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.
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