Citizens’ assemblies are a hot topic these days in democratic theory. Hélène Landemore gave her Tanner Lecture at University of Michigan last semester, describing her experience on the governance committee of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life. Her account of how ordinary citizens could not only deliberate seriously about a contentious issue, but even come to love one another despite their disagreements, was moving and inspirational. I agree with her that citizens’ assemblies offer a promising way to revitalize democracy and reduce the alienation of ordinary people from government–an alienation that factors into the cynicism, nihilism, and “shake things up” populist authoritarianism that is endangering many democracies today.
Here I want to add to her argument a more specific claim, which is the pivotal role citizens can play in directly strengthening the democratic structure of representative government. This can be seen in Michigan’s Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission. Unlike the many experiments in citizens’ assemblies that have only an advisory role, MICRC has genuine legislative power. It is charged with drawing fair (not gerrymandered) districts for the state legislature and Michigan’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, without interference by politicians.In 2018, voters passed an amendment to the state constitution proposed by the group Voters Not Politicians, which established the MICRC. The key argument for the amendment was straightforward and nonpartisan: politicians cannot be trusted to draw their own districts. When politicians draw the maps, they choose which voters get to vote for (or against) them, and choose the ones that will entrench their power. To empower voters to choose politicians instead of the other way around, voters need to be in charge of drawing the maps. The amendment passed with 61% of the vote, and took a majority in 67 of 83 counties–impossible without substantial support from voters of both parties.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, many states’ efforts to end gerrymandering have failed because they gave politicians a say over the maps. The constitutional amendment establishing the MICRC addresses this problem by barring politicians, recent candidates, party officials, campaign consultants, lobbyists and others connected to such people from serving on the Commission. Only politically unconnected voters may serve. Another important feature of the MICRC is that, while Republicans and Democrats each get 30% of the seats, independent voters get the rest–a plurality. Holding these proportions fixed, and allowing each party in the state legislature to strike up to 20 applicants, the selection of commissioners is otherwise random.
We can’t always expect the experience of participating on a citizens’ assembly to be as loving and inspirational as what Landemore witnessed and personally felt. The process in Michigan was fraught. Commissioners engaged in long, heated arguments. Some broke down in tears over their conflicts.
Nevertheless, their output was clearly superior to letting politicians draw the maps. Michigan has been a basically 50-50 state for decades. Yet, before the MICRC was established, GOP politicians had blocked the Democratic party from taking both houses of the state legislature for 40 years, much of this time due to partisan gerrymandering. In 2016, the partisan vote for the Michigan House was almost exactly equal, yet Republicans won a 16-seat advantage in a 110-seat chamber. The MICRC, as directed by the state constitution, delivered maps that were not rigged in favor of either party. In 2022, with the help of its fair maps, voters delivered a Democratic sweep of both state legislative houses and all statewide offices. The maps were genuinely competitive for both parties: Democrats won the state legislature by only 2 seats in both houses. This election year, the GOP could easily win back their majority in both state houses.
Michigan’s success has inspired Ohio’s Citizens Not Politicians to get Issue 1 on the November ballot. Despite the fact that Ohio’s constitution already forbids partisan gerrymandering, the GOP officials who control the redistricting process have refused to comply with the law. In 2022 they got their way–despite losing two Ohio Supreme Court rulings declaring their maps unconstitutional–by running out the clock in Federal court. This time, a GOP-dominated ballot board approved ballot language that misleads voters by suggesting that Issue 1 means the opposite of what it actually says. And the GOP-dominated Ohio Supreme Court mostly went along with this wildly misleading language. Let’s hope Ohio’s voters see through this ruse. Last year, they rejected a 60% approval threshold for passing constitutional amendments, which they knew was designed to thwart their desire to protect abortion rights.
Where might citizens’ assemblies go from here? I suggest that the next step should be to empower them to legislate on voting rights as well as transparency and corruption in state government. These are also issues that politicians can’t be trusted to handle well. Citizens’ assemblies can strengthen the democratic character of representation as well as trust in representative government by reserving these issues for themselves.
Suppose these experiments are tried and succeed. A natural next step would be to empower the voters to establish a citizens’ assembly to legislate on any ordinary issue specified in a proposition, not just on democracy-reinforcing structures. The idea is that some issues may be too complex for a citizens’ initiative process. The issue may require considerable fact-finding, deliberation, and numerous tightly linked provisions. In such cases, voters cannot be expected to find the devils hiding in the details, especially if special interests have drafted and gathered the signatures for the initiative and are spending millions on misleading ads. I suspect that was a problem with California’s Prop 22, promoted by Uber and Lyft, which classified rideshare drivers as independent contractors without employee rights. (Alex Guerrero has some clever ideas on how to prevent corruption of single-issue citizens’ legislatures.)
The very possibility that voters could strip the state legislature of the power to legislate on a given issue and assign it to a citizens’ assembly might itself induce the representative legislature to behave more democratically–that is, to take the voters’ concerns more seriously. It’s one way to nudge our current laboratories of autocracy to behave more like laboratories of democracy.
{ 10 comments }
Matt 09.29.24 at 2:47 am
This is very interesting. I hadn’t heard anything about this, and am glad to learn about it. It sounds like a good initiative, and as you note, perhaps it can be expanded to other topics. I do have a couple of questions, and maybe a worry, about this part:
while Republicans and Democrats each get 30% of the seats, independent voters get the rest–a plurality.
My first question is whether this over-represents “independents”. What percentage of (eligable voters? registered voters? whatever group is being used) are “independents”? My second question is whether giving such a larger share to “independents” is itself good. My understanding (very much gained through 2nd hand sources) is that 1) most so-called “independents” are actually typically partisan voters – they vote for one party the vast majority of the time, almost as much or as much as people who are registered in a party, and 2) they tend to be “low information” voters to a higher degree, and less clear on the issues, which parties support which policies, and so on. If either or both of those are true, is it good to give this group a plurality? I can imagine it might actually help them clarify their views, gain more info, and so on to be involved, but can also see it leading to problems.
I’d also be interested to hear how minority representation turned out on this process. I’m genuinely not sure what the best approaches are to that issue, but would be curious to know what has happened on that front. Do you know if anything has been reported on this?
John Q 09.29.24 at 7:52 pm
The alternative in this case is to have the boundaries drawn by an independent commission like the Australian Electoral Commission. But that depends on having the requisite degree of trust, which may be lacking in the US.
Moz of Yarramulla 09.29.24 at 11:01 pm
Matt, it’s easy to game if people want to just by changing their political registration. But it’s also resilient because to be gamed it requires more participants in the game than not, making the “gaming” in some ways democratic.
The more serious attack is by further restricting voting rights. That’s being done explicitly via legislation as well as de facto by making it both harder to vote and easier to have voters/votes disallowed. That seems to be the current preference among anti-democracy activists and is amply supported by ‘originalist’ readings of laws harking back to when only white men could vote.
I agree with JQ that ideally electorate boundaries would be set by bureaucrats based on some collective ideal of fairness, but also that that isn’t possible in the USA so we should put it with “universal suffrage” and “a fair voting system” in the too hard basket. Strengthening democracy in the US has to be done incrementally and from inside, all outsiders can do is point to relevant examples.
Moz of Yarramulla 09.29.24 at 11:08 pm
The idea is that some issues may be too complex for a citizens’ initiative process. The issue may require considerable fact-finding, deliberation, and numerous tightly linked provisions.
I think you could point to Ireland reforming abortion laws as well as the US end of life example to counter this. As I understand it there’s normally an information presenting phase before the deliberation, and generally some form of consensus required (or a supermajority). I’m more familiar with the citizen’s jury approach of paying both jurors and experts for their time at a decent rate, and allowing interested parties to present whatever random bullshit they come up with, limited primarily by a Select Committee style “10 minutes per person”. But the jurors get to ask questions and thus implicitly can ask for fact checks. JQ has been through on some of the review boards he’s been appointed to (sentenced to?)
That increases the cost of the assembly, but it’s still a lot cheaper than an elected body (especially in the US!). There’s an argument for paying members a high wage rather than a below-minimum one specifically to avoid the common jury problem of court jurors wanting the fastest possible resolution regardless of the facts purely because they can’t personally afford a long trial.
Liz Anderson 09.30.24 at 12:11 am
Anyone who applies to the Commission is unlikely to be a low information voter, since the latter are people who are disengaged from the political process as a general matter. The advantage of independents is, even if they do generally turn out for a particular political party, they are likely to be less partisan than party-identifiers, more skeptical of both parties, and so less likely to want to draw biased maps for one of the other party. The first maps drawn by the Commission were overturned for failing to include enough minority districts. It looks like the Commission got bad legal advice the first time around on how to comply with the VAR. They redrew the maps, which passed VRA review.
Nicholas Gruen 09.30.24 at 11:22 am
John Q and Moz argue that a bureaucratic system is better. I disagree because it depends on the assumption that appointments will not be rigged. This hasn’t just been the case in numerous areas in the US — not to mention their Supreme Court — but was proceeding apace as Australia’s last government left office in other bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Lottery selection is much more robust to corruption hard and soft.
Katherine Kirkham 10.04.24 at 12:39 pm
“his time, a GOP-dominated ballot board approved ballot language that misleads voters by suggesting that Issue 1 means the opposite of what it actually says. And the GOP-dominated Ohio Supreme Court mostly went along with this wildly misleading language. ”
I really wonder, when reading things like that, whether such people actually believe in democracy, believe their own arguments, or actually are happy to cynically manipulate a system they don’t believe in.
Anyhoo, I think Citizen’s Assemblies have turned out to be surprisingly sophisticated and civilised methods to work through potentially thorny issues. The Irish CA on abortion being a perfect example. With a Bill going through the UK Parliament right now about legalising assisted suicide, I wonder if such a thing could work better to decide on the issue and work out some of major the details.
JPL 10.05.24 at 11:01 pm
@Katherine Kirkham 7:
“Anyhoo …”
Haven’t heard that one in a while. My father used to say “anymahoo”.
But it looks like the “GOP … ballot language” is not just “misleading”, it’s false.
The term ‘gerrymander’ by definition (as they say, but it’s really not the definition, which is drawn up by dictionary makers, but the integrating principle of the category belonging to the English lexicon (i.e., the “meaning of the lexeme”) that determines appropriate usage) refers to an act that violates ethical principles (thus “wrong”) or is a crime, like ‘steal’ or ‘murder’, not just to an act that is ethically neutral. So, the proposal states the principle governing the drawing of voting districts as “prohibit[ing] the use of redistricting plans that favor one political party and disfavor others”, i.e., that all political parties are equivalent wrt resulting benefit and harm in the drawing of voting districts; in other words, it prohibits gerrymandering. But the GOP description of the proposal says that, the commission is “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties”. The use of the term ‘gerrymander’ here does not mean that the proposal will merely “create maps that ensure certain political outcomes”; it expresses the claim that the proposal requires the commission to violate the ethical principle of the equivalence of all political parties wrt the drawing of voting districts. Prohibits/requires. This is how the meaning of the description is “opposite” from the proposal: it’s a false description, the polar opposite of “true”.
J-D 10.06.24 at 3:26 am
I read that and I can’t help thinking ‘So, then, what are parliaments good for?’
engels 10.12.24 at 1:43 pm
Interesting. I think I read Corbyn helped set up a citizens assembly in Islington but I can’t find the article now.
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