy Lang1

Social scientists have long recognized that those who control the agenda can control the outcome of a discussion. Research has shown that agendasetting processes shape political decisions in at least three distinct ways. First, political agenda-setting processes may consistently exclude certain problems from discussion (Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 1963; Lukes 1974). While putting limits on a discussion should not be assumed to be inherently politically biased (Wright, Levine, and Sober 1992), empirical research has shown a political bias operating in particular cases (e.g. Crenson 1971; Gaventa 1980). Second, the substantive choices identified within a discussion may exclude important courses of action. For example, participatory budgeting processes may require that citizens redress fiscal imbalance through budget cuts, instead of raising taxes. (See for example two different participatory budgeting processes described in Weeks (2000) and Jones (2004)). Third, the overall structure of a decision-making process may bias an outcome. Different processes for aggregating preferences may yield outcomes that do not reflect the true distribution of preferences of the group. For example, empirical research has shown that consensus methods of decision-making may suppress important substantive conflicts (Rothschild-Whitt 1979; Snyder 2003), and may result in more polarized or extreme outcomes (Miller 1985; Moscovici and Zavalloni 1969) than 1

The author would like to acknowledge the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program for its generous financial support during the fieldwork described in this chapter. For their insightful comments and general encouragement, many thanks are also due to Erik Olin Wright, Pamela Oliver, Aya Hirata, Hui-Jung Kim, Kate McCoy, Carolina Milesi, Landy Sanchez, and the participants of the Designing Democratic Renewal Conference at the University of British Columbia, June 10–11, 2005.

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individual group members’ preferences might suggest. Conversely, as will be discussed below, plurality-based decisions also exclude the accommodation of some preferences in a decision-making process. In sum, agendasetting power exists in the ability to set the parameters of a discussion, to determine substantive choices, and to implement procedures for arriving at a decision. Agenda-setting thus poses a problem for the theory and organization of public deliberation. In deliberative forums, the deliberative ideal – careful consideration of information, possible courses of action, and the opinions of all participants (Burkhalter et al. 2002) – is constrained by the problem of organizing and coordinating these activities. In particular, organizers of deliberative forums may undermine citizens’ control over the outcome of their participation. Regardless of their intentions, organizers of deliberative forums create obstacles for citizens: they set a mandate, control information, ‘‘manage’’ the encounters among citizens and state agents (Eliasoph 1998; Greaves 2004), and interpret citizen input in order to communicate decisions back to governments and to the general public. Democratic theorists have proposed that a principle of reflexivity be built into agenda-setting processes (Barber 1984; Gastil 1993; Fung and Wright 2003), where a group’s agenda is always a work in progress, and subject to change. However, actually implementing a reflexive agendasetting process remains a real practical problem. Time, funding, the size of a group, and the imperative to produce a decision may inhibit reflexivity in agenda-setting. Consequently, many deliberative processes continue to suffer from a tension surrounding who will control the parameters, substance, and structure of discussions. The agenda-setting issue is particularly relevant in large-scale processes like the BC Citizens’ Assembly, where government defined the mandate of citizen discussions, experts were brought in to define the problem and the possible solutions, and organizing staff defined the roles and responsibilities of citizen participants. In the BC Citizens’ Assembly the formal working agenda was guided by the government-defined mandate of the Assembly, laid out by Assembly staff, and subject to relatively minimal input from Assembly members. Staff laid out the structure of their weekends together, assigned tasks to participants, and even limited the content of discussion groups through a series of pre-assigned discussion topics. The information about electoral systems and the initial criteria for judging different systems were laid out for Assembly members during the learning phase. Citizens came in with little substantive knowledge of electoral systems, and little idea about what a participatory process would entail. Theoretical and empirical research on agenda-setting might lead us to conclude that this was a politically biased process: that although citizens

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and staff acted in good faith in terms of trying to create authentic and empowered citizen participation, the highly structured nature of their work seriously circumscribed the citizens’ contribution to the decision. However, in the Citizens’ Assembly context something else was going on that enabled citizen participants to have some real power. Over the course of the Assembly’s meetings there was a second, informal agenda-setting process that was substantially guided by Assembly members. This was a process of defining and articulating certain problems that would come to dominate the participants’ discussions over the course of the Assembly. Assembly members raised a wide variety of ideas and questions in the formal plenary and small-group discussions, and for some issues, the discussion stopped there. For other issues, the ones that grabbed the hearts and minds of the Assembly members, the discussion spread out into all the other spaces the members occupied – into coffee breaks, into meals, in their online discussion forum, and in the evenings after the day’s work was supposed to be finished. These citizen-articulated problems became the basis for the substantive decision that they made: the choice of the single transferable vote (STV) system for BC. In the end, this was their real contribution as citizens: developing their particular perspective on what constituted a problem, and what were the means to solve it. Although they worked within a framework laid out by the official agenda, it was the unofficial agenda of citizen-identified problems that guided their decision-making. This chapter examines the development of both the formal agenda built by the Assembly staff, and the informal agenda developed by the Assembly members. First I look at the process used to generate the formal agenda of the Citizens’ Assembly. I examine the kind of input staff and members had, and in particular members’ ability to change the group’s agenda. I then examine the process of developing the unofficial agenda, focusing on two problems that Assembly members spent a lot of time discussing: ‘‘the needs of the North’’ and ‘‘women’s representation.’’ I conclude by discussing the implications of these processes for the theory and practice of deliberation. The following analysis is based on seventeen months of fieldwork observing the BC Citizens’ Assembly in action. I attended five of six learning phase weekends, twelve of fifty public hearings, the Assembly’s meeting in Prince George, and all six of the deliberation phase weekends. During both the learning phase and the deliberation weekends I observed small-group discussions and plenary sessions, and talked informally with audience members, staff, and Assembly members. For every weekend I wrote extensive field notes, in particular trying to capture as much of the non-recorded small-group discussions as I could. I attended ten post-weekend staff

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meetings, four pre-weekend staff meetings and the Fall 2004 meeting of an advisory committee set up by the research staff. I completed in-depth semi-structured interviews with fifteen staff members (including eight facilitators) and fifty-nine Citizens’ Assembly members from around the province. The interviews lasted between one and three hours. Formal agenda-setting in the Citizens’ Assembly Confronted with the task of inventing a ‘‘citizens’ assembly’’ from scratch, the Citizens’ Assembly staff proceeded to put together their working agenda in a consultative manner. The process was led by Dr. Jack Blaney, the official Chair of the Citizens’ Assembly, head of the secretariat that would organize the process and official liaison with government. Two senior political scientists, Dr. Ken Carty and Dr. Campbell Sharman, were hired to develop and oversee the educational components of the Assembly. An administrative staff included a senior logistics officer, Dr. Leo Perra, and a recent graduate of the Simon Fraser University Dialogue program, Susanna Haas, acting as Project Assistant and Member Liaison. Importantly, these senior staff all had academic backgrounds, and brought with them a culture of collegiality in planning and decision-making. Their work was guided by two founding documents: the Citizens’ Assembly Terms of Reference (Government of British Columbia 2003), the government executive order laying out the Assembly’s mandate and major procedures, and by the report on the creation of the Assembly written by Gordon Gibson (Gibson 2002). Using these documents, the staff elaborated a master list of tasks, assigning dates and priorities to each. Each senior staff person was in charge of a particular area, but there was a good deal of informal collaboration and exchange. Weekly staff meetings included everyone in the office, and all were encouraged to participate and contribute ideas. The Chair consulted with outside process experts, and the research staff set up an advisory group of local academic experts to discuss the plans for the learning phase of the Citizens’ Assembly. While there was some advance planning of the overall trajectory of the different phases, putting together the agendas for each weekend meeting of the Assembly members was a different matter. As one staff person put it, ‘‘we were making it up as we went along.’’ Consequently, lectures and activities were developed in the two-week period between the weekends when the Assembly met. This created some built-in responsiveness into their agenda development process: they could tailor the coming weekend’s agenda based on what had happened at the last meeting. However, because of the short time frame, there was not much time for Assembly members to respond with new ideas or input into the agendas for each week.

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Staff nevertheless retained the mantra that the Citizens’ Assembly was ‘‘the members’ process.’’ They tried to gather member input in several ways. First, weekly surveys were administered asking about how useful and effective different portions of the weekends were (plenary sessions, smallgroup discussions, and guest lectures). Apart from the survey there were spaces for write-in commentary. Much of the feedback from the questionnaires seemed backward-looking as opposed to forward-looking – what Assembly members liked and didn’t like about the weekend, rather than what they would like to do next time. Second, the Chair would routinely consult with a variety of CA members on various issues, including where to go next – calling them up on the telephone in between meeting times, and roaming around lunch and dinner tables during their weekends together. This way of ‘‘feeling out the room’’ was Dr. Blaney’s characteristic way of working, and most Assembly members I interviewed respected this approach and felt that they were being listened to. A few Assembly members who were particularly attentive to process issues questioned this way of working. One member questioned the informality of Dr. Blaney’s practice of ‘‘feeling out the room’’: How does he pick the people to talk to? There were a few times decisions came by and he would ask me my opinion or send me an email about it. Other times he didn’t include me in that list. So he kind of he picked a few people but I don’t know how he chose those people. How did he choose when he was going to come up with the agenda in the deliberation phase, or the Prince George meeting, how did he decide who to ask? . . . It all seemed kind of ad-hoc. (Interview, April 3, 2005)

She wondered whether the input she gave over the course of the Assembly had an impact on subsequent events. Some things she had suggested had happened, others had not happened, but the link between her suggestions and the outcome wasn’t clear. However, the structure of the agenda was not a concern for most members interviewed. Many were aware of the structured nature of their activities – as one Assembly member put it, it was clear that the Chair wielded ‘‘the iron hand in the velvet glove’’ when it came to keeping the process on track. But when asked whether he would have liked more input into the way they proceeded, this Assembly member answered a firm ‘‘No’’ explaining, ‘‘I didn’t know enough. That’s not where my expertise lies. If you ask me to navigate [a boat], I can do that . . . But structuring a system like they had there – I’m not going to do my own brain surgery. Leave that to someone who knows what they’re doing’’ (Interview, April 4, 2005). Most of the Assembly members interviewed assigned the role of organizing

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the process to the staff, rather than to themselves, citing their own lack of expertise. This is striking considering the staff themselves admitted they were ‘‘making it up as they went along.’’ Instead, most Assembly members interviewed were more concerned about substantive bias rather than structural bias in the Assembly’s work. Many Assembly members interviewed were concerned about ‘‘being led’’ by the academic staff to a particular electoral system. They sought evidence of substantive bias in the lectures on electoral systems, and spent time directly questioning the academic staff about their personal preferences. Despite repeated inquiry, they could find no evidence within lectures or private conversations that the staff were trying to sway them in a particular direction. In contrast, the Citizens’ Assembly staff was ambivalent about the low influence of Assembly members over the process. At one meeting, a staff person said: There’s been a lot of talk about democracy – but this was a very highly managed process. I don’t want to say that Jack fooled [the Assembly members]. Jack’s skill is to make people feel that the system was responsive. But this was not a member driven process. The timing, the structure – partly it was that Jack and the system were geared to respond to every non-substantive wish – if they wanted more bacon [they got it]. (Fieldnotes, September 26, 2005)

The argument was that input on the ‘‘little things’’ such as breakfast requests, room requests, and travel arrangements was being mistaken for real influence over the development of the process. True influence presumably would have meant that Assembly members could organize and change the timing and structure of their meetings. In interviews, other staff members acknowledged the tension between the amount of control the staff had over the process, but maintained that the Assembly members made an authentic contribution to the process. One staff member argued: [N]o doubt that having a professional secretariat around and we were the ones that had the time to think about process and structure, clearly we were the ones that provided the information to them. I’m sure that you could say that was very controlling. I think we all saw [the members] as being the final authority. Certainly most of us [staff] operated on that basis . . . the bottom line is when push came to shove, the Assembly was in charge, ok? (Interview, December 16, 2004)

Another staff person said: [Members] came in from a very ignorant perspective. There were so many who knew so little. So [pauses, thinking] the box had to be created for them. They

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were working within a box . . . I think the decision was theirs, but the process was laid out for them. A lot of that was structural – like the Gibson’s report’s recommendations about reserved seats and the number of seats. But there was a power imbalance with the research staff having expertise around a topic. Outsiders set the agenda – not how [members] would think, but what they would think about. (Interview, January 25, 2005)

In these comments, staff identified two additional standards for authentic participation in which members could influence the agenda. The first – ‘‘when push came to shove’’ – sets out a baseline standard for a fair, participant-driven process: members could provide a check on the staff’s agenda-setting power and object if they really disagreed with something. The second – ‘‘how members would think’’ – argues that the core contribution of the Assembly members was substantive – they contributed their interpretations and ideas within a framework laid out by the official agenda. To summarize, while there was a strong sense of collegiality and consultation between staff and Assembly members, the Assembly’s formal agenda-setting process was consultative rather than reflexive. The Assembly process was similar to other reflexive agenda-setting processes like the participatory budgeting and cooperative organizations in that its agenda was a work in progress, and Assembly members had opportunities to give feedback. However unlike other reflexive agenda-setting processes, the final authority for crafting the agenda rested with the Assembly staff. It was unclear when and to what degree member suggestions were incorporated into the Assembly’s agenda. This was not a concern to most Assembly members, who appeared to worry more about monitoring the substance of their discussions than the structure of their meetings. But Assembly staff were ambivalent about whether the staff’s agenda-setting power implied that members were not making their own authentic contribution to the process. Assembly staff proposed two additional accounts of Assembly members’ authentic contribution: members could act as a ‘‘check’’ on the staff’s agenda-setting power, and Assembly members could develop their own perspective on the substantive issues, in a way that significantly influenced the course of events. The following analysis examines each of these claims in turn. ‘‘When push came to shove’’: did Assembly members act as a check on the process? To examine the members’ ability to check the staff, I look at four pivotal moments in the Assembly’s process. These moments were pivotal in the sense that Assembly members objected to the process laid out by the

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Assembly staff, and the issue at hand was one that could change the final decision. That is, changing the agenda to meet Assembly members’ objections at these particular moments could have changed the outcome of their deliberative process. The four pivotal moments included objections to all three agenda-setting processes outlined in the introduction: the definition of their mandate, the elaboration of the substantive choices they had to make, and the procedural structure of their decision-making. Of these four issues, it appeared that staff deferred to Assembly members’ wishes only once: the Assembly members’ substantive objection was redressed, while the members’ objections to the mandate and structure of the process were overridden by the staff. First, in both the learning and deliberation phases Assembly members tried to clarify their mandate, specifically whether they were limited to keeping the legislature at seventy-nine seats in their recommendation. There was no explicitly stated limit on the number of seats in the official mandate of the Assembly. Clarification of this issue was important because limiting the number of seats would bias the process against choosing an electoral system that needed a larger number of seats to work well. One of the two most likely candidates – mixed member proportional (MMP; see page 130) – would not work as well in BC with only seventy-nine seats. When Assembly members raised the question of whether or not the number of seats was limited, they received mixed responses. At first the Assembly staff took contradictory positions, with the research staff saying they could potentially recommend a change to the number of seats, and the Chair saying they could not. Subsequently, the Chair’s word became final – although members kept raising the question and asking for reasoning throughout the entire process, the Chair made it clear that this was nonnegotiable. Members’ ability to ‘‘check’’ the staff interpretation of the mandate was unsuccessful in this case, even though some members believed it would significantly constrain their decision-making. A second pivotal moment occurred when Assembly members objected to eliminating some substantive choices from consideration. During the last weekend of the learning phase the Assembly members were charged with producing a preliminary report on their work, to be issued to every household in British Columbia. The staff’s idea was that Assembly members would eliminate some systems from consideration in their preliminary report. This would have consequences for their later decision, because it would focus the public hearings and subsequent discussion much more closely on a few particular systems. The Assembly broke off into small groups to discuss these issues. Back in the afternoon plenary session, it emerged that many of the members were uncomfortable with eliminating some systems from consideration. One group reported that they had

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flat-out refused to identify which systems should be low on the list for consideration. In another group, about half the members had refused to participate in selecting some systems for consideration. The plenary session was a spirited affair, where one person would make a statement against eliminating some systems from consideration, followed by applause from about 40 percent of the audience, and then another person would make a statement in favor of identifying particular systems for further consideration, followed by applause from about 40 percent of the audience. In the end, the Chair of the Assembly proposed that the core of their report should really focus on the values that they had identified as being important, that identifying these values was in itself a big step, and they should leave off the elimination of specific systems for the moment. About 85 percent of the audience clapped at this suggestion; no one raised an objection at this time. In this case, the Chair had listened closely to the members and came up with a compromise that met the members’ objections. However, it was clear that other staff members were disturbed by the incident. At the staff meeting at the end of that weekend, many of the facilitators expressed frustration about the problems they’d had trying to get the group to follow the tasks set up for them. One facilitator was particularly critical of the way that the academic staff had handled the situation, saying they had not addressed the questions about process sufficiently in the early plenary sessions, leaving the facilitators to cope with dissent and process questions, rather than being able to get down to task. She suggested that the situation was: Like with little kids – you have to give them chances. You have to clue them in: ‘‘in 10 minutes you have to put your blocks away, in 5 minutes you have to put your blocks away, okay now it’s time to put your blocks away’’ – if you give them warning they will cotton on and it will work. (Fieldnotes, March 22, 2004)

She argued that reinforcement of the tasks at hand by senior staff would help the facilitators push them through. In retrospect, other staff members agreed that they should have prepared members better to make sure they would follow through on this decision. The staff’s response highlights a tension inherent to the expectation that Assembly members would act as a check on the process – much of the Assembly members’ power to check rested on staff interpretation of the members’ objections. In this case, many staff – although not the Chair – interpreted members’ objections as unjustified resistance to the process, not as valid substantive objections that deserved to be accommodated. The third and fourth pivotal moments occurred when Assembly members objected to the procedures used to make their final decision. In the deliberation phase, the first procedure on their decision-tree involved

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affirming core values that the Assembly members had identified in a previous weekend. The three core values they had chosen were scheduled to become the touchstone for all subsequent debate on electoral systems. However, Assembly members had good reasons for wanting to revisit these values – they had not understood the import of the exercise used to pick these core values and they saw flaws in the method used to aggregate preferences to the values that were chosen. That Saturday morning, the Assembly debated whether to revisit these values for several hours. After lunch, the Chair returned to the plenary room and said to the group: Well, I went to five different tables to try to get some idea about how to move ahead. Well I’ll tell you what I did, I got five different opinions. [Quiet laughter in the audience]. But there is a very strong opinion to start moving ahead. And there is a strong opinion that the three values that we picked the other day – as defined and discussed by Ken . . . that we indicate general support for those and then move on to some other things. However remember – nothing is decided until everything is decided. (Fieldnotes, September 25, 2005)

The Chair went on to propose an exercise where the Assembly members would think for a couple of minutes and then express further values on ‘‘what is most important to you when you make your choice on some voting system.’’ They were given fifteen minutes of plenary time to do so. These values were duly recorded on a list, but the list never resurfaced into the discussions during the rest of the deliberation phase. In this case, the values Assembly members wanted to include in their deliberations were channeled into an expressive exercise, rather than incorporated into the overall structure of the process as core values. It was unclear whose was the ‘‘strong opinion’’ that urged the Assembly to move forward, when there had been five different opinions about what to do at lunch. And it was ironic the Chair reiterated that they could revisit this if they chose, given that Assembly members had tried to revisit last week’s exercise on picking values, and their efforts had been redirected away from doing just that. A fourth pivotal moment occurred in the deliberation phase, when Assembly members did not fully complete their MMP system. While some individuals voiced their discomfort about this at the time, it was the survey feedback after the fourth deliberation phase weekend that indicated that a substantial number of members were unhappy with the way the process had gone on. They felt the final debate about which system they would choose would have been better if the members had had more time to discuss MMP. In an interview one member said that was the moment she would have liked to have more influence over the agenda:

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It felt like we didn’t have time to spend on these last two systems. And that was one point where it would have been nice to have more input at that point. Because I think that day [when we were building MMP] we did have a speaker come in and that took up a chunk of time that we could have spent on the Mixed Member system. And I think a lot of people felt that it wasn’t given the time that it deserved. That would have been a time that I would have liked more input on the agenda. (Interview, April 26, 2005)

In summary, ‘‘when push came to shove,’’ the staff imperative to keep the process on track overrode Assembly members’ concerns about the interpretation of their mandate and the structure of their decision-making. The claim that Assembly members were empowered to act as a check on the staff’s agenda-setting power was not borne out in pivotal moments during the process, when a change of the agenda could have had a real impact on the decision they produced. ‘‘How members would think’’: the creation of an informal agenda While members did not appear to prevail ‘‘when push came to shove,’’ there is substantial evidence that members made a contribution in terms of ‘‘how they would think’’ about the issues that were presented to them. In the course of their discussions, members collectively assigned a relative value to different issues raised in the lectures. Some of the issues raised in the lectures received a lot of attention, some received very little. Some issues developed into ‘‘problems’’ that had to be solved, and others did not. How did this happen? The lectures presented criteria for evaluating different systems (generated from the Law Commission of Canada report on electoral reform, 2004) that included stable and effective government, electoral accountability, check on government, representation of social groups, democratic political parties, choices for the voter, identifiable representation, encouragement to participate, and equality of the vote. Thus the issues that developed into problems started on a relatively equal plane with those that did not – they were all issues raised in the initial lectures about how to think about electoral systems. From this menu of issues, Assembly members focused in on a few in particular. Most consistently, the issue of ‘‘the needs of the North’’ was raised and debated. Much of this debate surrounded the importance of local representation for rural areas. The issues of women’s representation, increased youth participation, Aboriginal representation, and ethnic minority representation were also discussed, although these were more controversial topics among the group. The following paragraphs compare the development of the Assembly’s debates on ‘‘the needs of the North’’ and ‘‘women’s representation.’’ The development and successful resolution of a problem was a complex social

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process that involved individual advocacy, responsiveness on the part of other Assembly members, and mobilization of staff resources by Assembly members. How the North was won . . . At the the first learning phase weekend, random assignment of discussion groups had produced a group that was populated primarily by Northerners. When they were asked to report on their small-group discussions, this group reported that local representation was very important to them – a stark contrast to the reports coming out of groups populated with citizens from the densely populated Lower Mainland BC. One participant recalled that her sense of being an advocate for the North crystallized in response to the comments of others: To be totally honest, until I became part of the Assembly I never really felt the North–South thing. Until I became a member I had no clue that there was that much antagonism between the urban and the rural of BC. It was kind of a surprise to me that there was so much tension really . . . [In the Assembly] One person commented basically that we were freeloaders and the taxpayers of Vancouver supported us. That was like the second weekend . . . There were a lot of people – at one town meeting I said I was from [a rural area] and it was important for us to have our input. And one fellow said, ‘‘Why? moose don’t vote!’’ And I said well that’s an interesting way of looking at it and thanks for your input. I didn’t realize how some people view the North. That we’re not as important as the Vancouver area. I hadn’t got any idea of that until I got into the Assembly. And that made me feel that we needed a louder voice in the Assembly. (Interview, April 26, 2005)

The early development of a Northerners’ group consciousness was accompanied by the emergence of a vocal advocate for the needs of the North. Wilf Chelle, a rancher from Buick, up in the remote northeast corner of the province, was an eloquent, charming, and folksy man who publicly raised the issue of Northerners’ needs from the second learning phase weekend onward. Armed with political experience as a school board trustee, Wilf appeared comfortable speaking to the group, although he confessed to me that public speaking made him nervous. Wilf was also a sociable fellow, famous among Assembly members for throwing late-night get-togethers in his hotel room, and plying his guests with glasses of good whiskey. A number of others who were concerned about the issues of representation for rural citizens also advocated behind the scenes to keep this issue on the group’s informal agenda. In contrast to Wilf, most Assembly members interviewed characterized their role within the Assembly as ‘‘listening and learning’’ rather than

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advocacy. This places them firmly at the left-hand side of the ‘‘participation spectrum’’ constructed by Pearse in this volume (see Figure 3.1, this volume). Consequently, when Wilf and others took on advocacy work for the North, the other members were prepared to listen to their concerns and try to do something about them. In the deliberation phase, the group spent one of their Saturday evening discussions to try and finally unpack what it was that Wilf and other Northerners actually meant when they talked about local representation. This ongoing discussion of the North progressed to the point where other members got a little tired of this issue. In retrospect, a number of interviewees felt that too much time had been spent on the North, but there was no real resentment of Wilf’s efforts. Most felt that the discussion of Northerners’ desire for local representatives contributed to the group recommending STV (single transferable vote; see page 130) for British Columbia, because it provided a more acceptable form of local representation than did MMP. A similar conclusion is reached by Blais, Carty, and Fournier in Chapter 6 and Pearse in Chapter 3 of this volume. This advocacy for addressing issues of the North was directed not only to other CA members but to Assembly staff. Staff were responsive, bringing in a guest speaker to talk about the province’s demographics, arranging to have an interim Citizens’ Assembly meeting outside of the Lower Mainland at the end of the public hearing phase and in the final deliberation phase, organizing space for an early-morning meeting of ‘‘rural/remote’’ Assembly members before the final vote on which system to recommend. Staff efforts to be responsive thereby contributed to keeping the North on the discussion agenda, once it had been initiated by Assembly members. Yet, after all the time spent making sure the ‘‘needs of the North’’ were taken into account, the other Assembly members still weren’t sure what those were. In a pivotal moment during their Saturday night discussion in the deliberation phase, another member finally asked Wilf directly what it was he meant by local representation. Wilf responded intensely: Local representation to me is someone that is accessible to me, who knows the constituency without me having to explain it to them, without having to be educated about it. Someone who has lived there, lived the life. I’m not stuck on single member ridings. But in my area a riding of more than two would be ridiculous. It’s a matter of our traditions, lifestyle and access. (Fieldnotes, October 16, 2005)

There was an audible pause as the group digested this. Not only had Wilf explained what he meant by local representation, he had acknowledged that he could support STV with his comment about ‘‘a riding of more than two.’’ Up to that point, this position had not been clear to many Assembly members.

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Because of his vocal advocacy Wilf had been put in the role of defining what constituted Northern representation, but while there was consensus that the ‘‘needs of the North’’ had to be addressed, there was no real consensus among the CA members from rural areas about what they wanted. This came out clearly in the meeting Wilf organized for rural/ remote CA members early on the morning of the big debate weekend (deliberation weekend four). The idea in organizing the meeting was to try and create some consensus and a common statement of values to take into the debates. The Assembly members at the meeting were unable and unwilling to do so. Sitting at the table there were rural Assembly members who preferred the current single member plurality (SMP; see page 000), the alternative MMP, and STV with larger district magnitudes for the North than what had been chosen by the Assembly in its model. After an hour of debate, the group decided to go back to the other Assembly members and report that they stood with the Assembly as a whole. Nevertheless, the majority of Assembly members interviewed felt that the issue of ‘‘the needs of the North’’ was consequential for the group as a whole picking STV. Wilf’s endorsement that Saturday evening, along with the work of other vocal Northern members on STV, appeared to make a difference to those who were inclined to be responsive to this group. Women’s representation In contrast, the Assembly dealt with the issue of increasing women’s representation with more ambivalence. Women’s representation was initially raised in a lecture and in small-group discussion in the second learning phase weekend. In the small group I observed, the facilitator was keen to raise the question of whether the Assembly members thought they needed to improve women’s representation in the legislature. One woman in the group tentatively said she thought it was a good idea. The idea was supported by a couple of men. Other men spoke against singling women out, saying they thought things had progressed very far and would continue to progress. At the prompting of the facilitator for some women to start speaking, the other women started to weigh in, arguing against ‘‘being singled out.’’ One woman said that it was important to find ways for ethnic minorities and Aboriginal people to enter the legislature, but that women didn’t need any special consideration. It seemed that many women on the Assembly felt that they were not suffering because there were few women in the legislature and consequently women didn’t need active help to enter the legislature. After this discussion on the second learning weekend, the issue was sidelined as the Assembly members dug into the details of the different systems. A few members continued to raise questions about how different

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systems benefited women and other minority groups, but it was not a central issue throughout the learning phase. During the public hearing phase, a small number of presentations were made to the Assembly members on the issue of women’s representation. However, those that did make it again received an ambivalent reception from Assembly members. At one public hearing in Vancouver, Assembly members stayed for forty-five minutes after the hearing was over to debate the issues of increasing women’s representation with a woman who had advocated that in her presentation. Some Assembly members were privately very encouraging to the advocate in question, putting her in touch with other sympathetic Assembly members. Others expressed much more anxiety about the idea of taking active measures to increase women’s representation in the legislature. One member started an online discussion on the Citizens’ Assembly member web forum about women’s representation that generated some debate. The issue gained additional momentum on the first deliberation weekend when Wendy Bergerud, a member from Victoria, publicly pointed out a submission by West Coast LEAF (Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) in a plenary presentation about overlooked submissions. At that point, the discussion gained enough momentum to spill out into small-group discussions and into the informal Saturday evening discussion. Members asked the staff for additional experts on the issue, but staff initially appeared to be reluctant to bring someone in. During first deliberation phase weekend, staff asked Assembly members to affirm the core values that they would use to adjudicate among different electoral systems. The exercise was hastily planned but had lasting consequences for the debate on women’s representation. In their usual fashion, Assembly members broke out into small groups to discuss the values they felt should underpin their choice of an electoral system. Group facilitators instructed them to pick their top three values. Although no rationale was given for picking only three, it is reasonable to conclude that this was a number picked by staff for purposes of expediency and keeping things manageable. In the small group I observed, their fourth pick was ‘‘social and cultural representation,’’ a phrase that included the idea of women’s representation. Back in plenary, the groups reported on the values that had received the most votes in their groups – sometimes ‘‘the most’’ was five votes, out of a group of twelve or fifteen Assembly members. As these group votes were tallied, the top three choices emerged. Four small groups, in addition to the one I observed, reported that they had a minority opinion or lively debates about ‘‘social and cultural representation’’ and that they wanted to report on these debates in order to keep the issue on the table. However, within the framework of the exercise, there was no way to include

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this as a value for judging electoral systems. As described in one of the pivotal moments above, when the Assembly members wanted to revisit the process used to pick core values the following weekend their efforts were redirected by staff members. Nonetheless, members still wanted to bring in expert advice on the issue. So on the third deliberation weekend, the staff brought in Dr. Lisa Young, an expert on women’s political representation from the University of Calgary, to discuss the issue. She presented evidence that there was no clear solution in the electoral system for increasing women’s representation. Her evidence suggested that the problem lay in the nomination processes and cultures of political parties. Interestingly, women from different camps both interpreted her evidence to support their positions. One woman who was opposed to taking active measures said in plenary: ‘‘I really want to thank you because I’ve been of a mindset that a woman can do anything she wants to do . . . you pretty much backed me today because you’ve used a lot of words like ‘limited evidence’ and ‘doesn’t show’ so there is no concrete evidence that shows right now that women aren’t in politics or can’t be’’ (Fieldnotes, October 16, 2005). Others who were in favor of increasing women’s political representation accepted Dr. Young’s presentation as evidence that there was indeed a problem that needed to be fixed, but that there was nothing they could do about it directly within the confines of their mandate. The combination of the group vote on core values and Lisa Young’s presentation introduced a new bit of common understanding – the issue of women’s representation, while important to some, was now ‘‘outside the mandate.’’ Some Assembly members were relieved to move on to other things – like the issue of ‘‘the North’’ they felt that this discussion had taken up too much time. Those who were advocates of increasing women’s representation retained the hope that multi-member districts would encourage political parties to run a greater diversity of candidates, rather than the usual older, White man who lived up to the image of a politician. Creating an informal agenda: advocacy, cultural consensus, and mobilization of resources The issues of women’s representation and geographic representation were both presented in the staff’s lectures to Assembly members as important considerations to take into account when thinking about choosing an electoral system. However, the members’ debate on women’s representation differed from that on the North in several ways. First, there was no clear advocate for women’s representation from the beginning of the Assembly as there was for ‘‘the North.’’ While some members were

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interested in the issue and raised their concerns publicly and privately, they could not or would not claim to represent all women, as Wilf did for ‘‘the North.’’ Indeed, one woman who characterized herself as a strong feminist was fearful of being labeled as such and dismissed: I’m an educated feminist. And so you know I had concerns about how vocal I could be. And just what I would encounter . . . I guess going head to head with patriarchal thinking and attitudes . . . I certainly found it challenging [to present my viewpoint], just challenging the status quo. And definitely the status quo was [assumed to be] better. Whenever we had a conversation about women’s needs, the desire for women to have equal representation in an electoral reform system, as well as Aboriginal people. They were pretty much in my opinion taboo subjects. You couldn’t go there and have any kind of discussion that didn’t quickly go into emotion and some fairly old ideas. (Interview, April 30, 2005)

Others who demonstrated a strong belief in increasing women’s representation maintained that their role was to ‘‘listen’’ and ‘‘learn’’ rather than advocate within the Assembly. Second, there was no cultural consensus among Assembly members on whether or not women’s representation even should be on the Assembly’s agenda. It wasn’t enough just to have an advocate for an issue – the other Assembly members had to respond to the pleas of the advocate in order to keep the conversation going. Many Assembly members talked about the emotional response that the different issues generated. On the issue of women’s representation, one Assembly member recounted: And people – as soon as you’d say women, some people would get really upset and angry right off the bat. You could see them – their faces would flush, they would look startled. And a lot of us were just [thinking] ‘‘why are you getting upset about this?’’ And this happens in groups all across [the spectrum]. I was on [a taskforce] and if you just bring up the topic on foreign people, women, visible minorities, whatever, people get upset about it. (Interview, April 16, 2005)

On the other hand, it was clear that people also responded emotionally to the issue of the North. A facilitator explained the difference this way: People can share the North in a way people can’t share minority rights. People can feel they can authentically identify with Northerners – as a resident of BC, I can identify with the North. I don’t think a lot of people can feel comfortable with minority representation that same way. Or they’re not comfortable of talking about what’s outside of their own experience. (Interview, February 2, 2005)

It seemed that for Assembly members, the issue of ‘‘the North’’ was a more legitimate topic of discussion within the context of the Assembly. Perhaps for some, the North represented a universal identity – it could

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be anyone who lived there. In contrast, thinking about representation for women and other minority groups was not as legitimate because they were groups whose identities were not universally shared. This finding supports the arguments made by James in Chapter 5 of this volume regarding the consequences of under-representation of visible minorities within the Assembly. Others viewed representation for the North as having more tangible consequences than representation of women or ethnic minorities. One person from a rural area said: I think that when you’re talking about politics you’re talking about funding. You’re talking about medical funding and educational funding . . . Women’s rights that’s a little bit different. That’s not so much a community thing . . . If it comes down to dollars and cents that the government’s going to hand out I want the North to have their hand out and say ok I want my ICU back in my hospital . . . That’s the difference I feel. It comes down to funding and what we’re supplied with more than the colour of my skin. (Interview, April 26, 2005)

Both the North and women’s representation evoked an emotional response on the part of Assembly members, but it was not the same response. Assembly members responded to advocacy on behalf of the North more ardently than they responded to advocacy for women’s representation. There appeared to be a cultural consensus among Assembly members that ‘‘the North’’ was legitimate issue for discussion. In contrast, Assembly members were ambivalent about discussing ‘‘women’s representation,’’ for a variety of reasons. Cultural consensus in this context did not mean that people agreed on what to do about an issue, because they clearly did not all agree about solutions to the needs of the North or the question of women’s representation. Rather, cultural consensus existed around what counted as a legitimate topic for discussion. Third, because there was no clear advocate, and no clear ‘‘cultural consensus’’ that the issue merited attention, staff support for the women’s representation came late. As many Assembly members spoke in favor of the issue of women’s representation as for Northern representation, but there was no clear and persistent spokesperson claiming to take a universal point of view, and staff were slower to bring in a guest lecturer on the issue. In the interests of keeping the discussions manageable, the Assembly’s core values were limited to three. Since social and cultural representation was placed fourth it was excluded from the list, and Assembly members were unsuccessful in their attempts to revisit that process. In short, staff resources were not mobilized to support the issue of women’s representation the way that they were mobilized to support the issue of ‘‘the North.’’

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Conclusion This chapter argues that agenda-setting poses a challenge for organizers and participants in deliberative forums in terms of who will control the mandate, substance, and structure of their discussions. This problem is particularly acute in large-scale processes that demand high levels of coordination and organization. Even where organizers are committed to a process that authentically empowers participants, the process of agendasetting constitutes an ongoing organizational challenge. Organizers of deliberative forums must limit the scope of policy discussions in order to make decisions. But constraining citizen input on the mandate, substance, and structure of policy discussions may undermine the legitimacy gained by having citizens participate in political decision-making in the first place, particularly if such constraints systematically exclude politically relevant choices from discussion. Three possible resolutions to this problem have been discussed with reference to the BC Citizens’ Assembly. First, democratic theorists have proposed that agenda-setting processes should be reflexive. In the BC Citizens’ Assembly the staff engaged in consultation with Assembly members, but not reflexivity. In contrast to reflexive approaches where participants are able to modify their discussion agenda, Assembly staff retained the final authority over the parameters and the structure of the Assembly’s work. Consequently some staff members were ambivalent about the authenticity of Assembly members’ contribution to the process. These staff members proposed two additional standards of authentic citizen participation: Assembly members could provide a check on the staff’s agenda-setting power, or they would contribute in terms of ‘‘how they would think’’ about the issues. In reviewing pivotal moments where Assembly members tried to act as a check on the staff’s power, it appears the Assembly members were mostly unsuccessful in changing the course of the process. However, Assembly members did carve out a space for their own unique contribution by developing an informal discussion agenda. This agenda guided their thinking over the course of the process. Certain Assembly members identified specific problems and advocated for their resolution, with varying degrees of success. They used their individual resources such as rhetorical skills and social skills (and whiskey!) to further their cause. They also petitioned the staff for resources to bolster specific issues and to keep the discussion of their cause going. The development of this informal agenda had real consequences for the outcome of the Assembly process: the majority of Assembly members interviewed felt that the identification of the ‘‘needs of the North’’

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contributed to the choice of the single transferable vote electoral system by the Assembly. The kind of geographic representation provided by STV was closer to the ideal of local representation articulated by advocates for the North than that provided by other systems under consideration. While local representation was likely to be considered even without a vocal advocate, the kind of local representation the Assembly decided was necessary was influenced by the advocacy on behalf of the North. But Assembly members responded to different advocacy in different ways. Advocates for choosing an electoral system that increased women’s representation were not as successful at convincing their fellow Assembly members that this issue was a legitimate one for discussion. While many individual Assembly members were concerned about this issue, the Assembly as a whole did not embrace it. An apparent cultural consensus – evidenced by Assembly members’ different emotional responses to Northern and women’s representation – helped to structure what issues would stay on the Assembly’s informal agenda. Members did not all agree about what to do about ‘‘the needs of the North,’’ but there was a striking consensus that this was a legitimate issue for discussion. In contrast, members were not in agreement about whether the issue of women’s representation should be on the table. The agenda-setting processes documented here have several implications for the theory and practice of citizen deliberation. First, here is evidence that even with careful attention to the design of a deliberation process, the terrain of deliberation is uneven. Providing participants with balanced information at the outset of a deliberation process is not enough to produce discussions that match an ideal form of democratic deliberation. Some issues will get extended consideration, while other issues, though relevant, will be sidelined. Consequently, the democratic legitimacy of deliberative forums does not lie in meeting an absolute standard of discussion where all facets of an issue are considered. Rather deliberative forums have the potential to produce more varied, thoughtful, and responsive discussion and debate relative to existing political arenas. The BC case demonstrates a second point, which is that the scope of the discussions in a deliberative forum depends as much on the agency of participants as it depends on the work of organizers. Participants’ cultural ideas about what are appropriate topics of discussion will shape the response toward different issues. How participants view their roles within the deliberative forum will also shape what issues become prominent topics of debate. While a few participants became vocal advocates within the Citizens’ Assembly, it is unrealistic to expect that individual participants will enter a deliberative forum wanting to act as representatives of

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particular social constituencies (Warren, Chapter 2, this volume; Pearse, Chapter 3, this volume; James, Chapter 5, this volume; Lang 2007). Consequently, a third lesson from the BC case is that deliberative forums would do well to build in mechanisms that enhance participants’ agency within discussions. In particular, forums should enable participants to more openly and equitably construct both the formal and informal agendas for deliberation. Formal mechanisms might include procedures for identifying items for discussion and for questioning staff decisions about the parameters and structure of the process. They might also involve providing space and time for participants to organize themselves into caucuses around particular issues of interest. Formal caucuses legitimize an issue and assure its place on the agenda of the group as a whole. Caucuses also provide the means to develop a deep discussion on an issue that might otherwise be constrained by the cultural biases or emotional responses of participants. To that end, the organizers of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, under way between September 2006 and May 2007, created four ‘‘working groups’’ of Assembly members to consider specific issues related to electoral reform (women and under-represented groups, geographic representation, political parties, and stable government) and four ‘‘advisory committees’’ of members that would make recommendations to the Chair on process issues, such as the development of a deliberation plan and the preparation of the Assembly’s final report. Informal mechanisms might include acknowledging more explicitly the role that advocacy plays in a deliberative process, and providing participants with the training and resources to become advocates for the issues that concern them. They might also include the development of a culture of deliberation that seeks to clarify assumptions about what topics are appropriate for discussion. In sum, a more explicit focus on processes of agenda-setting may result in a more varied and responsive discussion among participants, and increase the legitimacy of deliberative forums as institutions for public decision-making.

5 Descriptive representation in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly Michael Rabinder James

The last decade has seen a marked interest in deliberative citizen assemblies. Ideally, such bodies allow ordinary citizens to engage in rational deliberation over pressing political issues. However, they often lack significant influence on policymaking or electoral politics, a criticism leveled at James Fishkin’s National Issues Convention (Fishkin 1995; Gastil 2000: 131, 135). The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) is an important institutional innovation precisely because it exercised considerable political influence. Its participants judged which electoral system would best suit the Province of British Columbia, whose citizens could then accept or reject the recommended system in a provincial referendum. In doing so, the CA engaged in two forms of political influence. First, they set the agenda for a binding, province-wide referendum, by voting to select a modified version of the single transferable vote (STV; see page 130) over the German-style mixed member proportional representation system (MMP; see page 130). In choosing STV, the Assembly did not make a binding decision for the province. But because their choice was to be ratified through a Yes or No vote, they set a very narrow agenda for the BC electorate, and agenda-setting is a pretty significant form of political power (Dahl 1989: 112–14; Riker 1982). But beyond agenda-setting, participants in the CA also exercised political influence in recommending the STV to the broader BC populace. On a micro-level, individual participants tried to persuade their fellow citizens that the STV was the best system for the province. On the macro-level, the collective legitimacy of the CA led some referendum voters to support the adoption of the new electoral system. Given that the complexities of electoral systems far exceed the 106

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political knowledge of most citizens, the CA’s collective recommendation influenced voters – especially those less educated, more distrustful voters identified by Cutler and Johnston in Chapter 8 of this volume as ‘‘populists’’ that constitute about two-thirds of the BC electorate – to vote Yes in the referendum. Indeed, by making a collective judgment on a complex issue, setting a narrow agenda, and recommending a specific position on that agenda, CA participants did more than merely exercise political influence: they acted as political representatives. Warren labels this role as ‘‘citizen representative’’ in Chapter 2 of this volume. Rather than simply reflecting the preferences of the populace, they engaged in autonomous deliberation amongst themselves and with electoral experts, in order to come to a collective judgment about what system would best serve the province as a whole. They thus exemplified political representation, by making an independent action on behalf of the interests of the represented (see Pitkin 1967: 143, 209). The issue I address in this chapter is the legitimacy of this kind of political representation. Whereas legislative representatives are formally authorized to act for citizens through elections, CA representatives were indirectly legitimated to do so. So how did CA participants acquire the legitimacy to act as political representatives? Two possible sources come to the fore: the CA’s descriptive similarity to the British Columbia electorate, a more symbolic form of legitimacy (Mansbridge 1999: 650–52); and the quality of its deliberation, a more substantive form of legitimacy. CA organizers explicitly sought legitimacy through descriptive similarity by using ‘‘stratification, meaning the division of the list into categories to increase the likelihood that the sample selected will indeed be representative. This reduces the size of the Assembly necessary to give a particular degree of representativeness’’ (Gibson 2002: 10; emphasis in original). A non-stratified random sample might have secured the impartiality of the Assembly, insulating it from charges of being beholden to the provincial government (as might have been the case with a government-appointed commission); but a stratified random sample went further, by making the Assembly resemble the province demographically.1 It is this similarity that seems to have led the ‘‘populist’’ voters

1

Legitimacy through descriptive similarity also seems to have been a goal in Fishkin’s less politically influential National Issues Convention, which drew its participants from a demographically representative random sample of the American population (Fishkin 1995: 162). Merkel (1996) concludes that the 1996 National Issues Convention was representative of the populace in terms of race and gender, but overrepresented the politically active while under-representing the elderly and less educated.

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identified by Cutler and Johnston in Chapter 8 of this volume to trust the CA and therefore support its recommendation. Quality deliberation also legitimated the CA, particularly in the eyes of Cutler and Johnston’s more educated ‘‘non-populist’’ voters, who were more likely to support adopting the STV to the extent that they believed that CA participants became ‘‘experts’’ on the topic of electoral systems. Combining these sources of legitimacy, we can envision CA participants justifying their political representation by collectively saying to the BC electorate: ‘‘We are ordinary citizens just like you, and after gaining sufficient expertise in electoral systems, we concluded that the STV was the best system for ordinary citizens just like us.’’ Moreover, descriptive similarity and quality deliberation are not just complementary but intertwined, since the failure to represent all relevant viewpoints can render deliberation both unfair and epistemologically deficient. Deliberation is unfair when the interests of disadvantaged minority groups remain unrepresented within an assembly (Mansbridge 1999: 633–37). While a deliberative assembly can justifiably deny disadvantaged group interests, should representatives find compelling and acceptable reasons to do so, fair deliberation does presuppose that they at least get a hearing within a deliberative assembly. Arguably, the representation of disadvantaged minority group interests does not require descriptive representation, since non-minority representatives could advocate for them. But whenever representatives have the leeway to act as trustees for their constituents, descriptive similarity can enhance trust between representative and constituent (Bianco 1994; Phillips 1995; Williams 1998). And whereas leeway persists even if representatives face re-election, in unelected citizen assemblies leeway becomes even greater and descriptive similarity becomes even more important (Mansbridge 1999: 635). Given that the CA was an unelected body that enjoyed significant leeway in exercising political representation over an issue – electoral systems – about which few citizens would have strong preferences, the importance of descriptive representation to its legitimacy seems hard to doubt. Apart from the question of fairness, the epistemological quality of deliberation may improve when certain group perspectives are represented (Mansbridge 1999: 633–35; Young 2000). Viewed in this way, descriptive representation is required not to protect the disadvantaged group interests but to convey distinct forms of social knowledge more likely to be found among members of such groups (James and Goldfinger 2005). Importantly, accessing such group-based knowledge can serve the common interest (Mansbridge 1999: 634; James and Goldfinger 2005). For example, a deliberative assembly convened to examine police practices in the United States or Canada should probably include Black members,

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since Blacks are more likely to have suffered police misconduct.2 While the representation of a Black perspective might protect Black interests, since Blacks are more likely to have trouble with the cops, the social knowledge conveyed by a Black perspective could also aid other, nonBlack citizens, since they too could fall victim to police brutality. In this way, the representation of a group perspective can further all citizens’ common interest in proper police practices. Because the legitimacy of the CA’s representative function depended on both descriptive similarity and quality deliberation, and because quality deliberation itself may depend on descriptive representation, the problem of descriptive representation becomes central to assessing this and other citizen assemblies. In the next section, I will recount how the designers of the CA envisioned descriptive representation in selecting representatives to the Assembly. I will then assess their decision to seek descriptive representation in terms of gender, age, and region, but not in terms of race or ethnicity, by posing three questions: Which identity characteristics are generally relevant within society? Of the generally relevant identity characteristics within society, which ones are relevant to the specific issue addressed? And how many members of a specific identity characteristic must be included? While empirical inquiry regarding the salience of racial and ethnic identity can resolve the first two questions, I suggest that the CA’s two sources of legitimacy, along with its complex institutional character as both a deliberative and aggregative body, complicate answering the third question. Descriptive representation at the CA In selecting members to the CA, its primary designer – Gordon Gibson – sought proportional representation according to three criteria: gender, age, and geographic electoral district. As Gibson put it: ‘‘Geographic representativeness for the Assembly is essential. Gender balance is highly desirable. Age representativeness is desirable as well’’ (Gibson 2002: 10). In considering various criteria for stratification – such as ‘‘geography, age, 2

While the tendency of Blacks to experience negative treatment by the police in the United States is now widely accepted, new research increasingly shows this to be the case also in Canada (Wortley 2003). I deliberately use the term ‘‘Black’’ instead of African American or Afro-Canadian, in order to emphasize that the perspective grounded in negative encounters with the police derives from common experiences of all individuals socially perceived as Black, whether they be African American (i.e. descendants of American slaves), West Indian immigrants, or immigrants from Africa. The common perception by police of these individuals as ‘‘Black,’’ regardless of their significant cultural and historical differences, is what generates the common experiences undergirding a ‘‘Black’’ perspective on police brutality.

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gender, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, trade union membership, education, and so on’’ – Gibson reported encountering two contradictory ‘‘principles’’: ‘‘On the one hand I received frequent and vigorous representations that members of the Assembly should not be chosen as to represent special interests, but rather they should represent the common good. On the other hand, there was near unanimity that certain very broad special interests – gender, for example – should be recognized’’ (Gibson 2002: 10; emphasis added). With this advice, the CA secured equal gender representation. Geographic stratification seemed so important that it barely prompted discussion in the Report. At most, Gibson noted that ‘‘residence in a rural as opposed to an urban area might affect views of the electoral system. This element of representativeness must be preserved’’ (Gibson 2002: 13; emphasis added). Apart from this, the Report primarily discussed only different means of representing the regional cleavage, concluding that selecting one male and one female representative from each electoral riding would be the best option, since this ‘‘represents a settled political compromise between urban and rural British Columbia’’ (Gibson 2002: 11; emphasis added). The primary justification for proportional age stratification was the fact that, according to Elections BC, young voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four voted at a much lower rate than did members of other age cohorts (Gibson 2002: 10). The result was a citizens’ assembly proportionally represented by age, gender, and region. Gibson provided no specific argument for rejecting stratification according to religion, socio-economic status, trade union membership, or education. He did, however, cite two considerations in rejecting ethnic stratification. One was simply the lack of available data: ‘‘Elections B.C. has not done research as to whether there is particular underrepresentation of any ethnic or cultural group’’ (Gibson 2002: 10). The other consideration was the advice, not attributed to any individual, group, or organization, ‘‘that most of the dimensions of variation beyond geography and gender are not of central importance for the important but narrow task of considering whether and how our electoral system should be changed’’ (Gibson 2002: 13). However, shortly thereafter Gibson did acknowledge that an additional ‘‘argument for setting up ethnic quotas as a part of the ‘representativeness’ mandate is that arguably some electoral systems more sensitively reflect ethnic diversity.’’ However, Gibson quickly rejected ethnic quotas, since ‘‘a fundamental value of most Canadians is that our democracy is resolutely colour-blind.’’ Gibson then concluded that ‘‘representations in respect of ethnic sensitivity of various electoral systems should properly be made to the Assembly itself, rather than building this value into its makeup. Therefore in general I advise against screening for ethnicity’’ (Gibson 2002: 14). With this, the CA was intentionally created with roughly proportional

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representation according to age, gender, and region. And not surprisingly, given past experiences with randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, the CA eventually under-represented those disadvantaged groups not specifically guaranteed representation, while overrepresenting more advantaged groups, as indicated in Table 5.1. Let us first consider a profoundly disadvantaged and marginalized group in Canadian society, Aboriginals. Random sampling did not select any participants who had officially recognized Aboriginal status. As a result, Aboriginal representatives were solicited through a letter sent to the broader sample of the electorate who were initially invited but declined to participate. From the responses to this mailing, two status Aboriginals – one male, one female – were invited to participate in the CA. Notably, this method of gaining Aboriginal representation did not secure proportionality. According to 2001 Census estimates, the total ‘‘Aboriginal identity’’ population constituted 4.3% of the BC population, while the two Aboriginal representatives constituted only 1.3% of the CA membership (see Table 5.1). A similar problem also occurred with respect to ethnicity. The Canadian Census identifies as ‘‘visible minorities’’ those who identify as Chinese, South Asian, Black, Filipino, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Arab, West Asian, Korean, and Japanese. While visible minorities did gain some representation through random sampling, they were clearly proportionally under-represented. A comparison of biographical information provided by CA members with data from the 2001 Canadian Census reveals that 88.1% of CA members were White, as opposed to 75.1% of the BC population; in turn, only 11.9% of CA members were visible minorities, in comparison to 24.9% of the provincial population. More specifically, Asians constituted only 9.4% of the Assembly versus 19.2% of the general populace. Interestingly, CA membership closely mirrored the populace in terms of place of birth, with 25.6% having been born outside of Canada, compared to 26.4% of the population. But when we examine where these migrants were born, we find significant overrepresentation of individuals born in the UK (8.1% of CA vs. 3.7% of the province), the USA (2.5% vs. 1.4%), and Germany (2.5% vs. 1.1%), as opposed to significant underrepresentation of individuals born in India (1.9% vs. 2.4%), China (1.3% vs. 2.8%), and Hong Kong (1.3% vs. 2.3%). In general, people born in Europe or the United States were more likely to participate in the CA than those born in Asia. None of the members was born in Africa, while only one member was born in South America.3 3

Data on the CA members in this paragraph and the following paragraph were collected by Assembly staff. All BC population data are available on-line at the Statistics Canada website: www12.statcan.ca/english/census01.

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Table 5.1. Comparison of demographic characteristics of the Citizens’ Assembly and the BC population Citizens’ Assembly (%)

BC population (%)

Gender Male Female

50.0 50.0

49.1 50.9

Age 18–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70 þ

11.0 19.5 17.5 27.9 17.5 6.5

19.5 19.6 21.4 16.3 10.6 12.6

Birthplace Canada Outside Canada United Kingdom China India Hong Kong

74.4 25.6 8.1 1.3 1.9 1.3

73.6 26.4 3.6 2.8 2.4 2.3

Visible minority status White Visible minority Asian Aboriginal

88.1 11.9 9.4 1.3

75.1 24.9 19.2 4.4

Education Some high school High school graduate Trade certificate/college University

5.1 9.6 28.9 56.4

19.4 24.2 32.5 23.9

Occupational skill group High school or less Apprenticeship College University Manager

13.1 5.6 35.0 38.8 6.3

43.1 8.1 22.0 16.0 10.8

Source: Citizens’ Assembly data were collected by Assembly staff via questionnaires distributed at the initial member selection meetings in late 2003. The age of Assembly members is calculated as at January 1, 2004. All BC population data are from the 2001 Canadian Census and are available on-line at: www12.statcan.ca/ english/census01/.

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With respect to education and socio-economic class, we find similar disparities. For instance, 56.4% of CA members were university educated, as opposed to 23.9% of the provincial population. Regarding socioeconomic class, we lack data on the income levels of participants, but members did identify their current occupations or previous employment in the case of participants that had retired from the workforce. Notably, only 13.1% of the CA were employed in positions that required at most a high school degree, as opposed to 43.1% of the British Columbia population. Conversely, almost 74% of the Assembly were in positions that required training at either a community college or a university, occupational skill levels that reflect only 38% of the populace. This information suggests that the CA, like many citizen assemblies, overrepresented members from advantaged groups thereby undermining the equality of representation that is part of Thompson’s focus in Chapter 1 of this volume. The participants were disproportionately of White Canadian or European background and of a higher education and occupational level. Aboriginals, other visible minorities, and migrants from regions other than Europe and the United States, along with those with less education or lower occupational skills, were less likely to participate. Now recall that the legitimacy of the CA’s unelected representatives seems to have depended upon its descriptive similarity to the provincial population (especially for ‘‘populist’’ voters) and to the quality of its deliberation (particularly for ‘‘elitist’’ voters). In turn, recall that descriptive similarity and quality of deliberation are intertwined, given that the quality of deliberation partially depends upon the inclusion of all relevant viewpoints, in order to avoid unfairness (by overlooking the interests of disadvantaged groups) and epistemological deficiency (by failing to incorporate insights supplied by different group perspectives). With this in mind, let us revisit Gibson’s arguments for stratifying certain descriptive characteristics and not others. His language suggests that gender representation was sought to protect women’s interests, whose exclusion would presumably have made CA deliberation unfair. Regional representation, in turn, seemed to rest on both epistemological and fairness grounds. On the one hand, rural voters presumably would have ‘‘views’’ or perspectives on electoral design different from those of urban voters; on the other hand, a ‘‘settled political compromise,’’ presumably one that balanced rural and urban interests, justified regional representation. Gibson never explained why the underrepresentation of young voters was so important as to justify their proportional representation. Were the interests of the young shortchanged due to their under-representation? Did younger voters possess perspectives that would have helped deliberation aimed at the common good? Moreover,

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Gibson did little to explain why ethnic representation would not have contributed to deliberation about electoral systems, despite his acknowledgment that electoral systems do affect ethnic representation, which suggests that ethnic minorities would have interests in this issue. Additionally, including ethnic minorities need not presume that protecting interests was of primary importance. Even if we grant Gibson’s contention that CA deliberation should be focused on the common good, representing minority ethnic perspectives could improve the epistemological quality of such deliberation. Finally, Gibson provided no justification at all for the failure to guarantee descriptive representation by education or class. In assessing descriptive representation within a deliberative citizens’ assembly, three questions come to mind: Which identity characteristics are generally relevant within a society? Of the generally relevant identity characteristics within a society, which ones are particularly relevant to the specific issue addressed? And how many members of a specific identity characteristic must be included? In the following sections, I will use these three questions to assess the failure to provide descriptive representation according to visible minority status. In evaluating the CA’s failure to stratify proportionally by visible minority status and Aboriginal status, leading to the underrepresentation of both of these groups within a citizens’ assembly otherwise committed to descriptive representation, these three questions may be modified to read as follows: Are Aboriginal and visible minority identity characteristics generally relevant within Canadian society? If so, are these identity characteristics particularly relevant with respect to the question of electoral systems? And if so, how many Aboriginal and visible minority representatives should have been present within the CA? This last question will be the toughest to resolve. For while empirical inquiry can resolve the first two questions regardless of why we seek descriptive representation, the answer to the last question will largely depend on whether we seek descriptive representation in order to protect group interests or to secure the epistemological benefits of including diverse group perspectives. In addition, the complex institutional character of the CA also complicates answering the third question. I focus on visible minority and Aboriginal status because a voluminous scholarly literature confirms that the specific issue addressed by the CA – electoral systems – has a direct impact on the representation and interests of these groups.4 While I do not wish to diminish the importance of the even more egregious under-represention of citizens with lower education levels and occupational statuses, I will not focus on these characteristics for 4

For a sample of this literature, see Amy (1993: Ch. 6); Guinier (1994); Horowitz (1985: 628–51); Horowitz (1991); James (2004); Lijphart (1977); Williams (1998).

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two reasons. First, there presently exist no studies specifically assessing the effect of different electoral systems on the representation of citizens of different socio-economic classes or levels of educational attainment. Certainly part of the reason for this lack is the fairly widespread evidence that in all democracies, regardless of their electoral system, representatives tend to have relatively high levels of education, occupational status, and income.5 For present purposes, it is irrelevant whether this results from Robert Michels’ ‘‘iron law of oligarchy,’’ whereby the clerical demands of even socialist organizations and political parties require the employment of a relatively educated managerial class (Michels 1962: 254–70, 342–56; Sartori 1987: 141–52), or from elitist characteristics inherent to elections, whereby voters are psychologically drawn to candidates who possess ‘‘salient’’ characteristics that are not widespread within a democratic society (Manin 1997: 142–49). The upshot is that representative institutions tend to be populated by individuals with higher levels of education, occupational skill, and income. Second, it is possible that citizens with lower levels of education or occupational skills could conceivably possess perspectives or interests that would lead them as a group to prefer a different electoral system than that preferred by more educated, higher-class citizens. Alternatively, less education and lower occupational skills could have led some citizens to favor the simpler MMP electoral system over the more complex STV that was eventually chosen by the CA. However, data from the CA deliberations reveal no such distinction in preferences.6 Simply put, participants with less education and lower occupational statuses were as likely to support the STV as were more educated and higher-status participants. On the other hand, as we shall see below, there is evidence that a substantial number of visible minority participants did prefer the MMP over the STV, bringing their preferences into clear conflict with those of the larger group. The general relevance of visible minority identity According to Hanna Pitkin, descriptive representation requires determining ‘‘which characteristics are politically relevant for reproduction. In a 5

6

See Czudnowski (1983); Gutmann (1974); Higley and Deacon (1985); Hoffmann-Lange (1985); Hoffmann-Lange, Neumann, and Steinkemper (1985); Putnam (1976: 22–40). These data were collected by Andre´ Blais, R. Kenneth Carty, and Patrick Fournier using three large self-administered questionnaires of Assembly members, conducted in December 2003, July 2004, and December 2004. For more information on the questionnaires, see Chapter 6 of this volume. I would like to thank Patrick Fournier for testing these specific correlations on my behalf.

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general sense, we are very much aware that politically significant characteristics vary with time and place, and that the doctrines about them vary as well’’ (Pitkin 1967: 87). While racial identity is obviously politically relevant in the United States, the question is whether or not ‘‘visible minority status,’’ a broader but rough correlate to non-White racial status, is generally relevant in Canada. To address this, I will examine sociological studies regarding a ‘‘colored vertical mosaic’’ within Canadian society. Canadian sociologist John Porter coined the term ‘‘vertical mosaic’’ to describe how members of the British and French ‘‘charter groups’’ that founded Canada dominated the country’s political, economic, and social elite (Porter 1965). Drawing on Census data from 1931 to 1961, he depicted a vertical mosaic with the British on top, followed by the French, with various European, Asian, and African ethnic groups beneath them. Subsequent sociologists have debated whether the vertical mosaic still exists, with Porter himself later questioning its validity (Pineo and Porter 1985).7 The original argument erred by focusing on the elite, an exclusive bastion unsurprisingly dominated by those groups longest in the country (Lautard and Guppy 1999: 220–21). Thus, more recent studies have rethought the vertical mosaic thesis by examining employment and income differentials among ethnic groups. Hugh Lautard and Neil Guppy tested this thesis using Census data on occupational stratification, or the extent to which members of different ethnic groups possess jobs of differing levels of quality, including but not limited to income. Should ethnic groups be lumped into worse jobs than the charter groups, such occupational stratification would suggest the persistence of a vertical mosaic (Lautard and Guppy 1999: 226–28). A static, 1991 comparison of ethnic groups found Jewish males and females at the top, with British males and females coming in a distant second; concentrated closely at the bottom were Black, Greek, Portuguese, and Aboriginal and Metis males and females, along with South Asian and Yugoslavian females (1999: 243–44). Analyzing occupational stratification over time, most notable has been the downward shift of South Asians, who went from being heavily concentrated in high-status occupations to falling below the occupational mean (1999: 243–44). Immigration appeared to be the key causal variable to this limited vertical mosaic (1999: 245–47). Presumably, poorly skilled immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe, along with the historically disadvantaged Aboriginal population, were concentrated at the bottom, while a shift

7

Lian and Matthews (1998: 1–3) and Lautard and Guppy (1999: 219–25) summarize this debate.

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from high-skilled to low-skilled South Asian immigration led to this group’s downward migration. A more troubling finding, not attributable to immigration trends, comes from studies that control for education in comparing the earnings of various Canadian ethnic groups. Examining data from the 1991 Canadian Census, Jason Lian and David Matthews stratified workers by ethnic origin and by three levels of educational attainment: non-secondary education, secondary education, and post-secondary education. At all three levels, workers of French, British, Western European, and Eastern European origin earned at or above the national average for their educational cohort, while Southern European ethnics exhibited a more mixed level of earnings. However, visible minorities suffered at all three levels: at the non-secondary level, all visible minority groups, along with Aboriginals, earned below average incomes; at the secondary level, all ten visible minorities earned ‘‘substantially less than the comparable Canadian average’’; at the post-secondary level, eight groups earned ‘‘substantially below’’ the average, while Blacks and Chinese earned ‘‘somewhat less’’ than the average (Lian and Matthews 1998: 4–5). They then conducted a multivariate regression analysis to control for other factors, using British Canadians as the baseline for comparison. This revealed that European ethnics earned roughly the same as British Canadians, but Aboriginals and all ten visible minority groups typically earned less. They concluded that an ethnic vertical mosaic has disappeared, only to be replaced by a new ‘‘colored mosaic,’’ wherein visible minorities with similar educational credentials earn less (1998: 5–8). Kevin Gosine uncovered similar findings from the 1996 Canadian Census, by examining the weekly earnings of individuals with two sorts of Canadian degrees: non-university post-secondary diplomas or certificates; and university degrees. Using models that controlled for confounding factors such as English proficiency, Gosine found that visible minority status had an independent effect on earnings at all levels of education, with minorities earning significantly less than comparably educated White Canadians, and Black Canadians suffering the largest discrepancy (Gosine 2000: 7–8). The colored vertical mosaic thesis implies that visible minorities are likely to face subtle forms of informal discrimination, which generate lower incomes at all educational levels. Even if highly educated visible minority individuals have higher incomes than White manual laborers, they are still more likely to have experienced discrimination. This suggests two implications for assessing descriptive representation in the CA, each one related to a specific argument about that body’s legitimacy in exercising political representation without electoral authorization.

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The first implication relates to the CA’s legitimacy through its descriptive similarity to the provincial population. As noted earlier, ‘‘grassroots’’ voters were more likely to follow the CA’s recommendation in favor of the single transferable vote to the extent that they perceived the Assembly to be similar to them. The importance of descriptive similarity was also anticipated by Gibson in using a stratified random sample to select membership to the CA. The problem was that Gibson rejected stratification by ethnicity, partly by asserting that most Canadians view their democracy as ‘‘resolutely colour-blind’’ (Gibson 2002: 14). But while most Canadians might think of their democracy as color-blind, the evidence from the ‘‘colored vertical mosaic’’ thesis suggests that many visible minorities experience Canadian society as significantly color-conscious. For this reason, visible ethnicity is a characteristic that has general political relevance, and the proportional representation of visible minorities would likely have enhanced the CA’s legitimacy in the eyes of other minority citizens (see Mansbridge 1999: 650–52). Such legitimacy through descriptive representation is crucial, since CA participants exercised political representation without the formal authorization generated through electoral processes. The second implication pertains to the CA’s legitimacy through quality deliberation. The failure to represent visible minorities proportionally undermined the fairness of the deliberative body, since the interests of potential victims of discrimination could potentially be undermined. But beyond this, the failure to screen for ethnicity may have also undermined the quality of deliberation aimed at the common good. The experience of discrimination may generate among visible minorities a distinct perspective on Canadian society, one that can contribute to robust deliberation about public policy or political institutions. And because the legitimacy of the CA was partially generated through the quality and fairness of its deliberation, including visible minority perspectives would have enhanced that legitimacy. The specific relevance of visible minority identity to electoral systems The ‘‘colored vertical mosaic’’ argument suggests that visible minority status is generally relevant to Canadian society. But in assessing the stratification process of the CA, we must also ask whether this generally relevant characteristic is particularly relevant to the specific issue of electoral system deliberation. In justifying the decision not to stratify by ethnicity, Gibson seemed to deny this, asserting that ‘‘most of the dimensions of variation beyond geography and gender are not of central importance for the

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important but narrow task of considering whether and how our electoral system should be changed’’ (Gibson 2002: 13). The preponderance of scholarly evidence contradicts Gibson’s claim. Numerous studies show that electoral systems strongly affect the representation of racial or ethnic minorities within legislatures. Although scholars disagree over which electoral system best enhances racial or ethnic representation or inter-group political cooperation, the impact of electoral systems on the representation of racial or ethnic minorities is beyond dispute.8 This point becomes particularly germane when we compare the specific relevance to electoral design of the other descriptive identity characteristics intentionally selected for the CA. The organizers stratified for age because younger voters participated in elections less than older voters. But this evidence is largely irrelevant, since older voters, in virtually all democracies and under a wide variety of electoral systems, turn out more than do younger voters (Powell 1986). This does not mean that youth and old age are generally irrelevant characteristics in Canadian society, nor does it mean that youth and old age are not particularly relevant to other political issues. It would be hard to imagine a fair and epistemologically robust citizens’ assembly concerning pension reform that did not include older citizens, or one concerning university tuitions that did not include younger citizens. But if low turnout among young voters is the problem, changing an electoral system is not of direct significance. There is, however, clear evidence that electoral systems strongly affect the representation of women and residents from different regions (Amy 1993: Ch. 5). For this reason, region and gender were clearly relevant to the specific issue of electoral design. However, electoral systems that enhance the representation of these groups need not enhance the representation of racial or ethnic minorities. There is some evidence that women may have more success getting elected under multi-member plurality electoral systems than under single member plurality systems, but the opposite is true for racial or ethnic minorities, who risk getting shut out under multimember plurality schemes (Williams 1998: 207–08; James 2004: Ch. 5). Similarly, regional minorities tend to fare better under geography-based electoral systems, like single member district plurality or STV, as opposed to party-list proportional representation. But again, this tends to be reversed in the case of ethnic or racial minorities, particularly when these minorities are geographically dispersed, as is often the case in the United States and Canada (James 2004: Ch. 5).

8

For an overview of this literature, see Amy (1993: Ch. 6) and James (2004: Ch. 5).

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These examples raise a troubling point: by stratifying for region and gender but not for race or ethnicity, citizens’ assemblies deliberating about electoral systems could skew the agenda against the interests of racial or ethnic minorities and in favor of women and regional minorities. Amy Lang’s analysis of deliberative dynamics within the CA in Chapter 4 of this volume suggests that the something like this could have occurred. While facilitators and the Chair imposed certain formal agenda items, Lang notes that participants themselves informally added at least three items to the informal agenda: the representation of the North, the representation of women, and the representation of racial and ethnic minorities. Of these, Northern representation proved most influential in the ultimate decision to favor STV over MMP, since the former system would better protect the local, geographic representation sought by the North. Women’s representation garnered less attention. Although advocates were able to invite Dr. Lisa Young to testify on the capacity for an electoral system to enhance female representation, Young denied that a new electoral system would have much effect given the nominating processes and political cultures dominant within Canada, effectively taking the issue off the agenda.9 But whereas female representation did gain at least limited attention within the CA, racial and ethnic representation was largely ignored within the Assembly’s deliberation, to the disappointment of at least one participant (Lang 2005: Ch. 5). And such disappointment may have been more widespread, as Lang observed that four of five visible minorities within the CA favored MMP over STV (Lang 2005). Lang proffers three explanations for the failure of women’s representation and the success of Northern representation within the CA’s agenda: no strong, informal advocate for women’s representation emerged within the Assembly, whereas a strong, informal advocate did emerge for Northern representation; as a result, staff support for female representation was too little and too late, even though as many participants expressed support for this issue as did for Northern representation; and there was no ‘‘cultural consensus’’ on the importance of women’s representation, as there was for Northern representation. Because a contingent factor – the emergence of a strong, informal advocate for Northern representation – so strongly shaped the agenda, Lang concludes that, with a different set of participants, different informal advocates may have emerged, leading to different items becoming entrenched within an informal agenda. 9

Young’s conclusion, that electoral systems have no bearing on female representation, hardly reflects the scholarly consensus. For arguments suggesting that female representation is bolstered by multi-member plurality and proportional systems, all other things being equal, see Amy (1993: Ch. 5); James (2004: Ch. 5); Williams (1998: 207–8).

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However, it is hard not to note a rather non-contingent factor when contrasting the relative importance of both Northern and female representation as opposed to racial or ethnic representation: gender and region were proportionally represented within the CA. While this did not guarantee these groups would find informal advocates, it certainly helped their chances. In comparison, the underrepresentation of visible minorities in general, and the extreme underrepresentation of Aboriginals in particular, clearly lowered the probability that strong, informal advocates would emerge from these groups. Moreover Gibson’s rejection of racial or ethnic representation within the CA could itself have hindered any cultural consensus in favor of racial or ethnic representation as a value to be sought within an electoral system. Notably, racial and ethnic representation was introduced as an agenda issue by an external, written submission to the Assembly. Shan Rana, from an organization called Indo-Canadians for Minority Representation, wrote: ‘‘Proportional Representation should be adopted in a way which represents different ethnic groups as well as different political ideologies.’’ However, Rana was concerned not only with the exclusion of IndoCanadians but also with the political and legislative dominance of Sikhs over Hindus among Indo-Canadian political representatives (Rana 2004). This raises the difficult issue of internal diversity amidst descriptive representation, an issue addressed in the next section. How many visible minority representatives? Given that visible minority status is not only generally relevant within Canadian society but also specifically relevant to the issue of electoral reform, we now must determine how many visible minority participants are required for adequate descriptive representation. This requires revisiting the two sources from which the CA derived the legitimacy to act as political representatives for the people of British Columbia. The first, more symbolic source was the Assembly’s descriptive similarity to the province’s populace. The second, more substantive source was the quality of deliberation achieved within the Assembly. Recall that these two sources are intertwined, given that the inclusion of all relevant viewpoints is necessary to achieve quality deliberation that is fair to disadvantaged groups and secures the benefits of diverse perspectives. However, each source suggests a different number of visible minorities to be represented within the CA. Descriptive similarity implies that all population characteristics be represented in proportion to their numbers within the province. Recall that a concern for descriptive similarity drove Gibson to seek proportional representation by gender, age, and region among CA participants. A more

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thorough concern with descriptive similarity would have led him to seek proportional representation according to visible minority status, Aboriginal status, socio-economic status, and education level, characteristics that are generally relevant within Canadian society. But before one fears that descriptive similarity would prompt a nettlesome process of screening for a whopping seven characteristics, recall that not all of these generally relevant characteristics are specifically relevant to the question of electoral design. Given the mandate of the CA, it would suffice to stratify for proportional representation according to only four criteria: region, gender, visible minority status, and Aboriginal status. Age, socio-economic class, and educational level could legitimately be rejected as characteristics irrelevant to deliberation about electoral design. But while legitimacy through descriptive similarity requires proportional representation of relevant characteristics, legitimacy through quality deliberation demands only a critical mass of descriptive representatives. This is because the goal of representing certain characteristics is not to make the assembly resemble the general populace but to achieve four different goals.10 First, a critical mass of representatives is needed to communicate a group’s perspective to the broader assembly. A single descriptive representative would suffice if assembly rules granted equal speaking time to one representative from each group. But since citizens’ assemblies, like the CA, lack both a rigid definition of distinct groups and a rigid division of participant speaking time, fair and robust deliberation would require enough representatives to facilitate the mere capacity to convey a group’s position. Second, enough representatives must be present so as to bolster the confidence of minority descriptive representatives. In the absence of other minority group members, an isolated individual is less likely to express a minority position that contradicts the dominant perspective, such as the CA’s ‘‘cultural consensus’’ supporting regional representation but not racial or ethnic representation. Third, a critical mass is needed to convey a group perspective throughout the various sub-sections of a citizens’ assembly, such as the CA’s ‘‘break-out’’ groups in which participants deliberated in order to place new items on the informal agenda. One item that failed to make the agenda, despite its consideration in five ‘‘break-out’’ groups, was ‘‘social and cultural representation,’’ a concept that encompassed the representation of visible minorities (Lang 2005). While this item could legitimately have been removed from the agenda should fair deliberation deem it relatively unimportant, its

10

The following discussion draws on Kymlicka (1995: 146–47), Mansbridge (1999: 635–37), and Young (2000: 148).

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exclusion loses legitimacy to the extent that visible minorities were underrepresented or unrepresented in some ‘‘break-out’’ groups. Finally, a critical mass of descriptive representatives is needed to represent the plurality of viewpoints within a visible minority group perspective. Descriptive representation of different groups contributes to epistemologically robust deliberation through the inclusion of diverse, group-related perspectives on society. The social knowledge accessed through group perspectives is grounded in actual, empirical experiences by members of such groups, not through any putative genetic or metaphysical essence. Consequently, we cannot expect all members of any specific group to have had such experiences, either directly (i.e. their own, personal experiences) or indirectly (i.e. through the communicated experiences of another group member). However, voluminous empirical evidence suggests that members of some groups are more likely than members of other groups to have had the types of experiences that ground a distinct perspective on the social world. For example, visible minorities are more likely to have experienced the informal discrimination implied by the ‘‘colored vertical mosaic’’ thesis discussed earlier. Still, this is a difference of probability, not of necessity. Thus, it may be necessary to have a sufficient number of representatives from a specific group, in order to reveal both the statistically typical group-based perspective, along with statistically atypical outliers (James and Goldfinger 2005). It can also facilitate the representation of internal diversity within a broader racial or ethnic identity group. This last consideration can help to resolve the tension in Shan Rana’s submission regarding Indo-Canadian representation, should a critical mass of South Asians within the CA include a variety of religious perspectives within a common ethnic perspective. At this point, let me clarify what I am and am not claiming. I am not suggesting that the CA had to place racial or ethnic representation on its agenda in order for its deliberation about electoral design to have been fair. If prior deliberation within break-out groups determined that this was relatively unimportant when compared to other issues, such as regional representation, gender representation, or the general proportionality of an electoral system, racial or ethnic representation could legitimately be removed from the docket. Autonomous deliberators must be free to determine their own agenda. However, excluding an item from the agenda must occur under conditions of deliberative fairness. If a dominant cultural consensus shuts out minority perspectives, then deliberation is unfair and its resulting outcome – in this case the exclusion of racial or ethnic representation from the agenda – is illegitimate. Moreover, I am not asserting that visible minority interests or perspectives can never be adequately considered in the absence of a critical mass

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of descriptive representatives. It may be possible for a White representative to defend the interests of visible minorities, although it is not clear how a White representative could express a visible minority perspective without having had the experiences commonly associated with being a person of color in a predominantly White society. Furthermore, it may be possible for a single minority representative to successfully defend her group-related interests and perspective. But all things considered, such individual leadership would be rather supererogatory, even heroic, and heroism should not be expected among randomly selected, ordinary citizens. Just as a solitary Black student is rarely willing to defend racebased affirmative action amidst a classroom of White students opposed to such measures (Cohen and Sterba 2003), so too a solitary Asian immigrant would be unlikely to defend racial or ethnic representation as a key agenda item within an assembly of mostly White participants whose ‘‘cultural consensus’’ denies the importance of this issue. Anything is possible in politics, but when designing deliberative citizens’ assemblies, we must work with expected patterns of social interaction, not extraordinary exceptions. Thus far, I have examined descriptive representation only in terms of its relation to the CA’s two sources of legitimacy: descriptive similarity and quality deliberation. A further complicating factor stems from its complex institutional character as both a deliberative and aggregative body. While deliberation requires a critical mass or threshold representation, aggregative, democratic decision-making typically requires proportional representation of different groups, whenever equally weighted, individual voting is the method of decision-making. Some ‘‘quasi-legislative’’ committees make collective decisions through consensus or unanimity, thereby obviating the need for proportional representation (Stark 1997: 383–84). However, this was not the case with the CA, whose 160 members voted to place STV rather than MMP on the referendum ballot. The use of aggregative voting to reach a collective decision thus raises the question of whether visible minorities should have been proportionally represented, as was the case with respect to region, gender, and age. The disproportional underrepresentation of visible minorities in general and Asians in particular must be judged as unfair because aggregative fairness and legitimacy requires descriptive similarity. More complex is whether the statistical underrepresentation of these groups failed to secure a critical mass or threshold representation for these groups. With only nineteen visible minorities among the 160 participants in the CA, a good case can be made that threshold representation was not achieved, since clearly there were insufficient numbers from these groups to secure representation within each ‘‘break-out’’ group.

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A clearer violation of threshold and proportional representation occurred in the case of Aboriginal representation. With only two representatives with the CA, Aboriginals were not only statistically under-represented but clearly failed to secure threshold representation, according to any of the four reasons cited above. Amidst 160 participants in total, two Aboriginals were insufficient to communicate an Aboriginal position strongly or to bolster confidence in voicing a position outside of the prevailing cultural consensus. Two representatives were clearly not enough to secure minimal representation in the many ‘‘break-out’’ groups or to express the plurality of viewpoints within a broader Aboriginal perspective. That Aboriginal representation fell below a critical mass is reinforced by Leo Perra’s observation that the two Aboriginal representatives did not participate in discussions of Aboriginal issues in the Assembly (Perra 2005). This stands in sharp contrast with representatives from the Northern Regions, who not only voiced their concerns within the Assembly’s general deliberations but also held their own ‘‘North caucus,’’ in which they deliberated separately over how to define and protect their interests (Hirbour 2005). The underrepresentation of visible minorities, in terms of the substantive requirement of threshold representation or the symbolic or aggregative requirement of proportionality, raises some perplexing questions. Recall that the designers of the CA sought proportional representation in terms of region, gender, and age. Whereas visible minorities were proportionally under-represented with the CA, granting them proportional representation could conceivably have also secured threshold representation for these groups. However, this may not have been the case with Aboriginals, who constitute only 4.4 percent of the provincial population and thus whose proportional representation would have constituted only about six participants. Consequently, threshold representation of Aboriginals would have required their disproportional overrepresentation within the CA. If so, designers of later citizens’ assemblies in British Columbia may have to consider proportionally under-representing some groups in order to secure threshold representation for Aboriginals (see Kymlicka 1995: 144–49). This decision will hinge on how designers of subsequent citizens’ assemblies conceive of the relationship between legitimacy by descriptive similarity and quality deliberation, along with the role of aggregative decisionmaking. If deliberation remains tantamount, designers might alter the size and decision-making structure of future assemblies. CA designers included 160 members in order to have two members from each parliamentary district, along with two Aboriginal members. Alternatively, designers could base future assemblies less on the model of the provincial legislature than on the model of a committee, with perhaps ten to twenty participants. Under these conditions, decision-making could proceed

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under rules of consensus or unanimity, obviating the need for proportional descriptive representation in favor of more equally balanced threshold representation among those group perspectives deemed generally relevant within society and particularly relevant to the issue under question. Through this framework, a citizens’ assembly could more equitably consider the interests and perspectives of various groups, without representing some groups far above and other groups far beneath a critical mass.

6 Do citizens’ assemblies make reasoned choices? Andre´ Blais, R. Kenneth Carty, and Patrick Fournier

Can ordinary citizens make reasoned decisions about complex technical issues normally left to expert opinion? Those who advocate public engagement through the use of citizens’ assemblies say Yes. Are such citizens’ assemblies able to engage in normative reasoning and come to decisions that reflect the aggregated value preferences of the group? Those who advocate a more deliberative form of decision-making say Yes. Can the mutual learning and discussion that goes on in an open citizens’ forum override the advantages typically enjoyed by those with greater political information? Those who advocate the democratizing power of genuine engagement say Yes. The experience of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform allows us to test those assertions. The Assembly makes a particularly good test of these questions. Electoral systems are complex and esoteric institutions about which most citizens know very little, and the Assembly members ultimately recommended a system few of them had heard of before starting the process. How they came to that decision and on what basis they made their collective choice reveals much about the capacity of citizens to overcome their initial ignorance and to articulate and apply appropriate evaluative criteria in an evolving debate that underlay a deliberative decision-making process. Of course not all these ‘‘ordinary’’ citizens started from the same place: some were more politically interested, informed, and sophisticated than others. This makes it possible to explore the extent to which Assembly members were ‘‘equal’’ participants in the deliberative process, an issue of fundamental importance in assessing whether citizens’ assemblies really constitute a distinctly democratic alternative to other representative institutions. (Thompson 127

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provides a normative justification of the desirability of equality in the deliberative process in Chapter 1.) At the core of this chapter are answers to several simple but basic questions:

 Were the members of the Citizens’ Assembly able to clearly and consistently articulate criteria by which they might assess alternate electoral systems?  Were Assembly members able to assess and evaluate different electoral systems?  Did their evaluative criteria drive their system preferences in a logical and coherent way? And did the evolution of their preferences reflect their learning about the systems and a balancing of the normative trade-offs necessarily involved in the decision to choose one system over others?  Were there significant or consequential differences in the decisions made by the (initially) better informed as compared to the less knowledgeable? As we shall see, empirical answers to these questions illustrate that it is possible for ordinary citizens to become involved participants making reasoned choices rooted in their underlying value preferences. We start with a description of the data on which our analysis is based, and a brief account of the difference between the electoral systems that ultimately came into play as the Assembly moved to a decision. From there we move to an account of the members’ judgments about the criteria they believed salient and then their assessments of a variety of electoral systems – in both cases exploring how these judgments changed over the life of the Assembly. At that point, it is possible to consider the key question of the extent to which members’ choices were structured and driven by the importance attached to a set of criteria. Having considered the criteriapreference linkage, we then turn to the issue of information and the extent to which it impacted on the equal capacity of members to make reasoned choices. The BC Citizens’ Assembly and its choices One of the important distinctive features of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly was the length of time it took to do its work – a full year of learning, listening, considering, debating, and finally deciding. While the formal learning phase stretched over alternate weekends from January through March, members continued to study and learn during the rest of the year. Some members came to their preferred alternatives earlier than

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others and so moved to personal decisions at different times in the hearing or deliberative phases of the process. This meant that, unlike deliberative polls (Fishkin 1991, 1995; Luskin et al. 2002), there was a substantial temporal dimension to the exercise. Tracking changes in members’ evaluations and preferences over time reveals much about the evolution of the Assembly’s decision. Our analyses of the members’ views and judgments are based on a series of surveys conducted among all 160 of them. There were three large self-administered questionnaires, each containing more than 100 questions (many of them repeated). The first was conducted before the Assembly’s initial meeting (December 2003), the second after the learning and public hearing phases but before the deliberation phase (July 2004), and the third after the Assembly had completed its work and filed its final report to the government (December 2004). At the close of most weekend sessions, a short questionnaire was added to the regular weekend evaluation forms so that we have survey evidence on Assembly members’ attitudes, information, and preferences at thirteen distinct points in the process. Using information from the pre-Assembly survey as a benchmark, this analysis is largely based on data collected at three key points during the life of the Assembly – in March, July, and December. Each of these surveys contained a set of identical questions that asked members to indicate both the importance of relevant evaluative criteria by which electoral systems are typically judged and their own assessments of these electoral systems. The March survey came on a weekend near the end of the learning phase. By that time, all members had learned about the distinctive features of the major electoral system families and this was the first opportunity to collect comparative information on their initial assessments of them. The July survey was done after members had had the opportunity to think more about the issues involved, to test their understanding and interpretations against the written submissions from the public, and to engage with citizens in the hearings, but before they had started their formal deliberation phase. The final December survey was done after the members had cast their vote for their preferred option and the Assembly had ended. Assembly members reported their views on ten distinctive criteria that are widely used in both the political science literature and public debates on the merits of competing electoral systems (Blais 1991). The criteria covered a wide ground, speaking to the different perspectives of governing, competing, and voting that governments, political parties, and voters bring to the electoral process, and all had been raised in learning session discussions on distinctive electoral systems. While the learning phase had highlighted five distinctive families of electoral systems (Farrell 2001), important

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variations among them meant that Assembly members were able to rate nine different electoral system alternatives in each of the surveys. By the time that the Assembly had moved into its deliberative phase, three electoral systems were in play in their discussions. The single member plurality system (SMP) was currently in use in British Columbia and so the default position if no agreement on an alternative was reached. SMP is the dominant system in North America – it has representatives chosen in single member electoral districts with the winner being the individual for whom the largest number (not necessarily a majority) of votes are cast. It is a system in which there is no necessary or regular connection between a political party’s overall vote share and its seat share. The two alternatives the Assembly was finally interested in were both systems of proportional representation (PR), that is, systems in which a party’s seat share is (roughly) proportional to its vote share. The first is generally referred to as a mixed member proportional (MMP) system. Such systems (pioneered in West Germany) typically give electors two votes, one for an SMP component, one for a list of party candidates that is then used to compensate for the lack of proportionality in the SMP part of the system. A second alternative the Assembly debated was the single transferable vote (STV). In that system, voters are able to rank order as many candidates as they choose in electoral districts that return more than one candidate to the legislature. If asked, many observers and electoral system experts would have predicted the Assembly would choose an MMP system. Such systems had recently been adopted by reformers in New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales, and some of the new Eastern European democracies, while STV is used in only a handful of jurisdictions. However, after building models of both types and conducting an extensive comparative debate, Assembly members voted overwhelmingly for STV over MMP by 123–31. At that point, they returned to a comparison of STV with SMP and, after another full debate, opted for STV by 145–7. Part of our task involves understanding the basis for this surprising recommendation. Our detailed analysis of Assembly members’ comparisons of electoral systems in terms of their normative preferences ultimately focuses on these three particular systems. The members’ judgments Individuals came to the Assembly open to finding an alternative electoral system. When asked ‘‘How satisfied are you with the way the electoral system works in British Columbia?,’’ about two-thirds (64 percent) of the new members reported some level of dissatisfaction with the system. By the end of the second weekend of the learning phase, before they had explored

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Table 6.1a. Assembly evaluations of criteria for judging electoral systems

Effective government Electoral accountability Parliamentary check on government Fair representation of parties/groups Democratic political parties Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation Encouragement to participate Equality of the vote Simplicity

March

July

December

6.1 5.8 6.0 5.9 5.6 6.2 5.1 6.0 5.7 –

5.8 5.9 5.8 5.4 5.2 6.0 4.8 5.6 5.5 –

6.1 6.0 6.0 5.8 5.4 6.2 5.4 5.8 5.9 4.2

Note: Mean scores: 1–7, not important to extremely important.

SMP in detail but after they had begun to read and talk about issues of democratic governance, electoral organization and competition, dissatisfaction rose to over 80 percent and stayed there throughout the entire year. The great majority of CA members were obviously willing to recommend a different system if they could find one that would better fit their values. Table 6.1a reports the mean scores (on a 1 to 7 scale labeled from not important to extremely important) Assembly members gave to the importance of ten different criteria by which electoral systems are generally assessed by political science experts, politicians, and public commentators. Several important patterns appear in the data and reveal the members’ approach to the decision they had to make. The average ratings are quite high – none of them comes close to falling below the mid-point on the range. This suggests that Assembly members were unprepared to be dismissive of any criteria (except ‘‘simplicity’’ for which we have only one measure), but also that they did not see any single criterion as trumping all others. However, that said, it is also striking that ‘‘choice for the voter’’ was the criterion that was consistently given the highest rating by the ordinary voters who constituted the Assembly in all three surveys. This is not a value that typically gets much attention in political scientists’ or politicians’ assessments of electoral systems. This evidence suggests that citizens think about the electoral process from a distinctive perspective. There is a pronounced overall stability in the ratings Assembly members gave to these basic considerations as marked by the minimal differences between the earliest and last scores (March and December). This suggests

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Table 6.1b. Proportion of CA members with stable ratings (%)

Effective government Electoral accountability Parliamentary check on government Fair representation of parties/groups Democratic political parties Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation Encouragement to participate Equality of the vote

March to July

July to December

March to December

75.2 77.7 76.9 77.2 69.1 82.9 67.7 76.0 80.0

81.7 82.1 81.6 74.8 73.9 80.2 62.9 75.7 75.0

81.1 75.5 75.5 74.5 79.3 80.4 59.8 74.8 76.4

that these evaluative criteria reflected basic predispositions to political values and institutional preferences. One criterion for which the score seems to have moved quite extensively was ‘‘local representation,’’ increasing at the end of the Assembly process. This reflects the more contested nature of that dimension in the Assembly debates, and the movement would prove to be a significant part of the final decision-making story. (Lang assesses the role of advocates within the Assembly in bringing this issue to the fore in Chapter 4.) Of course this stability of responses to questions about the importance of particular criteria might easily hide considerable instability in the responses of individual members. Indeed, those who doubt citizens are capable of engaging in reasoned debates over issues like electoral systems might do so precisely because they believe that ordinary citizens do not hold stable views on such matters. Table 6.1b tests this proposition and makes it clear that, at the level of the individual members, judgments were relatively stable over time. It reveals that about threequarters of the members typically provided similar ratings (measured as giving the same score or differing by only one point) at two different points in time. It is striking that ‘‘voter choice,’’ which got the highest ratings (Table 6.1a) also had very stable ratings, and it is perhaps not surprising that the shifting scores given to ‘‘local representation’’ reflected a considerable variation in individual members’ assessments of its importance. Once Assembly members had learned about the variety of types of electoral systems that they were bound to consider, they were able to respond to a question as to how good they thought such a system might

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Table 6.2a. Assembly comparative ratings of electoral systems

Majority, two ballots Majority, preferential ballot Plurality, single-member (SMP) Plurality, multi-member Open list PR Closed list PR Single Transferable Vote (STV) Mixed-Proportional (MMP) Mixed-Parallel (MMM)

March

July

December

3.0 3.4 2.9 3.3 5.3 3.8 5.1 5.4 4.2

2.8 3.7 3.1 3.3 4.9 3.5 5.2 5.4 3.6

2.8 3.4 2.9 3.1 4.5 3.2 6.2 5.2 3.6

Note: Mean scores: 1–7, very bad to very good.

be for British Columbia. Again we asked members to rate systems on a seven-point scale (from 1 ¼ very bad to 7 ¼ very good). Table 6.2a reports their responses and indicates that, from the beginning, only four of the nine different system types were rated better than 4, the mid-point on the scale: two mixed systems, STV, and open list PR. The non-compensatory type of mixed system was rated only slightly better than 4 and, as members came to realize that in practice such systems were not proportional, its rating quickly declined. Apparently, it was never a serious contender. Open list PR systems had high initial scores but they subsequently declined when members assessed them against their other criteria. The evidence of the table also demonstrates that, from the beginning, members gave their lowest ratings to the existing single member plurality system, an evaluation that would remain relatively stable from March right through to the final decision. What is especially obvious from the data is that, at each stage of the process, an overwhelming majority of members preferred MMP and STV over SMP. Table 6.2b shows that, while a majority of the Assembly members rated the systems in a consistent fashion, there was slightly less stability in this set of ratings than there was in the basic criteria that members were applying in making their judgments. It would seem that Citizens’ Assembly members continued to revisit their evaluations over the process as they learned more and discussed the merits of the respective systems. Among the systems, MMP was the most consistently rated, while a much more substantial change took place in the evaluation of STV. Ultimately the key decision made by the Assembly came down to a choice between STV and MMP. As we saw in Table 6.2a, MMP was rated (on average) higher in March and July, but in the final deliberative phase

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Table 6.2b. Proportion of CA members with stable ratings (%)

Majority/two ballots Majority/preferential ballot Plurality/single-member (SMP) Plurality/multi-member PR (open) PR (closed) Single transferable vote (STV) Mixed-Proportional (MMP) Mixed-Parallel (MMM)

March to July

July to December

March to December

69.4 76.4 75.0 70.0 73.2 63.2 72.2 84.2 61.8

70.2 72.0 80.7 78.3 70.6 73.6 64.3 80.9 73.6

69.5 70.0 69.2 71.0 64.2 65.0 63.0 84.0 62.4

Table 6.3. Evolution of preferences between MMP and STV (%)

Prefer MMP No preference Prefer STV N

March

July

December

41 39 20 139

40 32 27 139

10 18 73 120

the positions were sharply reversed, producing the final decision in favor of STV. This evolution in the preferences between these two systems can be seen in Table 6.3, which reports the percentage of individuals rating one of these systems higher than the other (equal scores are coded as no preference). When members first rated the systems, 41% gave MMP a higher score, about the same proportion was indifferent, while only 20% preferred STV. Little appears to have changed by the end of the public hearing phase, save perhaps a modest increase in the proportion supporting STV with fewer now indifferent. A spectacular turnaround occurred by the end of the deliberative phase so that, at the time the Assembly concluded, 73% of its members rated STV higher than MMP, leaving only 10% still giving MMP a higher rating than STV. A crucial aspect of an analysis of the Assembly decision-making must inevitably focus on what produced this huge movement in members’ judgments. The shift appears to have occurred sometime between the end of the public hearings and the early part of the deliberation phase. During the summer period members were actively discussing the merits of alternate systems on

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their private web forum and some argue that it was then that opinions began to crystallize.1 Having adopted ‘‘voter choice,’’ ‘‘proportionality,’’ and ‘‘local representation’’ as the key values they wished to see institutionalized in an electoral system in the first weekend of the deliberative phase, the members then devoted the next two weekend sessions to elaborating detailed models of the two types of electoral systems that they identified as best being able to incorporate these values, first STV and then MMP. At the end of the weekend during which the details of an STV system were worked out, the participants were asked to preferentially rank five systems – SMP, STV, MMP, a preferential majoritarian system, and a mixed non-compensatory system – from first to last preference. At that point, 73% of the members indicated STV ranked first in their mind, while only 25% picked MMP, and just 1% SMP. After the following session in which members articulated the components of an MMP model they thought appropriate for BC, they were invited to rank order the three systems still being seriously considered – SMP, STV, and MMP: 72% identified STV, 25% MMP, and 3% SMP as their first preference. It seems clear then that a significant preference for STV over MMP emerged as the Assembly was developing an STV model; it changed little as a consequence of working out the mechanics of an MMP system. These ordinary citizens were able to indicate which underlying criteria they believed more and less important to an assessment of electoral systems. And the stability of their judgments suggests that theirs was no mere random or unreasoned response. Much the same can be said for their ability to evaluate different electoral systems. But it is also obvious that, during their learning and deliberation, Assembly members changed their views about which system was best suited to institutionalize their values and came to settle on a clear preference for an STV system. This brings us to our third question, which seeks to explore the extent to which the citizens of the Assembly were reasoning from their values to a decision as to which system would best satisfy them. Linking criteria to preferences Our assessment of the extent to which the citizens who made up the Assembly were able to make a reasoned decision depends upon an analysis of which (if any) valued criteria drove members’ judgments about the best electoral system and governed their final decision. To do so, we focus on the three options that the CA ultimately chose among: SMP, STV, and MMP. 1

Interviews with members suggest that they think this period was important and that the web discussion, in which a few members were active contributors but the majority was reading and following, focused attention on the key issues.

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We start by examining members’ relative assessments of these three systems. This is measured by a series of variables that are based on the comparative scores members gave to each of the systems: the value is simply the score given to one minus the score given to the other.2 These values are then treated as dependent variables and were regressed against the ten criteria (see Table 6.1a) on the basis of which systems might be evaluated. Our preliminary analysis indicated that three criteria mattered most to members’ decisions: fair (i.e. proportional) representation, voter choice, and local representation. Those were the criteria that had been highlighted by the Assembly for discussion in its Preliminary Statement issued at the end of the learning phase, and they were the features that members agreed, at the beginning of the deliberation phase, ought to be essential features of any BC electoral system.3 Table 6.4 shows the effect of the three criteria on relative preferences among the three systems, at each of the three stages. As one would expect from an expert analysis of the characteristics of the systems, evaluations of SMP versus STV and MMP both hinged on the importance attached to fair representation as compared to local representation. Members more concerned with local representation were more likely to prefer SMP – the coefficients are positive and generally significant. Those who gave higher priority to fair representation were prone to dislike SMP – the coefficients are all negative and significant. Fairness was typically more highly valued than local representation (recall Table 6.1a). This finding indicates that fairness was a crucial value for the citizen members and so, from that standpoint, SMP (and for that matter all majority and plurality systems) was ultimately unacceptable. Any assessment of preference ordering is bound to be less straightforward with respect to the criteria applied to evaluating STV and MMP. In March, members were still absorbing information about these two systems about which few had any previous knowledge or experience. Not surprisingly then, at that point the relative evaluations of the two systems 2

3

We use relative evaluations rather than actual vote choices because, incorporating the intensity of preferences, they provide finer measures of members’ judgment. There was a strong correlation between relative evaluations and final choice; 88 of the 93 respondents who gave a higher rating to STV over MMP or the reverse voted for their preferred option (15 of the 21 individuals who gave them the same rating supported STV). The statement at the end of the learning phase raised four areas for debate and feedback: the vote–seat relationship (fairness as proportionality), local representation, the range and nature of choice offered to voters, and governance. The latter could be linked to the effective government and/or parliamentary check on government criteria. A copy of the Preliminary Statement to the People of British Columbia can be found as an Appendix to the Assembly’s Technical Report.

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Table 6.4. The determinants of relative evaluations of SMP, STV, and MMP (OLS regressions) March

July

December

SMP versus STV Fair representation of parties/groups Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation N R2

.58 *** .11 .29 *** 132 .23

.35 * .14 .30 ** 139 .14

.66 *** .05 .14 115 .21

SMP versus MMP Fair representation of parties/groups Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation N R2

.66 *** .02 .31 *** 132 .24

.74 *** .36 ** .14 138 .24

.70 *** .20 .37 ** 115 .25

STV versus MMP Fair representation of parties/groups Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation N R2

.09 .14 .00 135 .01

.39 ** .22 .17 ** 137 .08

.05 .25 .23 ** 118 .16

STV versus MMP Fair representation of parties/groups Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation STVvMMP (July) N R2

– – – – – –

– – – – – –

.11 .08 .32 *** .32 *** 107 .30

***significant at .01 **significant at .05 *significant at .10

appeared to be unstructured by these evaluative criteria. However, as members learned more, that changed. By July, those who were more concerned with increasing voter choice were prone to prefer STV (the coefficient does not quite reach statistical significance because of the small number of cases); those more concerned with fairness and/or local representation rated MMP more highly. The result was that, in the Assembly as a whole, MMP was then somewhat more highly rated than

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STV (recall Table 6.3), but the differences were modest because the most highly ranked criterion, voter choice, benefited STV. By the final decision point at the end of the deliberation phase in the fall, those patterns changed dramatically. What did not change was the role of voter choice – those who gave priority to choice continued to prefer STV. But MMP lost support in terms of the two criteria that had led members to initially support it. Fairness no longer made the significant difference it had in July as members came to believe that their MMP model would not be intrinsically fairer (i.e. more proportional) than their version of STV. Perhaps more important was the transformed influence of concern over local representation. In July, it had been negatively correlated with a preference for STV over MMP – now it was positively related with higher STV ratings. What STV and MMP entail with respect to local representation depends on how one defines ‘‘local’’ (especially versus ‘‘regional’’) as well as on the size of the constituencies. What we know, however, is that politicians in Ireland do a lot of constituency work (Katz 1980; Carty 1981; Marsh 2000), and that there are good reasons to suppose that this is due in part to the use of the single transferable vote. It thus makes sense for someone who is concerned with local representation to think that STV is a good system. STV, then, ultimately became the choice of the Assembly partly because MMP ceased to be perceived as fairer and partly because STV came to be the choice of those for whom the local representation criterion was particularly salient. (Pearse reaches a similar conclusion in Chapter 3.) This becomes apparent when we relate the final system preferences of members to their criteria ratings while controlling for their earlier (July) preferences (see the last panel of Table 6.4). That allows us to identify the factor that accounts for changes in members’ judgments in the second half of the Assembly process. Those results make it clear that it was those who attached greater importance to local representation who became more positive toward STV by the time a final decision had to be made. These data show that Assembly members made choices that reflected a well-defined set of criteria appropriate to the choice of an electoral system. They rejected SMP because it is rightly understood to be an unfair – nonproportional – system. They chose STV over MMP because they believed that it would give them what they most preferred – greater individual voter choice at the ballot box – and they liked the particular form of local representation it offered. Indeed, the shift from a small edge in favor of MMP at the mid-point of their work to a widespread preference for STV by the end stemmed from an increased importance given to local representation and a developed perception that STV was ‘‘better’’ than MMP on that score. This is a story of a careful, reasoned decision. Few electoral system experts would dispute the appropriateness of the criteria they

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considered, few could dispute that their decision was appropriate given the priorities they assigned to the criteria they applied.4 Skeptics may ask: but why did Assembly members make their choice on the basis of these three specific criteria (voter choice, fairness, and local representation)? As Table 6.1a indicates, some other values were rated more highly. The simple answer is that members were doing more than registering their individual preferences, they were engaged in a deliberative process in which they sought to accommodate their views and values to those of other members. And in this process they learned that there was a significant minority for whom local representation was very important.5 As they prepared to decide on which options to consider, Assembly members broke into ten smaller discussion groups to discuss which values ought to underpin an alternate electoral system. Each of the groups reported on their three preferred values (some identified four or five) and all ten identified proportionality, voter choice, and local representation as necessary components of any acceptable system. It is striking that all ten identified ‘‘single party majority government’’ as the least important criterion by which to judge an electoral system. While other issues were of concern to many members – for instance a more socially balanced legislature or ‘‘effective government’’ – they realized that those were, at best, indirect consequences of different electoral systems.6 Their mandate was to decide on the details of a possible alternative to SMP and so there was a natural tendency to focus on the constituent features of such a system: that led them rather directly to voter choice (a ballot structure issue), proportionality (a representational issue), and local representation (a district magnitude issue). The impact of political sophistication The Citizens’ Assembly was composed of ordinary citizens, drawn at random from the voters’ list, and so it was inevitable that they came to the process with very different levels of knowledge, experience, or even interest in political institutions and practices. All went through the same intensive 4

5

6

Some experts argue that MMP is inherently more proportional than STV for it entails higher district magnitudes (see Taagepera and Shugart 1989), but this theoretical argument does not seem to have carried the day with Assembly members seeking to balance several criteria and recognizing that their MMP model would not achieve perfect proportionality. More specifically, when asked to rank order fairness, voter choice, local representation, and simplicity from the most to the least important in an October survey, 28 members put local representation on top of the list. It was also the case that here was no correlation between the importance given to ‘‘effective government’’ and ratings of SMP, MMP, and STV by members.

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learning experience which required many of them to learn new terms, master the logic of unfamiliar relationships, and think through how the adoption of another electoral system would impact upon British Columbia’s political life. Critics of citizen decision-making processes would argue that the very complexity of these tasks means that an assembly’s decisions will reflect the participants’ differential ability to engage the material and that the more sophisticated among them will have a disproportionate influence on the group’s final position. To explore the extent to which the learning phase of the Assembly project was able to compensate for differences in members’ initial levels of political awareness, we want to know if it mattered that some members were more politically sophisticated than others at the beginning of the process. Was there a difference between the most and least informed in either the criteria to be applied in making comparative assessments or in the ratings of the different electoral systems themselves? Did the most informed members crystallize their views earlier and were they more consistent than those of their less sophisticated colleagues? At the heart of these questions is a concern for whether there was an information cleavage in the Assembly that structured members’ preferences. The extent of members’ initial political interest, awareness, and knowledge was measured in the benchmark questionnaire administered before the Assembly met for the first time. That questionnaire included a set of nine factual questions about major provincial and national political actors, jurisdictional responsibility for important areas of public policy, and the use of differing electoral systems in other countries. Taken together, the responses to these questions establish a (0 to 1) scale that provides an objective measure of each member’s level of political information.7 Because the benchmark survey used a self-administered mail questionnaire it is possible that some members might have looked up correct answers (even though they were invited not to do so). To compensate for this possibility, we also developed a subjective measure of each member’s initial political engagement from answers to three questions that asked them to rate their own general level of political interest, their overall degree of political information, and their knowledge of electoral systems.8 7

8

The scale’s alpha is .60; its mean ¼ .53. This approach, which is based on the capacity to give correct answers to factual questions, is the standard methodology utilized in studies about the role of information in opinion formation; see Luskin (1987); Zaller (1992); Delli Carpini, and Keeter (1996); Althaus (2003). This subjective political sophistication (0 to 1) scale has an alpha of .81 and a mean of .53. It is correlated with its objective counterpart (r ¼ .37) and correlations between subjective information in January and July, July and December, and January and December are: .66, .81, and .67.

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In our analyses, we have used both objective and subjective measures to test the robustness of the findings, but here we simply report those based on the objective scale. Given the small number of cases, we resort to the simple device of dividing them into two groups – those with more information and those with less – and we explore the extent to which there were systematic differences between them. We have also examined the members’ views in terms of their levels of education but, as political information is more proximate to their political decision-making, we focus on information in this analysis. Our primary question is whether the most knowledgeable Assembly members rated either the criteria or the various electoral systems differently than their less well-informed colleagues. Table 6.5 reports the results and demonstrates that, overall, there was very little discrepancy in the evaluations of the more and less politically informed. There are a few instances where the ratings differ substantially, but there does not appear to be any consistent pattern to them: in some cases the more informed had higher ratings, in others lower, and what marginal differences did exist seemed to vary over time. A parallel analysis between those with more or less formal education (the division is between those with and without a university degree) comes to the same conclusion. Our general conclusion is that, from the beginning, there was no systematic difference in the views of the most and least informed. A second possibility is that more informed members would have more developed and hence more stable views than their least informed colleagues. We compared the proportion of stable ratings between March and July, and then from July to December, among the most and the least sophisticated in an analysis that parallels that reported for the entire Assembly (recall Tables 6.1b and 6.2b).9 The conclusion is again clear – the data do not support a hypothesis that there was a significant information difference. The most politically informed half of the membership was more often consistent in their rating of a criterion or system, but that was not always the case. What differences in judgment consistency existed were neither regular (across the two time periods) nor large. It seems evident that both groups were struggling to make up their mind on these issues and both groups were (slightly) modifying their views over the life of the Assembly. Finally, we are concerned with whether the more informed Assembly members were better able to make a rationally intelligible and reasoned choice. Were their choices more logically consistent in the sense that their evaluations of electoral systems were more strongly related to the comparative importance they gave to underlying criteria? 9

Given the lack of significant differences we don’t report the detailed tables here. Interested readers can obtain copies from the authors.

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Table 6.5. Mean criteria and system evaluations by information level March High Info Criteria Effective government Electoral accountability Parliamentary check on govern. Fair represent. of parties/groups Democratic political parties Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation Encouragement to participate Equality of the vote Simplicity Systems Majority, two ballots Majority, alternative vote Plurality, single-member (SMP) Plurality, multi-member Open list PR Closed list PR Single transferable vote (STV) Mixed-Proportional (MMP) Mixed-Parallel (MMM)

Low Info

July

December

High Info

Low Info

High Info

Low Info

5.9 5.6 6.0 5.8 5.6 5.9 5.0 6.1 5.9

6.1 5.8 5.9 5.9 5.6 6.2 5.0 5.8 5.6

5.8 5.8 5.9 5.3 5.2 6.0 4.7 5.8 5.6

5.8 5.9 5.8 5.5 5.1 5.9 4.9 5.6 5.5

5.9 5.9 6.1 5.6 5.3 6.1 5.4 6.0 5.9 4.2

6.3 6.1 6.0 5.9 5.4 6.2 5.3 5.7 5.9 4.2

2.7 3.2 2.5 2.9 5.4 3.9 5.3 5.5 4.1

3.2 3.4 3.0 3.4 5.2 3.6 5.0 5.3 4.1

2.5 3.5 2.9 3.0 4.6 3.4 5.4 5.3 3.3

2.8 3.7 3.1 3.4 5.1 3.4 5.0 5.4 3.7

2.7 3.2 2.9 2.7 4.7 3.3 6.1 5.3 3.4

2.8 3.5 2.9 3.3 4.4 3.1 6.4 5.2 3.8

Table 6.6 allows us to compare how evaluations of STV and MMP are related to the importance attached to fairness, voter choice, and local representation among high and low information members. The results show that concern for local representation nourished a preference for STV over MMP among both the least and the most informed. They indicate, however, that it was only among high information members that valuing voter choice led to a marked preference for STV. It is also the case that the least informed were more likely to rally to STV in the final deliberative period of the Assembly. The proportion of switchers, that is, members who did not prefer STV over MMP at the July midpoint but who did so at the end, was 68 percent among the least informed and 44 percent among the most informed. There was a substantial shift toward STV in both groups but the shift was stronger among the least informed.

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Table 6.6. The determinants of relative evaluations of STV and MMP by information level y (OLS regressions)

STV versus MMP Fair representation of parties/groups Choice for the voter Identifiable local representation N R2

High Info

Low Info

.11 .52 * .33 ** 43 .29

.01 .08 .22 ** 69 .12

yBased on final (December) evaluations ***significant at .01 **significant at .05 *significant at .10

These results reveal only modest divisions within the Assembly between the most and the least politically sophisticated members. There were people who knew quite a lot about politics and political institutions when the process started and there were others who knew very little. Yet there is little evidence that the most informed had or developed significantly different preferences. Nor is there any evidence that the most informed led the group or that the least informed followed their lead. The only information cleavage that we did observe concerned the sources of preferences. Electoral system ratings were strongly correlated with the importance attached to voter choice only among the most informed. Conclusion The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly constituted a bold political experiment. The idea was to let ordinary citizens rather than self-interested politicians decide which electoral system was best for their province. The problem with such initiatives, critics argue, is that ordinary citizens are poorly informed about electoral systems (and possibly about politics more generally) and so ill equipped to make an intelligent choice. The Assembly solution involved a learning program to inform its citizen members about both the options (the various electoral systems) and the criteria (goals) through which these options can be ascertained. They then had an opportunity to think through the alternatives, deliberate about their comparative merits, and then finally make a decision as to their preference. In principle, such a decision should correspond to the decision that would be reached by

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the entire electorate, if that electorate were well informed. The composition of the Assembly should assure that it reflects the general values and concerns of the population, and the information and deliberation processes should assure that the decision is a wise one. In this chapter, we have focused on whether the choice made by the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was a reasoned and coherent one given the values and goals that its members recognized and articulated. Our preliminary analysis of the evidence provided by the members themselves suggests that the Assembly did indeed make a reasonable and intelligible choice. As we saw most clearly in Table 6.4, both MMP and STV were preferred over SMP because a system that generated more proportional (i.e. ‘‘fair’’) outcomes was seen to be more important than one which sacrificed them in the name of local representation. The choice between STV and MMP was a more difficult one. However, the final decision in favor of STV reflected the higher priority members gave to voter choice (maximized in that system by allowing voters the option of selecting among candidates within and between political parties) and the concern among a substantial minority over the issue of local representation. The importance finally attributed to local representation, which initially had a lower average rating, is a reminder that this was both a deliberative and a political process. A minority intensely concerned with local representation was able to convince others to weigh it more heavily in their assessments of electoral system alternatives than they might otherwise. The rejection of SMP in favor of STV thus appears to be a choice in which Assembly members were both exercising their individual preferences as well as accommodating those of their fellow members. We cannot say for certain that all Assembly members developed a preference that was entirely consistent with their priorities, but we would contend that their collective choice made a lot of sense. We have also noted that while the most and the least informed had similar preferences, the preferences of the least informed were more weakly structured. All in all, the rejection of SMP and the choice of STV appear reasonable, given the values of the Assembly members.

7 Communicative rationality in the Citizens’ Assembly and referendum processes R. S. Ratner

The spread of representative democracies over the last twenty years has stimulated new interest in electoral systems, attracting scholarly attention to their determining impact on the functioning of political institutions. As well, a growing concern about public apathy toward political life and deepening distrust toward ‘‘politics’’ generally has signaled the need for a revitalization of the democratic polity. In that regard, attempts to resurrect the notion of the ‘‘public sphere’’ have produced a range of electoral reform initiatives and procedural innovations in recent years, reinforcing ‘‘the supposition that deliberation enhances democracy’’ (Sanders 1997: 347). This extended project of ‘‘participatory democratic regeneration’’ (Fung and Wright 2003: 40) has now yielded numerous rationales for ‘‘deliberative democracy’’ – essentially a mode of discursive public activity that encourages participants to ‘‘give reasons’’ in order to ‘‘justify decisions’’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 7). Free and open dialogue is viewed as the tonic for an alienated citizenry. A merger of these two postulated correctives to the ‘‘democratic deficit’’ – electoral reform and deliberative democracy – was launched in the Province of British Columbia in January 2004 with the advent of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. (The details of the specific impetus and formation of the Assembly are reported by Warren and Pearse in the Introduction to this volume.) As it turned out, the Assembly’s recommendation that the current single member plurality (SMP) electoral system be replaced by the single transferable vote (STV; see page 130) system, was defeated in the May 17, 2005 referendum, the vote falling just short of the 60 percent supermajority threshold. Although the government had budgeted $5.5 million for the Assembly process, only $800,000 was provided 145

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to inform voters on the Assembly’s recommendation before the referendum. Assembly members were left to mobilize their own resources if they wanted to represent their motion to the voters. Approximately 100 of them became active ambassadors of the Assembly and its recommendation (141 of the 160 members joined the Citizens’ Assembly Alumni, hereafter referred to as CAA) and made presentations to interested groups in their respective ridings. Despite the lack of a publicly funded education campaign, the referendum outcome made it evident that the Assembly’s recommendation had broad support, compelling the Premier to announce in his Throne Speech of September 12, 2005 that a second referendum on the Assembly’s recommendation would be held in conjunction with the November 2008 municipal elections. The new referendum would have the same double supermajority thresholds (60 percent of the total provincial vote and a majority result in 60 percent of the ridings), but, this time, the government would fund campaigns supporting both the status quo and STV, the Electoral Boundaries Commission would provide the public with boundary maps indicating potential constituencies under both STV and the current SMP system, and the number of Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) could be increased from seventy-nine to eighty-five. Approximately one month after the Premier’s announcement, I conducted interviews with sixty members of the Citizens’ Assembly. My intention was to glean their impressions of how the Assembly process compared with the referendum process, and from that to arrive at some ideas about how to enhance the deliberative processes of such ‘‘thought experiments’’ as the Assembly and transfer its benefits to more diffuse institutionally delegated ‘‘public spheres’’ such as the referendum. In developing the set of questions that I would pose to the CA members, I drew on J¨urgen Habermas’ famously articulated ‘‘ideal speech situation’’ and ‘‘validity claims’’ model. These were useful constructs to clarify communicative processes in the CA and referendum experiences; moreover, his later work specifically addresses the problem of mediating the disjunction between the insights generated by ‘‘autonomous’’ public spheres and the institutional requisites of politics and administration1 – a tension partly replicated between the CA and referendum processes. In the following section I present a synopsis of Habermas’ ideas that link his validity claims formulation to my research questions, and introduce my interview sample.

1

Many scholars of democratic practice acknowledge Habermas’ intellectual centrality in the revival of deliberative politics, whatever their reservations about specific features of his approach (e.g. Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 9; Fishkin 1995: 40–41).

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Assessing communicative rationality Without rehearsing Habermas’ System–Lifeworld duality, suffice it to say that, in his view, the fundamental integrative crisis of modern societies is expressed in the way money and power, instead of language, come to govern meaning and action. Habermas’ proposed antidote is a resurrection of the ‘‘public sphere’’ in the economic and political arenas spurring relinguistified debate and argumentation and leading to new communicatively achieved meanings and transformative actions potentially capable of harmonizing the differentiated domains of System and Lifeworld.2 Habermas’ confidence in the regenerative capacities of the public sphere rests on his assumption that linguistic communication presupposes an orientation to consensus in which the ‘‘force of the better argument’’ prevails. Such an ‘‘emancipated’’ discourse presupposes, in turn, what Habermas calls the ‘‘ideal speech situation’’ (ISS) – a social condition in which the parties to public discourse are in a situation of equality and autonomy. Requisite conditions for the ISS are the following: (1) every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in the discourse; (2) speakers will have symmetrical chances to speak; (3) assumptions and conceptual frameworks which govern the situation may be called into question by any speaker; and (4) attempts to dominate, or strategic motivations on the part of actors, must be cast aside. Habermas acknowledges that actual contexts of argumentation seldom correspond to the imaginary ideal of the ISS, but the possibility is conceivable, and it is certainly possible to improve the conditions of public discourse, even if fulfilling ISS conditions is unlikely. In any event, since it represents the constitutive conditions of possible discourse – even where those conditions are not fully met – the ISS provides a critical standard by which to evaluate actual discourse. 2

The brief digest of some of Habermas’ ideas presented here is based on selected reading from several of Habermas’ own works (1976, 1979, 1984, 1989a, 1989b, 1996) and various exegeses, including Baert (1998); Bernstein (1985); Calhoun (1992); Chambers (1996); Cooke (1998); Outhwaite (1994); Pusey (1987); Ray (1993); Sitton (2003). In this paper I have chosen to draw on those ideas in ways that I believe illuminate my own research problem, recognizing that in more recent work Habermas’ analysis of the normative basis for democratic legitimacy in pluralist societies (e.g. 1996) has developed somewhat differently than in my use of his earlier formulation of the validity claims model (e.g. 1979). I am not, here, engaging in a tendential critique of Habermas’ ideas nor am I seeking to establish the boundaries of deliberative debate within the institutional framework of liberal democracy. I am merely focusing on the extension of deliberative practice to one institutional arena of public discourse – that of electoral reform – and the problems that ensue.

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A second way in which Habermas grounds reason in the context of daily linguistic usage is through his contention that in everyday speech we implicitly and necessarily raise certain ‘‘validity claims.’’ Indeed, all linguistic utterances, as used in everyday processes of communication, can be construed as claims to validity in which a background consensus between interlocutors assumes that, if necessary, they could justify those claims. When challenged, however, communicative action cannot continue routinely, and disputed claims must be ‘‘redeemed’’ through reasons and argument so that interlocutors can agree and cooperate if necessary. Consensus occurs when four types of culturally invariant validity claims are honored by interlocutors, and consensus is blocked when one or more of these claims is challenged and fails to obtain agreement: ‘‘Comprehensibility’’ (What do you mean?): the speakers use language adequately enough to be understood; the speech-act is intelligible to participants. ‘‘Truth’’ (Is what you say true?): the statements (utterances) of speakers adequately portray realities in relation to the objective world; the speaker is offering reliable knowledge; the speech-act is factually correct. ‘‘Rightness’’ (Are you entitled to say that?): the statements of speakers are appropriate or legitimate in a given situation in relation to shared norms and values; the statements seem right and proper and can be assimilated by participants. ‘‘Truthfulness’’ (Do you really mean it?): the statements of speakers are sincere and authentic in the expression of intentions and feelings; the statements are veracious and not intended to deceive participants. Ordinary or ‘‘naive’’ conversation takes it for granted that all of the above validity claims are fulfilled, but challenges to a claim require argumentation at the level of ‘‘practical discourse’’ in order to achieve rational agreement. In this sense, the ‘‘public sphere’’ can be understood as a reflective medium for settling problematic validity claims, and ‘‘communicative rationality’’ is dependent on the realization (as nearly as possible) of the ISS, which affirms, in dialogue, the four validity claims. In sum, communicative action is action ideally oriented to the mutual production of consensus across the dimensions of reciprocally proffered validity claims, and communicative rationality is achieved in free and open communication that realizes the inherent dynamics of the communication process. To flourish, it requires the expansion of deliberative public spheres that promote discursively achieved agreement about matters of shared interest; ergo, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, one such autonomous ‘‘public sphere’’ specifically operative in the electoral sub-field.

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In a similar vein, just as the Citizens’ Assembly (CA) may be viewed as a potential site of communicative rationality, so too may the referendum process be viewed as a (more diffuse) public sphere oriented toward the production of rational discourse (and consensus), though plainly more susceptible to the incursions of money and power.3 Methodologically, the dialogical spaces of both processes – CA and referendum – can be purveyed through the utopian prism of Habermas’ counterfactual ISS and the pragmatics of the validity claims model in order to comparatively explore the state of discursively achieved agreement in the two settings.4 In essence, the research reported herein focuses on two principal questions: (1) Did the deliberations of the Citizens’ Assembly count as ‘‘high quality’’ – optimally conforming to the ideal speech situation – judging by the normative measures extracted from Habermas’ validity claims; and (2) did the deliberations count as ‘‘high quality’’ in the case of the broader public? The research undertaken involved 30–45-minute telephone interviews conducted over a two-week period with sixty CA members who had participated in the referendum process (most under the aegis of the CAA which accepted community requests for formal presentations). My modus operandi, as a researcher–observer of the CA process, was to request interviews with members who were moderately to very active in their discussion groups over the course of the learning and deliberation phases and whose level of involvement in the discussions likely familiarized them with the views of other members. Everyone I approached was agreeable to being interviewed. After obtaining a list of CAA members,5 I eliminated the few potential interviewees who had not given time to the CAA since the Alumni group had been established specifically to engage members in the

3

4

5

Hypothetically, the CA process entails formation of a rationally determined consensus on the merits of an alternative to the current SMP electoral system; likewise, the referendum process potentially elicits a rational consensus on the merits of the STV alternative over the present system. Habermas drops the ‘‘comprehensibility’’ claim in later formulations, partly on the grounds that the speaker need only put the statement differently for it to be understood; moreover, it is a claim that must be satisfied for the communication to succeed and is, therefore, not subject to discursive redemption. The ‘‘truthfulness’’ validity claim is also problematic since, arguably, speakers’ sincerity must be demonstrated by subsequent actions rather than by discursively redeemable speech-acts. Nonetheless, both validity claims are retained in my research schema since they provide relevant base-lines for assessing the quality of communicative action in the CA and referendum processes. I am grateful to David Wills, the Co-chair of the Citizens’ Assembly Alumni group, for his assistance in providing member contact information and for obtaining approval from CAA members for me to call them.

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referendum process.6 Only about two-thirds of CAA members actually participated in public presentations organized by the Alumni, but all had access to the CAA inter-member website, and all spoke, at least privately, with potential voters about the referendum. Given these selection criteria, I was confident that I had gathered a reasonably representative and informed sample of CA members able to reflect on both the Assembly and referendum processes, given their observed level of interaction in the former and their probable engagement, under CAA aegis, in the latter. Interviewees were divided into four sub-samples by gender and geographic residence (Lower Mainland Vancouver [LMV] or Rest of Province [RoP]). An anticipated problem was the difficulty that members would have in recalling specific incidents, particularly about the much earlier CA process; but since my questions were intended to elicit impressionistic responses over an extended sequence of events (punctuated by memories of particular exchanges),7 the recall problem did not seem to be a significant deterrent, and the difficulties it may have posed were likely counter-balanced by the willingness of interviewees to speak candidly in the aftermath of the referendum.8 The twenty-two questions put to CA interviewees (hereafter referred to as CAI) asked first about their level of involvement in the referendum process,9 and then shifted to a series of questions about the CA and referendum processes that were designed as negative interrogatives of the corresponding validity claims.10 The main section of the interview schedule that relates to the validity claims model is provided in an Appendix at the end of this chapter. Responses were coded, based on 6

Restricting interviewees to CAA members did not constitute a significant sample bias since, as noted earlier, 141 of the 160 CA members had signed up for the CAA and 100 were known by the co-chairs to be ‘‘active.’’ As it turned out, three of the recruited interviewees could not be reached and were replaced in the sample by CAM whom I had solicited as possible interviewees before the CA disbanded, but who were not members of the CAA. 7 Similarly, Lee (1992: 409) argues that the universalism of the presuppositions of validity claims means that ‘‘the basic framework is extendable from the initial idealization of isolated speech events to sequences of speech acts, texts, and conversations.’’ 8 The fact that I had observed the entire proceedings of the Assembly and reviewed my own transcripts of the sessions prior to my phone calls enabled me to make some sensitive probes regarding the CA process during the interviews. I did not have this background resource with regard to the referendum experience. 9 Over 80 percent of the CAI described themselves as ‘‘involved’’; the balance as ‘‘somewhat involved.’’ Their reported levels of participation in CAA activities ranged from ‘‘very active’’ to ‘‘slightly active.’’ Three-quarters of the CAI had spoken both to organized groups, clubs, associations, etc., and to individuals (relatives, friends, neighbors, co-workers) about the STV recommendation. 10 Needless to say, the construction of cognate questions was a difficult task given the breadth of interpretative responses they might elicit; yet, CAI issued a fairly stable set of replies that matched the intent of the questions.

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a code-sheet developed from a pilot sample of six CA members (hereafter referred to as CAM), yielding quantitative data profiles for the total sample (60), by gender and residence (30 each), and for each sub-sample (15 each).11 Verbatim transcripts of the phone interviews (written, not taped) were reviewed in order to highlight thematic content and extract pertinent quotes. The interview ended with questions about members’ reactions to the Premier’s announcement of the second STV referendum, the conditions stipulated for that referendum, and expectations regarding its likely passage. What transpired? – members’ perceptions Turning now to the research findings on communicative action in the Assembly and referendum processes, I will report CAI responses comparatively across the four validity claims, indicating the relevant interview questions. Gender and regional labels (M, F, LMV and RoP) are used to identify quotes and sub-samples. A summary and discussion of the findings follows in the concluding sections of the chapter. It is interesting to note that members’ perceptions of the deliberative process within the Assembly broadly correspond with the observations of Pearse in Chapter 3 and Lang in Chapter 4 of this volume. ‘‘Comprehensibility’’12 Nearly three-quarters of CAI felt that language comprehension problems in the CA, usually referring to members’ understanding of staff, did trouble some CAM on an occasional to infrequent basis, although most of these difficulties were thought to be resolved over time. Stronger doubts expressed were as follows: ‘‘For some, the content was beyond what they were capable of understanding.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘People usually did not explore their uncertainties.’’ (F-RoP) ‘‘A few members weren’t interested in the process or the subject and were just there to collect their cheques. They weren’t interested in clarification.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Some people near the end still didn’t understand.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘The language did seem too academic . . . the whole thing was intimidating.’’ (F-RoP) 11

12

Quantitative data are reported mainly for the total sample, except where sub-sample comparisons appear significant and connote plausible explanations. See Appendix, questions 1a and 1b.

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Such comments, however, came from only a handful of the CAI. Most alluded to some initial comprehension problems that dissipated as members became more familiar with the studied material. ‘‘Clarification was sought and obtained in the discussion groups. By the end of the deliberation phase, most people understood the differences [in electoral systems].’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘[The staff] dumbed it down very well. They were sensitive to the widespread levels of formal education.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘The discussion groups took place in everyday language. No one should have been in the dark.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘At the beginning there was some disorientation, but the slower ones caught up.’’ (M-RoP)

Several CAI were unstinting in their praise of the staff (instructors and facilitators) and of CAM in assisting others to comprehend the material. ‘‘Staff tried to make everyone comfortable. We all formed a strong bond.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Misunderstandings were clarified at breakfast, over coffee, lunch, and dinner, and at the bar. Everyone was helpful to each other. No question was a stupid question. We all felt we had a lot to learn.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Most people understood well enough. After all, of the 160 CA members, 98 of them made public presentations in the referendum process.’’ (F-LMV)

All of this contrasted markedly with the comprehension difficulties reportedly displayed by members of the public (the ‘‘voters’’) during the referendum process. Fifty-eight of the sixty CAI noted fairly serious problems in the voters’ understanding of the issues, which often were only partially resolved. Aside from the difficulty in explaining the intricacies of the STV vote-counting procedures, most of the CAI noted the voters’ shallow understanding of the referendum question and the STV proposal, either due to lack of information or to misinformation presented by the media. Cutler and Johnston note, however, in Chapter 8 of this volume, that those voters who had contact with CA Alumni came away with a better understanding of STV and a more positive view of the Assembly itself. ‘‘The STV proposal wasn’t clear to people. Most of them threw out the final report [mailed to households] before looking at it.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘In some cases people disliked the proposal because they couldn’t understand it. They were belligerent and completely resisted any explanations. Not understanding the proposal was an excuse for rejecting it.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Many didn’t even know there was an electoral reform process under way.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘I needed to debunk the news media, which had misinterpreted the STV system.’’ (M-LMV)

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‘‘There wasn’t enough time to explain the STV system to people.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘There was lots of misunderstanding. The pamphlets [final reports] weren’t enough, and many were never delivered.’’ (F-RoP)

A number of CAI remarked that voters who were inclined to favor the STV proposal – before any discussion of its particulars – seemed motivated by what appeared to be extraneous considerations. ‘‘People trusted what I said to them because they respected the Citizens’ Assembly.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘They didn’t understand the STV proposal, but they were going to vote for it anyway because they wanted change.’’ (F-LMV)

In essence, the CAI encountered a large number of voters who were unaware or misinformed about the CA recommendation, even amongst those who took the trouble to attend the formally arranged presentations. Some of these ‘‘interested’’ people, it turned out, were under the mistaken impression that the CA recommendation was intended to reform political parties or that CAM were themselves politicians with whom they could discuss their personal problems, such as immigration issues, etc. All this was a far cry from the meticulously cultivated knowledge about electoral reform that CAM acquired in their learning phase and public hearings incubation. ‘‘Truth’’13 Most CAI had little criticism of the objectivity of staff and viewed disagreements of fact with other CA members as inconsequential, at least until the final stages of the deliberation phase. Indeed, 40 percent of interviewees could not recall any statement that they felt to be untrue or incorrect. Such statements that did occur were usually taken up in the discussion groups or in more informal settings. ‘‘The information we got was trusted as coming from a reliable source.’’ (F-RoP) ‘‘People were open to having inaccuracies pointed out, especially during breakfast, lunch, and dinner.’’ (M-RoP)

Some concerns were expressed about staff (both instructors and facilitators) as possibly ‘‘guiding’’ members with misleading or biased interpretations, and some members felt that the formalities of the plenary sessions (time constraints and speakers’ lists) made it difficult to challenge perceived inaccuracies. ‘‘Staff members gave their version of the Five Families (electoral systems). There are different versions.’’ (M-LMV) 13

See Appendix, questions 2a and 2b.

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‘‘In the plenary sessions, you didn’t want to embarrass anybody.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Time constraints weren’t conducive to making corrections.’’ (M-RoP)

In general, members regarded most statements by other members as ‘‘opinions’’ rather than statements of fact, so ‘‘corrections’’ were seldom required. When a statement was thought to be ‘‘wrong’’ and in need of rectification, the plenary sessions were seen as a forbidding context, and even the discussion groups could be awkward for such exchanges. Most corrections, therefore, were made between members in more informal and congenial settings, with fewer people around and no staff members present to witness the outcome. In these somewhat removed settings, ‘‘inaccuracies’’ could be discussed and at least partially rectified. Again with regard to the referendum process, CAI regarded voter knowledge as grossly defective. Over 80 percent of the interviewees felt that the voters they contacted had made untrue statements about referendum issues often to occasionally, and that many of the misunderstandings were not easily addressed or clarified. ‘‘Some people were stubborn naysayers, or just disinterested.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘The zealots, the spoilers, wouldn’t stand to be corrected.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘It was easier to correct inaccuracies on a one-to-one basis; with groups it was harder to do.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘People’s inaccuracies were largely based on what they read in the newspapers.’’ (M-LMV)

Rectifying errors was difficult in many instances, given that a number of voters were ‘‘deeply positioned’’ and reluctant to consider new information (e.g. proMMP [mixed member proportional; see page 130] or FPTP supporters). When they appeared before CAA in group strength or participated in formal debates and presentations, their views, no matter how erroneous, were almost impossible to dislodge. Less recalcitrant or open-minded voters were those who had not yet developed strong opinions about STV or any other electoral reform alternatives, those who knew too little about the whole matter to refuse correction, or those who welcomed political change and/or trusted the Citizens’ Assembly so were much more willing to stand corrected. While these latter groups represented the majority of voters whom CAI encountered, the number of voters clinging to erroneous views was significant. ‘‘Rightness’’14 The issue of ‘‘normative rightness,’’ or conversely, ‘‘illegitimacy,’’ posed a more complex consideration. One-third of the CAI thought that 14

See Appendix, questions 3a and 3b.

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normatively inappropriate statements occurred now and then in the Assembly, but were effectively handled most of the time; the larger balance believed that such statements occurred infrequently or never. CAI described staff as fair-minded and could point to few deviations from the norm of impartiality, one instance being the Chair’s alleged waffling about certain mandate constraints and budgetary restrictions, suggestive of unexamined biases. Statements by most CAM were viewed as within acceptable normative bounds and mirroring the CA credo of mutual respect. ‘‘Trying to get the staff to express values/biases was like pulling teeth.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Remarkable professionalism and objectivity by the staff.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘Everyone was politically correct . . . no disparaging comments re gender, race . . .’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Everyone was very diplomatic . . . trying hard not to be prejudiced or biased.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘The respect was just amazing . . . rejuvenated my faith in mankind.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘Nothing said was derogatory or offensive.’’ (F-RoP)

Such judgments suggested a morally tranquil environment, but were contradicted by other CAI assessments that referred to unchallenged sexist, homophobic, and racist comments sometimes aired in the discussion groups but more often during coffee breaks or bar gatherings. Some plenary session sparring occurred over urban versus rural perceptions, given the immediacy of this issue to the task of electoral reform design, but most other value-preferences liable to cause controversy were kept on a tight leash during the public discussions. Concerns about procedural fairness were cited by some CAI regarding the alleged dominance of a small group of CA members at plenaries and discussions, and some annoyance was expressed over the general expectation that all CAM would publicly endorse the Assembly’s ultimate recommendation. ‘‘A few people thought the CA was run by elitists – they objected to the spotlight these people had . . . but those people were willing to work hard.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘I was treated as a rabble-rouser because I opposed the decision to present a united front to the public.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘Some members held views that weren’t politically correct or acceptable to other members (e.g. race, gender). These comments were largely passed over. We worked within the confines of the question at hand.’’ (F-RoP)

CAI responses suggested that a mix of the functioning CA credo (i.e. the set of procedural values identified in the opening sessions of the Assembly), the mandate constraints that relegated some potentially argumentative issues to the debate shadows, and the general reluctance of members to become embroiled in conflict under the eye of the full Assembly (which included all

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staff, observers, and media journalists), persuaded members to circumvent most of the value-driven altercations latent in the Assembly. The subtle managerial efforts of the Chair made no small contribution to ensuring that members stayed within the moral perimeters of their assigned task. A higher count of ‘‘illegitimate’’ statements were bruited by voters in the referendum process – half of the CAI reporting that such statements were made occasionally to infrequently (and seldom effectively challenged), though half did not characterize any statements in that way. Certainly it was more difficult to determine what ‘‘rightness’’ norms ought to prevail in that process than in the CA; indeed, some members held the view that virtually all opinions expressed by voters in the referendum process should count as valid. One interviewee remarked that the appropriate moral standard was displayed by ‘‘the people who came to the meetings just in order to find out [what STV was about] . . . most of them were on high moral ground’’ (M-RoP). A considerable number of the voters with whom CAI had contact, however, reportedly expressed fundamentally antidemocratic views and disliked submitting their views to critical scrutiny. ‘‘Some people didn’t believe that ordinary citizens were capable of making decisions about such a complex matter.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Some people didn’t like small parties getting any kind of representation in the legislature.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘The ‘No’ side was usually not interested in right or wrong, true or false.’’ (F-RoP)

In sum, CAI perceived a divide between voters whom they contacted – some were willing to explore the CA recommendation in a disinterested manner; others approached the referendum exercise warily and defensively, generally intent on defeating the recommendation since it appeared to threaten their own unexamined assumptions about people-empowerment or government accountability. ‘‘Truthfulness’’15 Two-thirds of the CAI felt that insincerity was never a problem in the Assembly; the remainder believed that the problem occurred only infrequently and was effectively challenged when it did.16 ‘‘Healthy debate’’ and ‘‘mutual respect’’ were said to permeate the Assembly. 15 16

See Appendix, questions 4a and 4b. The data on the Assembly process reveal a tendency for LMV interviewees to perceive a slightly higher degree of problems in the comprehensibility, truth, and truthfulness areas than for RoP interviewees. It is unclear why this is so, although ‘‘urban’’ members may self-consciously employ more critical standards and ‘‘rural’’ members may be more

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‘‘The integrity of all members was sincere.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘People spoke passionately, but no one was intentionally deceptive.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘There was certainly a lot of devil’s advocacy, but just to be sure that arguments would stand up under public scrutiny.’’ (M-LMV)

On the other hand, some CAI observations belied the surface civility: ‘‘The few [members] who were disenchanted at the end [with the CA recommendation] disappointed us because they didn’t express their concerns and opposition until the end. I wondered about their sincerity.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘There was a considerable attempt to gloss things over . . . strive for consensus. The final report was a bit facile . . . its language was shaped and massaged.’’ (F-RoP) ‘‘The Chair’s emphasis on ‘the team,’ ‘the group’ rather than the individual, created an uncritical ethos.’’ (F-RoP) ‘‘There was an inability to express politically charged values . . . we resonated with the status quo, which is that BC is really a sexist, racist province.’’ (F-RoP)

Such comments must be qualified by recognition of the fact that very few CAI felt that CA members were silenced in the Assembly environment; rather, they chose to respect mandate and time restrictions in not dwelling on what they believed to be tangential if provocative issues. As to the referendum process, one-third of CAI discerned occasional signs of insincerity in voters (finding those examples difficult to challenge); half of the CAI saw no evidence of this. Although a majority of CAI were reluctant to question the integrity of voters whom they spoke with during the referendum process, some deprecated their motives, which became transparent at the group presentations and debates. ‘‘The whole ‘No’ side was afraid of the redistribution of power under STV. They gave false and scaremongering reasons for being against STV.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘One time we sat down and someone passed out a sheet of remarks to people at the table spelling out what they took to be lies before we even spoke.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘Some people came with preconceived ideas: hecklers, monopolists, zealots . . . mostly not able to deter them. I didn’t think it was my job to argue with people.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘Certain groups . . . feminists, unionists, NDP [New Democratic Party] . . . couldn’t allow themselves to be seen favouring STV.’’ (F-RoP)

CAI emphasized that distortions by media pundits and the disingenuous comments of former politicians added to the difficulty of conducting an honest dialogue with these committed opponents of STV; moreover, the modest about targeting possible deficiencies in others. A similar pattern of responses occurred across all four validity claims with respect to the referendum process.

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vehemence of STV opponents was hard to challenge given that most CAA viewed their task as one of providing information rather than engaging in unbridled political debate. Restrictions/Limitations/Constraints17 In reflecting on the possible causes of communication difficulties in the Assembly, 40 percent of the CAI believed that operative restrictions were consequential, mainly those of a procedural nature affecting time constraints and agenda-setting. Lang considers these issues in greater depth in Chapter 4 of this volume. ‘‘The agenda was already set by staff and facilitators – even in the discussion groups. There weren’t enough CA members involved in agenda-setting.’’ (M-LMV)

Some CAI felt that more time should have been allotted to the deliberation phase – allowing more discussion of alternative possibilities – and for the writing of the final report. For a few others, the covenant that guaranteed a respectful dialogue proved restrictive since ‘‘Everyone had to be in a consensus frame of mind’’ (M-LMV). This critical perception contrasted with those who avowed that CAM showed ‘‘an amazing amount of honesty’’ (M-RoP) and that ‘‘anyone’s ideas were welcome on the floor’’ (M-RoP). A few CAI objected to the unilateral power of the Chair to compose the speaker’s list, cut off discussion, and interpret mandate restrictions. Some also saw the role played by facilitators as narrowing the parameters of debate in their manner of structuring the discussion sessions. One interviewee was particularly annoyed that the staff set an arbitrary limit on the number of core values that members could choose to shape their design of an electoral reform alternative: ‘‘It was inexplicable. ‘Diversity’ would have been our next value. Because we didn’t get to it, we couldn’t get the women’s groups on our side in the referendum process . . . that had huge ramifications.’’ (F-LMV)

All told, however, only a small number of CAI felt that the limitations they identified had a significant impact on the Assembly’s final determination. Again, the referendum experience contrasted markedly, with 90 percent of CAI of the view that constraints peculiar to the referendum process had grave effects. Time and funding limitations plagued CAA, who, in the absence of an effective government information campaign, took it upon themselves to inform voters about the coming referendum. As a self-funded voluntary 17

See Appendix questions 5a and 5b.

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organization, the CAA did not have the resources for advertising or extensive travel. Every household in BC had been sent a copy of the Assembly’s Final Report, but CAA members still encountered considerable ignorance about their proposal. Reports were mailed at the conclusion of the Assembly process, five months prior to the referendum process, which meant that in many households they had been discarded or forgotten by May 17, 2005. Consequently, most voters were so uninformed ‘‘that it was impossible to debate the nuances of the proposal’’ (M-LMV). This was extremely frustrating for some CAI. ‘‘The government spent five-and-a-half million dollars to make the decision and hardly anything to sell it.’’ (M-RoP) ‘‘It’s as if the government said, ‘We’re going to create this big hill for you to climb, and by the way, we’re not going to give you any ropes to climb it with.’’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘The referendum process was like trying to chip away at a wall with a penknife. A frustrating experience.’’ (F-LMV) ‘‘There were huge constraints . . . There was no plan about how to inform the voters. That was the main downfall of the project.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘You were on your own and didn’t have the help you needed.’’ (F-RoP)

The CAI lamented a perhaps unnecessary defeat. As one interviewee put it: ‘‘97 percent of those who voted in the election voted in the referendum. With some material support, we surely would have gotten the extra 3 percent.’’ (F-LMV)

Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the CAI thought that the communicative process of the Assembly was superior to that of the referendum. Unlike the referendum experience, in which faces changed after each encounter and where the premature commitments of many voters precluded reflection, CAM saw each other on a regular basis and were committed to a fluid learning process. ‘‘The difference was Night and Day. During the Citizens’ Assembly, the challenge was to learn. In the referendum process, the aim was to impart that learning. We were supported in one and not the other.’’ (M-LMV)

In short, the entry level of the two dialogues was quite different; beyond that, members were well resourced in one but not the other. Some interviewees wondered, in the words of one, ‘‘if we were set up to fail’’ (F-RoP): ‘‘We were quite coddled in the gilded environment of the Assembly.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘In the referendum process, most of the contact between members [CAA] was virtual . . . over the internet. It’s tougher when you’re out there doing it on your own.’’ (M-LMV) ‘‘It was a more complete discourse in the Assembly. I spoke with every member. The referendum process was more daunting . . . about 100 CA members trying to reach 1.6 million people.’’ (M-LMV)

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Discussion In contrast to the referendum experience, CAI recollections suggest that communicative action in the Assembly bore a facsimile to the ‘‘ideal speech situation.’’ All CAM were able to participate in the Assembly discourse and were held in equal regard. One ostensible deviation from the ISS profile was that some governing assumptions stemming from mandate restrictions could not be effectively challenged, but these limitations were made known to members at the outset, gaining their tacit consent if not expressed agreement. Levels of understanding (‘‘comprehensibility’’) in the Assembly steadily improved, as problems in that area were largely overcome by the solicitude of staff and mutual encouragement of peers; moreover, as Blais, Carty, and Fournier demonstrate in Chapter 6 of this volume using their series of surveys conducted among all 160 CAM, members revisited their previous assessments as they learned more about the respective electoral systems. Arguments of fact (‘‘truth’’) were infrequent, particularly in the learning phase when members deferred to staff, and disputes that did occur were usually dealt with informally in order to minimize friction between members. On the whole, the conduct of meetings (‘‘rightness’’) was regarded by CAI as appropriate. With relatively few exceptions, the staff were viewed as impartial and unobtrusive, and members exhibited a diplomacy that enabled consummation of the Assembly’s appointed task. That diplomacy came at a price, however, since normative claims regarding some controversial issues such as race and gender – that may have altered the pace and content of discussions – were suppressed or deflected by members’ reluctance to put the group’s solidarity at risk, or by staff’s priorities on sustaining momentum toward achieving a CA recommendation before expiry of the deliberation phase.18 Attitudes of staff and members were perceived as almost unwaveringly sincere (‘‘truthfulness’’), cloaking the discourse in an ambience of authenticity. Some members were occasionally troubled by the Chair’s suspected unilateralism with respect to agenda-setting, time management, and the prescribed consensus orientation, but these concerns were muted by a general satisfaction with the working of the Assembly and confidence in the overall good intentions of staff.

18

CA members accepted the Chair’s suggestion that issues that were ‘‘non-mandated’’ and could not be fully deliberated in the Assembly (e.g. the role of political parties, obstacles to the political participation of women and Aboriginals) would be noted in the Assembly’s Final Report and elaborated in the Technical Report. This tactic helped to dispel member doubts about the overall legitimacy of the process.

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In general, ISS prescriptions were infringed minimally and seldom in the Citizens’ Assembly. Staff and CAM encouraged all members to participate in the discourse; the shared and internalized process values permitted none to dominate. In practice, however, the discursive testing of validity claims in a forum of 160 members required some regulation of the process via organizational (Chair, expert intermediaries) and time constraints (specified deadlines, weekend meetings). Most members accepted the imposed substantive limits (mandate restrictions) as reasonable and not functioning as a brake on their own judgment. Some of the concerns about the appointed Chair’s exclusive authority in ‘‘running’’ the plenary sessions could, perhaps, have been mitigated by a random selection of willing and rotating co-chairs from within the ranks of the Assembly,19 but this option was not openly considered by the staff. A very different CAI portrait emerged of the referendum process, especially with regard to many of the formally arranged meetings in which CAM participated. In these particular encounters, dialogue was described as uneven, riddled with stubbornly held assumptions, and often dominated by voices representing the business, labor, or political communities.20 No semblance of the ‘‘ideal speech situation’’ prevailed, as debate in search of the better argument was rarely a driving force. Problems of comprehensibility were rampant, as many voters came to meetings without any prior information or had already adopted unyielding views on the basis of false information about the STV electoral system. CAI reported that a significant number of STV opponents attempted to prevent genuine debate on the Assembly’s proposal. Such transgressions of rational discourse betrayed a profound insincerity that set the CAA back on their heels since they were unprepared to wage a no-holds barred ‘‘political campaign.’’ Fortunately, there were a considerable number of attendees who came to these meetings in order to learn about the Assembly’s recommendation, so the CAA was not bereft of interested audiences; moreover, such difficulties were much less prevalent in the CAA exchanges with individual citizens. Indeed, CAI reported that many voters, unsure of the mechanics of STV, simply trusted in the reliability of CA members, an observation that resonates with the Cutler and Johnston post-referendum random survey of 2,643 voters analyzed in Chapter 8 of this volume, which identified two substantial groups of voters who voted more heavily in favor of the referendum based 19

20

Technically, the Chair was a formal member of the Assembly, but since his appointment was vetted and ratified by the government, he was generally perceived by members as ‘‘staff ’’ rather than as an Assembly counterpart. Although anyone currently holding political office was excluded from public involvement in the process, former politicians and civil servants did participate.

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on their perceptions of CA members as either more like themselves (‘‘ordinary citizens’’) or possessing unique expertise derived from the learning experience. Clearly, however, the referendum process – replete with strategic motivations and groups vying for supremacy – was far from exemplary of the ISS paradigm, a perhaps predictable outcome once the sheltered discourse of the CA confronted the maelstrom of adversarial politics; but the CA members, groomed year-long within the relatively apolitical ISS model, were frustrated by the discordant realities of the referendum setting.21 Underlying these concerns is the paradigmatic problem of determining how to extend the deliberative values, practices, and benefits of the intentional public sphere to the more diffuse arena of institutionally configured public spheres such as the referendum.22 The shift from the ‘‘subjectless communication’’ (Habermas 1996) of designed public spheres (such as the CA) to communicative power through institutionally regulated forms of citizen participation (such as the referendum) is evidently problematic since, as Dryzek (2005: 233) notes, ‘‘competitive elections [for example] are largely strategic and symbolically manipulated exercises’’ and, therefore, may be impervious to the democratizing influences of deliberative bodies. Of course, the obstacles to rational discourse, though ubiquitous, need not be permanent, and advocates of institutional change, as Fung (2005: 398) boldly argues, can engage in ‘‘deliberative activism’’ to reduce or eliminate the background inequities and forms of privilege that compromise communicative equality – employing tactics, as he suggests, that range from persuasive to coercive as circumstances justify. Recommendations and conclusion Deliberative ideals to press for in the 2009 referendum would be those that ensure adequate funding for media access for both Yes and No campaigns, balanced presentation of views in media outlets, an extensive public education funding program, including establishment of a non-partisan government information office with province-wide outreach functions, involvement of CA members in framing the new STV recommendation 21

22

Indeed, the turmoil of the referendum process hardly seemed illustrative of discursive procedures intended to facilitate the translation of communicative insight into law – Habermas’ (1996) ideal of a democratically norm-governed political order. Or as Fishkin (1995: 41) puts it, ‘‘At bottom, a major part of the problem of democratic reform is how to promote mass deliberation – how to bring the people into the process under conditions where they can be engaged to think seriously and fully about public issues.’’

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and representing it across the province, and promulgated rules of civility for public referendum debates. Although these measures are not tantamount to an ISS framework and would not eliminate the adversarial nature of the referendum setting, such provisions and assurances are likely to enhance the potential for rational discourse in the broader public sphere and contribute to the development of a more politically sophisticated citizenry. Added to the above, a crucial reform would seem to require an infusion of ‘‘political reality’’ into the CA process itself, if only to increase its credibility with the voting public. Although the state of political quarantine imposed on the CA by its constitutional framers was done, purportedly, to prevent the overarching influence of politicians on the process and to protect the nascent will-formation of the Assembly, the exclusion of political voices from CA deliberations becomes grounds for criticism of their judgment. Some degree of ‘‘political inoculation’’ that would both inform but not overtake the Assembly and help to legitimate the CA discourse in the broader public sphere might remedy this deficit (Gerken 2007). It would have been useful, for example, for the Assembly to have had some exposure to the views of incumbent politicians at the start of their deliberative phase.23 Although this feature poses some dangers of misrepresentation and manipulation, the risks are probably outweighed by the gained benefits of information, judgment, and credibility achieved through the interface of autonomous and institutionally regulated public spheres. Admittedly, the politically honed interests of MLAs are not consonant with exercises that may well entail a loss of their power. Indeed, there are serious grounds for reservation about the likely success of any antihierarchical proposal, which raises larger structural issues and stubborn questions about what we may hope for in such unorthodox ventures as citizen-engendered electoral reform. Nevertheless, the narrow defeat of the referendum in British Columbia and the May 2007 recommendation of the Ontario CA in favor of a mixed member proportional system for that province indicate that interest in electoral reform remains fueled by manifestly undemocratic outcomes under the current SMP system and by lingering voter discontent. Whether changes occur that enhance the possibilities for democratization and are not blunted by established political and economic forces is a vital question to be answered over the coming years.

23

Instead, that phase began with a reprise of several public hearing presentations selected by Assembly members who had attended all 50 hearings. Many CAI reported that the exercise had a ritualistic flavor.

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Appendix: Selected questions – CA/referendum interview schedule 1a. Did you ever think that the language used by staff and/or CA members was not always intelligible or comprehensible to all CA members? If this was a problem or concern, was it resolved in the Assembly, and, if so, how was it resolved? If this concern was not resolved, why do you think that was so, and did the lack of resolution have an effect on the CA process? If so, how? 1b. Do you think that the voters whom you contacted and spoke with had difficulty understanding the Referendum question and the BCSTV proposal? If so, were you able to improve their understanding of these matters . . . make the issues more comprehensible to them? If not, why not? 2a. Were there ever times when you thought or suspected that what was said by staff and/or other CA members in the plenary meetings and/or discussion groups was simply not true (i.e., factually incorrect) as far as you could tell? If so, were these possible inaccuracies pointed out and either defended or corrected? If so, how was that done? If not, how come? Did not correcting these inaccuracies have any effect on the CA process? 2b. Did the voters whom you contacted and spoke with make statements about issues regarding the Referendum question and the BC-STV proposal that you knew to be factually incorrect (simply wrong?) If so, were you able to correct those inaccuracies? If not, why not? 3a. Were there ever times when you thought/felt that what was said either by staff and/or CA members seemed unfair or illegitimate in some way (i.e., not morally right in the context of the Assembly; something that perhaps shouldn’t have been said?) If so, were such troubling or objectionable statements challenged, and, if so, with what effect on the CA process? If they were not challenged, why is that, and how did that affect the Assembly proceedings? 3b. Did the voters whom you contacted and spoke with express views or opinions about issues relating to the Referendum question and the BC-STV proposal that struck you as unfair, morally wrong, or illegitimate in some way? If so, were these troubling or objectionable statements challenged by you, and to what effect? If they were not challenged, why is that? 4a. Were there ever times when you felt that what was said by staff and/ or CA members was insincere in some way (e.g., deliberate distortions to sway members to their point of view; members arguing for argument’s sake or merely ‘playing games’)? If so, was anything said about that, and to what effect? If nothing was said, why was that and how did this affect the Assembly proceedings?

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4b. Did the voters whom you contacted and spoke with express views or opinions about issues relating to the Referendum question and the BC-STV proposal that you thought were insincere in some way (i.e., deliberate distortions intended to sway you and others to their point of view; arguing for argument’s sake or merely ‘playing games’)? If so, were such statements challenged by you, and to what effect? If they were not challenged, why is that? 5a. Would it be accurate to say that there were no restrictions or limitations of any kind placed on communication and debate over the course of the Assembly process, or were there constraints on the process that may have affected the outcome in some way? 5b. Would it be accurate to say that there were no restrictions or limitations of any kind placed on communication and debate during the period of the Referendum process, or were there constraints on that process that may have affected the outcome in some way? 6. Overall, how would you compare the quality of communication as you experienced it in the Citizens’ Assembly to how you experienced it in the Referendum process? Was the communication between yourself and others much better in one process than the other? Was one experience more challenging or difficult than the other? If so, in what ways?

8 Deliberation, information, and trust: the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly as agenda setter Fred Cutler, Richard Johnston, R. Kenneth Carty, Andre´ Blais, and Patrick Fournier

To Warren (1999: 311), ‘‘the generic problem [with] political relationships [is that they] throw the very conditions of trust into question.’’ Political choice can be cognitively very demanding, and voters may lack the capacity or the motivation to bear the cognitive burden. This is an argument for delegation. But the elites to whom political tasks are delegated will not automatically act as disinterested agents; they will pursue objectives of their own. Warren argues that deliberation potentially squares the circle by creating the circumstances for warranted trust. For ordinary citizens, however, the price of deliberation is usually too high. This is where the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) comes in. To the extent that choice of delegates was truly by lot, the CA represented the BC electorate as a whole. It comprised ‘‘ordinary’’ British Columbians. Its proceedings were highly deliberative and the deliberation was both informed and sensitive to potential conflicts of interest. The Citizens’ Assembly may be the harbinger of a new direction in political creativity. But the final choice on electoral reform for BC rested with the electorate at large in a referendum. Can deliberation be of any relevance to the world of referenda? In two ways, referenda may be said to fail the test from the start. First, the ballot question – the agenda, in effect – is fixed from the outset of the popular campaign and, as Thompson notes in Chapter 1 of this volume, it is highly unusual for the question to be set by ‘‘ordinary’’ citizens. Instead, it is quite likely that the intent behind the question is manipulative. Second, voters have little opportunity or incentive to pause from ordinary pursuits to consider the question closely by themselves, much less in the company of others. It does seem to help the prospects of a ballot measure if some institution deliberates on the question before it is referred to the people at 166

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large. In this respect, it may be no accident that elite-initiated votes are more likely to pass than privately initiated ones (Johnston et al. 1996). In elite initiatives, the popular vote is commonly preceded by some form of deliberation among legislators. The very prospect of reference to the people out of doors can raise the level – possibly even the honesty – of precampaign elite debate. Even so, initiatives originating in the elected elite can backfire (Lupia and Johnston 2001; Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). The situation is even worse for private initiation, and voters seem to discern this (Lupia 1994). The overall record suggests that a ballot measure like that on adoption of the single transferable vote (STV) should be doomed. The ballot proposed a shift from a well-understood status quo to an electoral system adopted in only a handful of places, and culturally devalued ones at that. The CA had only a small promotional budget of its own and very few resources were mobilized from other sources. Yet a clear majority voted for this far-reaching change in the political order.1 It is natural to wonder if a link exists between the nature of the Assembly and the clarity of the result. In broad strokes, the CA model’s most important selling point may be that it can be many things to many people: representative to some, fair and deliberative to others, and expert to yet others. To the extent that it was all these things, the CA might have turned the seemingly zero-sum game outlined in the first paragraph on its head, satisfying critics on both sides. On such an account, the CA would have been crucial to the majority result. The CA enacted the thought experiment at the heart of much contemporary empirical debate about the quality of decision-making in mass democracy: what would ordinary citizens do if they were fully informed? This enactment may have allowed voters at large to substitute the CA’s deliberation and learning for their own. The Assembly, in itself and in what it facilitated, arguably satisfied the conditions that Warren (1999: 338) identifies as critical to warranted trust: ‘‘access to information and institutions structured so as to provide . . . transparency.’’ Such a link between Assembly and result was not foreordained. How much did BC voters actually learn about the CA, and did they like what they saw? At the same time, how much did they actually learn for themselves about BC-STV (see page 12) and to what extent did they arrive at a prediction of its consequences that resonated with their values? To what extent was learning about one thing a substitute for the other, or a complement? In this chapter, we use survey evidence to dig into voters’ decisions. We begin by locating this very peculiar agenda-setter in the theoretical 1

Although the majority did not clear the 60 percent threshold for passage, we see the outcome as remarkable nonetheless, such that the high level of support demands explanation.

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literature on referenda. This takes us to the empirical issues that we embodied in our own survey. After a brief account of opinion dynamics over the campaign, we walk through the potential components of the choice. The foundational issue is what the public wants out of an electoral system. Then follows the question of whether voters know enough about BC-STV to connect it to their electoral values. The heart of the analysis, however, focuses on perceptions of the CA itself. First is a value question: how much value does the citizen place on grassroots authenticity – on common sense – and how much on expertise? Second is how citizens perceive the CA on these dimensions: the representative and deliberative authenticity of the CA, the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of its members, and their ultimate expertise. We show that there are two different paths to decision: one for voters who emphasize expertise and another for those who prize ordinariness. Both paths lead through the Citizens’ Assembly. The Citizens’ Assembly as agenda-setter We begin with a prominent theory of voter decision-making that carries special weight for understanding initiatives and referenda. Lupia and McCubbins (1998) explain how voters can make ‘‘competent’’ decisions with limited information and limited resources to process that information. In the Lupia-McCubbins model, a departure from the status quo is proposed by an agenda-setter who tries to persuade voters that the departure is a benefit. The proposal itself is usually complex, information is costly to acquire, and the collective nature of the result discourages citizens from informing themselves deeply. So most voters would seek only enough information to cast a vote in line with their interests. If information about the consequences of the change were costless and accurate, voters would use it. Most substantive information comes at a price, however, and few voters are typically willing to pay that price. But at relatively little cost, voters can evaluate a proposal by listening to speakers. Two questions apply to any speaker: is the person a competent judge? How do that person’s interests align with the voter’s? The agenda-setter is the first speaker, in fact. For this person, expertise is not usually the issue; the person proposing the measure either possesses the requisite expertise or can buy it. The problem is whether or not the agenda-setter is trustworthy, likely to tell the truth – from the voter’s point of view – about the proposal. This depends on how the voter’s and the agenda-setter’s interests are aligned. Typically, the voter does not know the answer to this question. At least, the voter does not start off knowing the answer. Potentially, however, the voter can look to positions taken on the question by other

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political actors whose interests she does know, who have incentives for telling the truth about the interests served by the proposed change, and whose expertise on the matter is also not in question. The voter triangulates on these interveners’ positions to determine the interests served by the proposal and, ultimately, to vote competently (Lupia and McCubbins 1998). All this implies that majority rejection of a referendum proposal is a result of agenda-setters being judged insufficiently expert and/or having interests in common with only a minority of voters. Put another way, majority support for a referendum proposal requires that a majority of voters accept the expertise of the agenda-setter and be assured that the agenda-setter would only propose something that makes them better off. Can this theory help us understand the BC referendum? In fact, the theory only highlights the novelty of the BC situation. Start with interveners: there were either too many or too few. It was reasonable to wonder where political parties, business, and labor would stand as interveners, but significant interventions did not materialize. To be sure, some reasonably well-known persons and groups weighed in on the matter, most in support of BC-STV.2 Voters observing the diversity of supporters might conclude that there was much to recommend the proposal. But it might just as easily have confused voters to hear proSTV endorsements from right-wing populist former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, left-leaning Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell, former provincial New Democratic Party cabinet minister Andrew Petter, and Nirvana band member Krist Novoselic, among others. A wide range of endorsements does not always bring the public on side; indeed, it might leave them feeling even more hoodwinked (Johnston et al. 1996). But for all the ideological and musicological diversity of interveners, the dominant impression was of silence. No party took a position, nor did any currently prominent political figure. The usual non-party antagonists in BC’s normally polarized political climate were also quiet. Official Yes and No committees did not exist, and the self-appointed unofficial ones had tiny budgets.3 This left the burden of persuasion with the agenda-setter, that is, with the Citizens’ Assembly. But the CA shut down five months before the referendum and, as Ratner discusses in Chapter 7 of this volume, had few resources with which to sell its message. The Assembly’s budget provided only for an initial mailout. Many delegates constituted themselves 2 3

For an incomplete list, see http://stvforbc.com/. By our estimation, less than $85,000 was spent by all interveners. Of this, about five-sixths was spent to promote the Yes side.

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as Alumni and made themselves available as speakers. But this was selffinanced4 and likely to have only local impact. So any impact from the CA itself would have required other actors, word of mouth, and self-motivated information seeking by ordinary citizens to fill the void. And then there was the question about the CA’s own interests and expertise. Were CA members representative of the province as a whole? Were they innocent of pre-commitments on the question? Once they convened, did they engage in respectful deliberation over an agenda that was as open as possible within the confines of the initial question? The CA’s own expertise was not obvious. It might be reasonable to wonder if members were ‘‘programmed’’ by government, manipulated by academic experts, or remained essentially ignorant. This implies something of an irony: the novelty of the CA meant that voters wanting to use a decision-making heuristic would have had to invest far more than the usual energy in gathering all this information. Zeroing in on the agenda-setter is meant to save voters effort, but here it would have required significant new information. The question remains, then, whether voters learned enough about the CA for it to supplement a more direct but even more costly decision on the merits of the proposal (see also Kuklinski and Quirk 2000). When the CA was most actively engaged in its own deliberation and decision, awareness of the fact was neither wide nor deep. So for the CA process to make a difference, voters would have had to learn something about the CA in the months after it ceased to exist. The voter’s task and the BC Referendum Study The survey on which this chapter is based, the BC Referendum Study, covers all potential considerations in the task before the citizenry. These were:

 The representational and governance principles implicit in the choice of electoral system. Here five questions seemed relevant: Richness of choice versus clarity in accountability * Preference for or against coalition governments * The acceptability of artificial majorities * Concern about the complexity of the STV ballot and the arguable lack of transparency in counting * Concern about governmental instability *

4

The official statement by the Assembly Alumni indicates that they spent less than $500 in total.

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 Awareness of the basic elements of STV as a mainly proportional    

system, and thus engaging representational and governance considerations. Orientation to populism, the thread that runs through both the referendum (any referendum) and the CA itself. Not everyone need be persuaded of the claims of common sense. Perception of the CA as a collection of ‘‘ordinary’’ or ‘‘grassroots’’ citizens. Perception of the CA as a deliberative body. Perception of the CA’s collective expertise.

Less central to the argument in this chapter but also of interest were questions on:

 Orientation to risk, given the magnitude of the change on offer.  Orientation to other features of the current system, especially political parties. Questions about all of these considerations as well as about sociodemographic characteristics were included in a twenty-minute questionnaire embedded in Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software. The sample was released dynamically: as a weekly rolling crosssection from January 17 to April 30 and then daily from May 1 to 16. The critical fact about sample release is that the day of interview was as much a random draw as was the respondent’s presence in the sample in the first place (Johnston and Brady 2002). Altogether 2,643 interviews were completed.5 The dynamics of vote intention appear in Figure 8.1. For the first two months, the dominant feature was stability. Only half of the public gave a Yes or No to the referendum question, with the balance roughly 2-to-1 in favor. In early April the number willing to indicate a preference grew, and the growth was almost exclusively on the No side. Thus far, the pattern was consistent with the norm in referenda, namely a turn against the ballot measure. But just as suddenly in the first days of May, the Yes vote took off. This got the balance back to the pre-April pattern, restoring the near 2-to-1 advantage, now with about 65 percent having made up their minds.6 5

6

Additional details are provided in the Appendix. For a full description, including the questionnaire and data, see www.politics.ubc.ca/index.php?id=2451. The steep drop in the No vote in the last couple of days could be real, but it might just as easily be an endpoint graphical effect, so we do not dwell on it. Note that the balance favoring the Yes vote is overstated in our data, relative to the actual outcome.

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172 0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1 Jan17

Feb1

Mar1

Apr1 Yes

May1

May16

No

Figure 8.1. Yes and No shares Note: Smoothed by loess bandwith = .2

A foregone conclusion? Or learning to like it? Voters had two potential targets as they sought to become informed. The referendum question brought both in focus: ‘‘Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform?’’ As Lupia and his colleagues expect, voters might well have wanted to learn about the substance of BC-STV and its consequences. But surely many would have been intimidated by the complexity and ambiguity of the information available. For them, learning about the CA would have been as useful, if not more so. So onesided a result could reflect an intrinsic preference for the values served by BC-STV or it could reflect the peculiar credibility of the Citizens’ Assembly. It turns out that both things were true. Choice of electoral system British Columbians were predisposed toward the representational principles and were also willing to live with the governance risks implicit in BCSTV. On our five questions about underlying attitudes, a system like BC-STV comes out on top in three of the five, as shown in Table 8.1. By nearly two to one, British Columbians prefer a situation in which multiple ‘‘parties are forced to compromise’’ to one party getting things done. By nearly six to one they prefer the range of choice made possible in a

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Table 8.1. Electoral system predispositions

Prefer coalition over getting things done Choice over knowing who to blame Artificial majorities unacceptable Concerned about complexity Concern about instability

Agree

Disagree

Ratio

Don’t know

63 82 81 63 44

36 14 18 32 46

1.8:1 5.9:1 4.5:1 2.0:1 1.0:1

1 4 1 5 9

multi-party system over ‘‘knowing who [sic] to blame’’ under a binary choice. Only one voter in five finds it acceptable that ‘‘a party can win a majority of seats without winning a majority of votes.’’ On the other hand, two-thirds were worried ‘‘that it will be hard [under STV] to follow how the ballots are counted.’’ Voters were evenly divided on a governance issue: concern that ‘‘the parties in power will change too often,’’ with half ‘‘very’’ or ‘‘somewhat’’ concerned. If the public inclined toward the values implicit in BC-STV over those served by the current system, there was no guarantee that they would connect these trade-offs and concerns with their decision on voting day. A citizen with average attention to politics might have balked at weighing the pros and cons, and assumed that the wool was being pulled over his or her eyes by the usual suspects. Nonetheless, given this balance of predisposition, increasing information about BC-STV should have pushed voters toward the Yes side. To assess such information, respondents were given a balanced vernacular true–false list referring to proportionality, district magnitude, single party majorities, ordinal ballot, coalition governments, and fractionalization of legislative representation. Knowledge levels were never absolutely high. Figure 8.2 indicates that knowledge of BC-STV did grow over the campaign, with upward movement starting in late March and a modest acceleration toward the end. In February, 62 percent knew not one feature of STV and only 21 percent knew at least four of six attributes; the mean score on the six-item STV knowledge scale was 0.24. By the end, 44 percent knew nothing, while 38 percent knew at least four things; the mean scale score was just under 0.4. The Citizens’ Assembly That STV was the recommendation of the Citizens’ Assembly should have been highly relevant only to the extent that the body could credibly claim

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174 0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2 Jan17

Feb1

Mar1

CA know something STV knowledge scale

Apr1

May1

May16

Know subject of referendum

Figure 8.2. Awareness of CA & STV Note: STV knowledge scale is proportion of six questions correct. Others are simple proportions. Smoothed by loess bandwith ¼ .5

both expertise and an absence of conflict of interest. Some commentators understood this intuitively. BC’s best-known political voice, Rafe Mair, put it this way: ‘‘we should start with the thought that 160 of our fellow citizens [emphasis added], in an overwhelming favourable vote, and after the most careful of examination of plenty of evidence, have made a recommendation. While that doesn’t mean we must agree with them – it does tell us that since none of us have gone through that exercise, we should give considerable weight to the recommendation made.’’7 Did citizens at large share Mair’s intuition? For citizens to do so, they must learn something about the Assembly. Figure 8.2 indicates that they did learn, although it is important not to overstate this claim. The figure portrays the absolute minimum of knowledge: the proportion who say they know something (anything more than nothing). At the start only a minority could make this claim, but the proportion jumped quickly in late January as the CA’s mini-report hit every doorstep in the province. There was no further positive movement for two months, followed by a gradual rise from the middle of March to early May and modest acceleration in the last ten days. By the end, almost 60 percent claimed to know something about the CA; of course, 40 percent still knew nothing. 7

Reprinted on www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public/news/2004/12/dmaclachlan-3_0412181202654.

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Table 8.2. Attitudes about the CA

CA were ordinary British Columbians Citizens had an equal chance of being chosen Members thought for themselves Members were people like me Members were not biased from the start CA was open to all views CA represented all parts of BC Members were looking out for all BC Members became experts

Agree

Disagree

Ratio

DK

56 25 26 21 25 33 31 33 25

11 14 14 19 12 8 10 12 17

5.1:1 1.8:1 1.9:1 1.1:1 2.1:1 4.1:1 3.1:1 2.8:1 1.5:1

33 61 60 60 63 59 59 55 58

Only those who claimed to know something were probed further about the CA. Table 8.2 shows that among such respondents, positive evaluations greatly outweighed negative ones. One characteristic about which respondents were less favorable was crucially different from the rest: it was not about conflict of interest, it was about expertise. Impact Given voters’ predispositions and the characteristics of the CA, then, learning about either STV itself or the CA should have pushed a majority of voters to Yes. This is the key to the positive result. STV, however it is regarded by experts on electoral systems or by partisan interests, is broadly in line with voters’ representational orientations, even if these orientations are masked by the current system’s strongly majoritarian framework. At the same time, the proposal originated in an unusual place. In ‘‘politics-as-usual’’ referenda, the proposal typically comes from a minority interest (Lupia 1994; Gerber et al. 2001; Mendelsohn and Parkin 2001), so the more the public learns, the more its suspicions are confirmed. The more the public learned about the CA, in contrast, the more it came to understand – from the Assembly’s composition, process, and (perhaps most importantly) nearconsensus recommendation – that its interests were broadly congruent with those of the electorate at large. To assess the impact of information, we assess learning in three different ways:

 First is an index of respondents’ general capacity to receive and process political information. The best gauge of such capacity is a checklist of political facts that lie outside the immediate campaign

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(Luskin 1987; Zaller 1992). In our case, this was indexed by four questions: the identity of the first female Prime Minister, the first Indo-Canadian Premier of BC, the current leader of the Conservative Party (then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister), and the level of government with primary responsibility for health, education, and welfare. That these are facts outside the campaign is precisely the point. Knowledge of these facts does not grow as a result of a campaign on STV. Rather, the questions index a general capacity to learn.  Second is the respondent’s simple claim to know something, as opposed to nothing, about the CA. This was an indicator in Figure 8.2.  Finally, we use the index of knowledge about the substance of STV, described earlier and also appearing in Figure 8.2. Tables 8.3a and 8.3b confirm the positive effect of learning on support for the change. Note that our results on vote intention involve only 53 percent of the sample, since 45 percent didn’t know how they would vote, and 2 percent refused to tell us. Table 8.3a begins by laying out the gradient in support by general knowledge: a positive relationship, but not dramatically so. More important is specific awareness of the CA and STV. Citizens in the dark about both were just about 50/50 on the referendum question. Knowing anything about the CA took them to 58 percent. Knowing anything about STV took them all the way to 69 percent support. And among those who were aware of both, nearly three-quarters said they would vote Yes.8 Table 8.3c indicates that the information at work is truly relevant to the choice: when education and general information are controlled, impact from awareness of the CA and from mastery of facts about STV remains robust: the more voters knew, the more they voted Yes. Different paths to Yes? Ordinariness vs. expertise Did the peculiar qualities of the CA as agenda-setter bring unlikely supporters into the fold? The CA was a populist instrument by design. Yet it

8

The joint relationship in Table 8.3b is essentially additive, such that one did not need to know about both the CA and BC-STV to get to a Yes vote; knowledge of one or the other helped. And the higher a person’s subjective estimation of their knowledge of the CA and BC-STV, the more likely they were to vote Yes.

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Tables 8.3a–c. Yes vote by general knowledge, STV knowledge, and CA knowledge 3a – Yes vote by general knowledge General knowledge

%Yes

Survey N

0 1 2 3 4

60% 67% 65% 68% 71%

366 259 261 295 213

3b – Yes vote by CA and STV awareness

CA know nothing CA know something Total

STV know nothing

STV know something Total

51% (336) 58% (179) 53% (515)

69% (149) 73% (731) 72% (880)

57% (485) 70% (910) 65% (1395)

3c – Regression of Yes vote on education, general knowledge, CA & STV awareness

Education (0–1) General knowledge (0–1) Know about CA (dummy) STV info scale (0–1) Constant

Coef.

Std. Err.

0.12 0.01 0.07 0.18 0.47

0.04 0.01 0.03 0.04 0.03

t 2.803  0.900 2.224 4.313 13.79

N ¼ 1395 Note: Linear probability model. Logit results substantively identical.

was also subjected to a grueling educational program. The natural question is how did BC voters respond to the rival claims of grassroots authenticity and expertise. Put another way, do they see themselves as populists or not? The indicator is a question that asks whether ‘‘we would probably solve most of our big problems if decisions could be brought back to the people at the grassroots.’’ The question has a long pe