A recent letter to the editor outlined what the author thought would be a reasonable approach to immigration reform. It got me to thinking about what a friend of mine had explained to me about Citizens’ Assemblies, a form of sortition.
What’s sortition? It turns out the Athenian Greek democracy did not elect representatives. Instead they were chosen at random from the population. That’s sortition.
For some, the very fact that we elect our representatives is at the core of the problems with our government today. They argue that if congress were made up of randomly selected, demographically representative individuals then a lot more would get done, and get done better.
Why? Because the representatives would focus on the issues, not the visibility of the issue and how it affects their fundraising and chances for re-election.
That’s clearly not going to happen to our Congress any time soon, but there is a variation on the idea that is happening in places and could happen on a national level. It’s called Citizens’ Assemblies.
A Citizens’ Assembly is a group of randomly selected, demographically representative individuals brought together to address one particular issue, hopefully to make law, but at least to make recommendations. These could be relatively large groups. They would take input from various stake holders and experts. After making their decision, they would disband.
An example of a Citizens’ Assembly is a jury. Random people together to solve one particular issue. It works reasonably well, even for contentious issues. Imagine if Derek Chauvin’s fate was to be decided by Congress, rather than a jury. The vote would be split down Republican/Democrat lines with no-one particularly caring about the particular facts of the case, like the medical testimony on what actually caused George Floyd’s death. All that would matter to the politicians is how their base, their colleagues, and their party perceives their vote.
They can be used at any level of government. Imagine a town wanting to come up with a sign ordinance governing what sorts of signs stores can put up, balancing the town’s esthetics and the need for local merchants to advertise. A great problem to form a Citizens’ Assembly to solve.
On a national level, take immigration. Imagine that a number of individuals, such as the letter writer mentioned above, were gathered together and asked to come up with an immigration policy that made sense. Not anyone looking to get re-elected, but people from all walks of life getting together to discuss, analyze, think about a plan that might work for the country.
They would listen to current experts, to immigrants, to employers of immigrants, to the Dreamers, to those who’s jobs are threatened, to those unhappy with changing neighborhood demographics, medical experts on disease, law enforcement, etc. etc.
It wouldn’t take that long for such a group to settle on a reasonable path for our country. It could then become law, and, since it was decided by a Citizens’ Assembly, the politicians could wash their hands of it.
Maybe every 5 or 10 years the issue would be revisited in a similar way?
My friend points out that politicians don’t actually want to solve these sorts of contentious issues. Both sides need the issues to fire up their bases. Immigration has been used as political fodder since, well, since forever. Build the Wall! Children in Cages! Vote for us! That’s how each side gets the voters out.
Abortion. A Citizen’s Assembly could study and come up with a path that best reflected the conflicting opinions of the country. And when they did, well there goes another get out the vote slogan, no more Pro-Life!, Pro-Choice! being used to get votes.
Health Care.
Gun Control.
Environment.
And so on for the issues of the day, leaving the politicians to do the more mundane work of running our government. And getting elected based on how well they do their job, and making more visible how they do it and what’s really going on when they’re not actually doing anything about the issues they campaigned on.
We did that with a sign ordinance in Athens, GA. It didn’t work since no one wanted to volunteer except the people who had a stake in the outcome. The final ordinance allowed for more and larger signs than we had before the ordinance was passed.