Professor John Gastil on Bringing Reason Back into Politics

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig, and this is another episode of the podcast Another Way. My guest today is not the typical guest for this podcast. He's neither a candidate for president nor a candidate for Congress. Instead, today we take a break from the politicians to talk to someone who has done extraordinary work focused on the foundations of democracy. John Gastel is the Distinguished professor in Communication, Arts and Sciences and Political Science and Senior scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, which was the university that when I grew up was the cool University just 45 minutes away from where I grew up, Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He studies political deliberation and that's what we'll be talking about today, and group decision making in many different contexts, but the one we care about is democracy. His newest books are Hope for How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics, published by Oxford in 2020 with Katie Knoblach and and Legislature by Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance by Verso in 2019 with Eric Olin Wright. Today we'll be talking to him about the Citizens Initiative Review Project from Oregon, which has helped evaluate a new form of public deliberation that could improve, at least initiative elections. His work in the past has included work with the Jury and Democracy Project to investigate and in some sense vindicate the jury system as a valuable civic educational institution. And he has worked closely with my friend Dan Kahan at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale. This is a topic we'll begin the conversation with in demonstrating ways in which our deeper values bias even how we see facts and understand the world around us. He teaches courses on democratic deliberation, group communication, and quantitative methods at Penn State. And this summer, in July, he has his first novel coming out. It's called Gray Matters, published by the science fiction publisher Cosmic Egg. And he said his tagline for this book was the interaction between politics and Alzheimer's disease, which at the time he thought about it seemed a little bit remote. May not be as remote as one would hope. So as we record this episode, it's now June 2, 2020. It's a little hard to stay focused on questions like this. I'll admit that it's hard not to think that we are Rome and Rome is burning, and our Nero doesn't even fiddle, he tweets. To be a little bit fair to the history there, Nero didn't fiddle either. That would be about 1400 years before the fiddle was invented. But in the middle of this current crisis, or we should say current and chronic crisis. Because the causes of this latest manifestation are as old as this republic. It is incredibly difficult to focus anywhere else except that crisis. I get that. But I also think we need to think about why there might be reason for hope. The most exhausting feature, or let's call it a bug about the current political moment, is that it's so hard to imagine how it gets any better even if Trump is not reelected. Do we return to the Republicans waging war on a Democratic president, as no doubt they see it tit for tat, as Democrats waged war on Trump. Will Congress be any freer of the corrupting influence of money? Will the polarization of the media be any less pronounced? It's hard to answer those questions in any optimistic or hopeful way. And as I've argued again and again, our problems today are much, much deeper than a single president. And we have to find a way to keep focused on those problems. I remember at the start of the Obama administration, I had worked in small ways to help Obama get elected. And one of the people I worked with in the administration would become a senior official in the administration. I remember meeting with him early on because obviously the Obama administration came into office needing to address the extraordinary economic crisis that had befallen the nation in the fall of 2008. But also Obama was elected, at least some of us thought, because he thought he was going to take up the fight, as he said, to change the way Washington works. Because you've heard me quote this, and I quote it from memory, it's so deep in my soul. Because as he said, if you don't take up that fight, then real change, change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans, will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo. That's who I thought Obama would be, that president. And so what I said to that Obama official is that it was sort of like we were on our way to the hospital to address with chemotherapy the cancer that had afflicted our body when we got hit by a bus. And so of course, what we need to do at the hospital is to deal with the accident, the bus drivers negligence, and we have to find a way to deal with the crisis of the accident with the bus. But we need to deal with that in a way that makes it possible for us to deal with the more fundamental problem as well. We got to deal with the accident on the way to dealing with the cancer. And that's the focus we need here. We need to think about how we deal with the current crises, the current crises of this democracy, the current and chronic crises of racism inside of America and the institutionalized racism of so much of America. We need to think about how to deal with those crises as well as the more fundamental problems that we've been focused on in these podcasts in the way that our democracy just is not. So today, our focus is on us, the people, and the question is how we can imagine us being represented better inside of this system. Some of you, you know, the 10 of you that have read my book will recognize that that's the question that the second half of my most recent book, they Don't Represent Us, tries to address. The they the government doesn't represent us. That's the unrepresentative system we've allowed to evolve from gerrymandering or money in politics or the Electoral College or vote suppression or the Senate. That part's obvious. But the other part is, I think, increasingly even more important. How do we make it so we as citizens are better represented inside of this democracy by being better able to understand the problems that we as a nation must address and have views that are informed and balanced in addressing those problems. That's the focus of John Gastel's work, and we're incredibly honored, and I'm very happy to have a chance to have him on this podcast. I loved his book Hope for Democracy because it does give hope in a story out of Oregon about making citizens represent citizens better. Thank you, John Gastel, for joining us. I want to begin a little bit indirectly with a project that you're familiar with, with a person who's a very close friend of mine, Dan Kahan. And Dan, of course, was instrumental in getting something called the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale. And the Cultural Cognition Project is, in an important way at the center of the problem which your extraordinary work is attempting to address. So help us understand a little bit about what the Cultural Cognition Project is helping us to see and how it might be relevant to this problem of how we make a democracy work better.

Absolutely. The Cultural Cognition Project is concerned with the way our cultural worldviews, orientation to the world, biases us in the way we perceive new information process arguments and arrive at judgments so we know that we're all biased in different ways. What Dan Kahan, Don Braman, and others at the principles of the project have shown is just how insidious those biases are making us see. The same video of, say, a clash between police and protesters appear fundamentally different depending on whether we have a bias in favor of the protesters or the police. You can even change the issue that people think they're looking at and get people to flip which side they think is, you know, being too aggressive. Obviously very relevant to today in the United States when we have violent clashes between police and protesters. But it really applies to everything from nanotechnology and environmental views to views of health care, and you name it that again, these fundamental worldviews, much deeper than partisanship, bias us so fundamentally that it makes it hard for us to understand facts in the same way and arrive at really kind of reasoned judgments, even in ways that express conflicting values.

Yeah. Now you said this, but I want to make sure it's clear to everybody. This is describing conflicts over facts. I mean, we all understand that if we started to have a conversation about whether there should be national health care or single payer healthcare, and you had a bunch of conservatives in the room and a bunch of progressives in the room, there's gonna be differences in views because of those differences in values. But we're talking about basic understandings of the facts. Look at the same video, the same representation of what happened, and you'll see it differently if you happen to be a hierarchical conservative or if you happen to be a libertarian liberal or something like that. Right. So this is really fundamental to our ability to have a conversation about the world.

Yeah. And it does extend beyond facts and creeps into what we think is logical, what we think is reasonable, how we think our values apply to the problem. Right. But the most shocking part of it, I think you're right, is that we can't even see the same facts in the same way when these biases are driving us and our perceptions.

So this becomes really critical right now in American politics because we see that the world that we see is increasingly curated by entities that have a business interest in corralling us into our own tribal worlds. Right. So we see in cable television, for example, a strong desire launched originally by Fox News, but now copied by MSNBC and CNN in a different way to sort of identify who their base is and to pitch to their base so that they can rally their base into the view of the facts that they want their base to have. And the same thing happens to some extent on both sides, which means that we build a political universe where we're being trained to see the world differently because of the way the story is being told to us, reinforcing this kind of gap between us, which makes it more and more difficult for us to deal with political problems that we ought to be able to deal with.

I think one of the reasons we don't always perceive what you just described is that it actually only applies to a part of our life, even in the context of scientific information, which Dan Kahn is often doing studies on how cultural biases shape how we even perceive, for instance, new information about new technologies and so on. Most of the time there's no political tint to how we process scientific information. It's incredible to me that the coronavirus got politicized so quickly, but so many other aspects of medical care. We don't really have a cultural conflict. So what you need to have the cultural conflict is what you just described. There have to be people representing these different worldviews who decide that this issue has cultural stakes. It's important to maintaining our identity and pursuing the things we want. But again, most of the time, for most of the things in our lives, these don't apply. So we can be perfectly reasonable people and look at factual information competently, unless it gets drawn into these cultural conflicts.

Yeah, this is a really important point. I reproduce one of the famous papers that Dan published in this series in my book where he's got this wonderful collection of graphs from different questions in science. So whether cell phone radiation is dangerous and then climate change issues or issues that relate to very familiar political disputes. And what's significant about that is if you look at that graph, most of the issues are issues where the fact that you're a conservative is not going to lead you to see the issue any differently from how you'd see it if you're a liberal. Or, you know, it's a more complicated four box matrix that Dan and the Cultural Cognition project uses. But we can simplify to say that if you're values or your character is different, you're not going to see these issues differently. But then there's some. You, you pointed to the coronavirus, which it's really tragic that this has been rendered political so quickly. But there are some climate change which, which are rendered politically, which means that for those, it's increasingly difficult for us to see the same facts in the same way. But the challenge to that is you could look at that and say either that's good news, or you could look at that mix and say that's good news. You could say that's bad news because it's good news. Because you'd say like in most issues we're actually able to think about things in a rational way. But you could look at it and say it's bad news because you say, here's how the marketing department of Fox News begins to pick out the issues that they got to begin to work on. Right. Because they know that if they can render an issue political, they can get more deeply committed focus of their base on that issue. On one way, looking at it one way and looking at it another way. Maybe that's what happened with the coronavirus. Fact. So the point is, this accidental feature of something seeming political or not seeming political is not natural. It itself is part of this political process. And again, as we think about how media is so deeply connected to how we perceive the world, we begin to worry that maybe there's an interest media to render these issues in a way that makes it so that we are even more politically invested one way or the other.

Absolutely. And it's important to recognize that an issue like the coronavirus that becomes polarized into these different sort of cultural worldviews, viewing the same thing so differently, it helps to remember that if you cross a national border or cross an ocean, you may find a country that in many ways is much like us, but absolutely sees that issue as something that has nothing to do with cultural or political biases. So what gets activated, as you say, depends on specific actors, elected officials, media elite, and so on that work to create these cultural understandings. There can also be a grassroots component, too, but it's culturally specific. So this isn't a universal feature of that issue that in every society, you know, the left and the right will polarize in a particular way. It has to happen in the course of the political rhetoric of that society.

Yeah. Okay. So this is. This is a great setup for the project which you describe. I mean, you've got two recent books that really talk about this, but we're going to focus on Hope for Democracy, which is about the project in Oregon. But it sets up the conversation for this in a really powerful way. Because what we can see, given where we are in evolution of democracy in America, is that we're in a place where if you just rely on the kind of natural process that has natural in the way that it's developed for thinking about and resolving these political questions, or even scientific questions, we can see the way in which our environment is making it extremely hard for us to resolve these questions in a sensible way. And by sensible, I don't mean, you know, what happens. To agree with what I think is true, but by sensible, I mean in a way that really respects and understands the view of everybody within a democracy. I mean, the point of a democracy is to make it possible for people who have different views to learn how to and to effectively live and work together. And that's what our project should be about, the project of democracy. And we can see that if we live in these isolated, tribalized, epistemically distant worlds, it's hard for us to engage in that process because we on the left or people on the right, they don't even know what the other side thinks. It's not that they disagree with them, they don't even understand the view. And so we gotta find a way to get over that. And that's where what I'm going to think of generically as this project of sortition gets introduced. I mean, we've seen a lot of work recently that's been extremely interested in thinking about alternatives, not necessarily as supplements or as substitutes for democracy, but at least as complements to democracy that might help us as citizens think about our problems more sensibly. And the idea of sortition is, you know, in its basic sense, let's find a way to collect a random, representative group of people to think about an issue, address an issue in a particular way. And because they've been randomized and are representative, we know that we're not amplifying one particular side or activists from one particular side. Instead, we are finding a way to bring together a wide range of people. And so that's procedurally what makes it representative. But what's interesting in relation to what we were just talking about is how that context might be a cure or at least a compensation for this kind of project problem of cultural cognition. So let's just start with this question. Independent of any of the particular examples of sortition that you have mapped out, really wonderful figure one, one of your, in your book, which shows the evolution of these projects across time ending up in the one that we're going to talk about, the Citizens Initiative Review in Oregon. But just in general, if you think about these groups of randomly selected representative people sitting down in a respectful way, talking about an issue, how does that affect the baseline problem of that cultural cognition is talking about that we see the world in a different way. Does it help us see things in a similar way? Does it help us at least have some humility about our view or at least understanding about the other people's views?

All of the above. So the bigger point, I think, behind all of this we're talking about is that democracy is a design problem. I think that's very much in accordance with your whole project here, here on the podcast that, I mean, when you, a few weeks ago, had folks from Oregon who had created Vote by mail. That was a solution to a problem, right? It was a design solution. What about people who can't vote on election day? Right. So democracy is an incredibly complex sort of moral proposition that needs all these institutions and practices to be designed thoughtfully and carefully and constantly refined. Well, that was kind of an easy solution to the problem of what do you do when someone can't vote on election day? What you're talking about is what do you do when people can't kind of listen to each other, when they, they're having trouble getting the information they need to understand an issue and they're not processing in a way that's systematic? Well, the idea of sortition is, as you say, to get a representative sample of people together. And then you combine that with an architecture of deliberation where again, it's a design problem all the way from the big picture down to the small question of how do you organize a discussion that lasts an hour, two hours, two days, a week, a few weekends, whatever your process is. And it comes down to having in place processes where people take turns speaking. They get to hear from people who have relevant information, they get to ask them questions in a sustained sort of follow up kind of way. They get to hear back from witnesses that they maybe need to hear from a second time and so on, and have plenty of time for discussion. And if that sounds kind of boring, I mean, it's just slowing things down, giving people access to information that can be translated through, you know, a person sitting there in the room. It is all pretty straightforward. It's kind of how we learn, right? It's how we get information and we get a chance to step back and think about it and reflect on it. And you're right that when that goes well, we're not only getting access to a lot of factual information, we're getting to kind of think about how those facts fit into different arguments for and against, maybe some proposition. And we're going to be ultimately talking about ballot measures. So those are simple propositions that a law be adopted or rejected. And then we get to think about how our values come into play there. And sometimes I think we oversimplify it and say, well, one group of people has certain values. Let's say they value personal liberty above all else. And other people maybe value the safety of the community above all else. Well, there's no such person. Neither of those is real. We all value really pretty much the same set of values, but we prioritize them very differently. And so we're still talking about trade offs. Even if you privilege liberty and I privilege the community, we both recognize when the police have gone too far to infringe on your liberty or when your liberty has gone too far to make it impossible to have a piece of public community. So all of those things require time and reflection. And that's what we're trying to do, is get that representative cross section to get the diversity of experiences and perspectives together with the information and the time and the process that lets them deliberate.

So I want to think a little bit about this idea of slowing it down. We've talked on this podcast before about what we could call the slow democracy move movement. And the slow democracy movement takes its inspiration from the slow food movement. And the idea of the slow food movement is, look, we understand how humans process food. We understand how they process food well. They process food well by eating food they have prepared slowly. That's just because of the way humans have evolved, right? So we don't prepare our own processed food well. We can't copy the likes of craft foods in our own kitchen. We don't have that skill, right? So if we tried to make the equivalent of a craft food processed cupcake, it would be terrible. But what we can do when we cook our food is produce food that's generally healthy. And if we sit there and eat it with friends, talking to them, as we've done for 50,000 years in human history, then we can actually digest and process that food in a way that our body can handle it well. And the idea of the slow democracy movement is to do the same thing with democracy, is to say, let's look at what humans do naturally well, and let's look at how they do it well. And once we examine how they do it well, let's fit democracy, as you so nicely put it, this design choice around democracy. Let's design democracy to what we know about how humans do deliberation well. And so one critical part to that is to slow it down. What we can say is, you know, Twitter and Facebook are the equivalent of like popcorn and potato chips because you can't resist them. They, like, trigger you and drive you into crazy land because that's what they're designed to do. That's their purpose. There's this amazing study I've article in the Wall Street Journal, if you saw it last week, where the Wall Street Journal describes a memo inside of Facebook where Facebook executives came to recognize that their algorithms were turning us into crazy people. They were radicalizing their population, like making us more polarized because of the way they were feeding information to people on both sides. And the recommendation of the memo was we should do something about it. But of course, Facebook decided to do nothing about it because it turned out to be so profitable. Well, that's exactly the same thing with potato chips and popcorn. It's profitable to make it like that. And so that's what they do. But the slow democracy movement says we might not be able to do democracy well on Twitter, but we can do it well if we sit down with real humans and look them in the eye and try to explain why we think what we think and listen and have to spend time deliberating with them about the issue. It turns out, because we've done this for 50,000 years, that's how humans process complicated information.

Well, is it wrong that now I want to try to make a Twinkie in my own kitchen? I think I would fail spectacularly, but I'm not sure it would taste better bad. I just. I want to know how to make that sponge cake. No, you're absolutely right that we. We can't make processed food in our own kitchen. And I think you're right that the same wisdom does apply very nicely. And it has been a great metaphor for democracy in that we. We need to slow down how we process information, how we make choices, and ultimately as. As voters, how we behave in elections. And, yeah, we do have the capacity and the technology to change how we do that. We just have to have the political will to then implement it.

So we've seen, over the last. It's now about 50 years, lots of modern innovation around this idea of sortition. I mean, obviously the history of democracy is before the birth of the French and American democracy, there was lots of sortition as a way to select representatives, or at least select leaders or officials inside of governments. Not just in ancient Athens, but also in Italy and even in Britain through much of the 18th and 17th and 18th centuries. But then Britain and America kind of gave up the idea that. That representatives would be chosen by anything other than votes. And so we kind of went quiet on this alternative way of representing people,

with one large exception. Right. The jury system has just quietly existed.

Yes.

I've heard people who study deliberative democracy or who are critics of deliberative democracy say, you know, you'd think that if this idea was so strong, there would be some institution that embraced this idea of bringing together a cross section of the public to deliberate in a sustained way. And our judicial branch foregrounds it in the Constitution multiple times. Countries like Japan and Argentina are Adopting new jury systems specifically for these features to inspire their populace to learn deliberative skills, become engaged citizens, and frankly to improve the quality of justice meted out by the judicial branch. So it is remarkable that this model of quasi random selection and deliberation has just been quietly existing in democracies, but really became taken for granted. Now, many democracies obviously don't have a jury system, but it's no coincidence that the jury inspired the citizens jury, which is a more policy oriented random selection of a small body. And that inspired ultimately what we're talking about today, the Citizens Initiative Review.

Right. So yeah, I mean, we've, I described in the introduction how this is another project of yours, jury and deliberative as juries, and the history of juries and how they relate to this project. And you're absolutely right, juries are a great example of how we have relied on even imperfectly representative, randomly selected, not even perfectly randomly selected bodies to engage in the kind of reflection that we need to make a really critical judgment. You know, in the United States, the judgment of a jury can send somebody to his or her, mainly his death. And so it's not insignificant, it's quite significant, but it's been a part, it's taken for granted in that context. But in the context of democracy, it's still quite contested. So what I want you to do for us for a couple minutes now is to, is to kind of map for us, like beginning in 1970 ish, where we've seen examples or really important experiments around this idea of randomly selected or not professional people engaging in the project of deliberating about what makes sense for a democracy or even not a democracy. China is also examples with deliberative polling.

Sure. Really it started with small bodies of 12 to 24 people on something called a citizen's jury, or in Germany called a planning cell. Consensus conferences came along and all sorts of names started being applied to these experiments, happening mostly in the U.S. europe, Canada, Australia, but in other countries around the world as well. And this gained a little momentum into the 80s and then ultimately in the 90s when Jim Fishkin created the deliberative poll concept. In the late 80s, that started getting implemented and that took it to a whole other scale. Now we've got hundreds of people more professionally randomly selected, brought together for a shorter period of time perhaps, but still with the same basic idea of sortition and deliberation combining to give you a sense of what people think and what they say when they have the time to consider the issues. Now again, These were demonstration projects, as you say, experiments happening. It's only in the last couple decades that we've started to see real institutionalization now happening. In parallel with this was a model of institutionalization, participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting didn't have that sortition aspect, but did have a kind of radical inclusion element, strongly encouraging participation by some of the most underrepresented social groups to have a stake in the budget for, say, a municipality. And that spread around the world much faster, that participatory institution. So where we are now is we're at kind of the confluence of a very successful internationalization of this participatory budgeting process and the global expansion of the ideas of sortition and deliberation. And all three of those are now mixing together for all kinds of interesting innovations. And you end up with something like in Belgium, where you've got a randomly selected body now kind of sitting alongside the government and having an institutional role to play with regard to the consideration of legislation. Or in Mongolia, kind of an adaptation of the deliberative poll gets to weigh in on some constitutional questions. Or as you alluded to, China is one of the most striking examples where they're using these randomly selected bodies to, in some cases, actually make decisions about, say, economic development programs. Now, obviously, with a constrained agenda of options, but a pretty broad agenda in many cases. So really, any country in the world, even countries that are manifestly not democratic, can see the wisdom of kind of building some public support and consent for an idea that is chosen by a public that is not just thinking off the top of its head, but is actually sitting down and weighing options. Now, implementing that into a democracy is a little bit more tricky in some ways, because, as you say, you don't necessarily want the sortition body to replace the larger public and let it have the final say. But as we're talking about with the Citizens Initiative Review, there are interesting ways of combining mass public participation with these small deliberative bodies that are chosen at random.

Yeah, the Mongolian example is really striking. I actually went amongst Mongolia to observe the first constitutional deliberative poll. Mongolia passed a law that requires that before the legislature is allowed to consider an amendment to the constitution, it has to conduct a deliberative poll that allows citizens to give their views about these proposed amendments. This is a bizarre history about how this law came to effect, but basically, one of the leaders from one of the opposition parties, after the party was thrown out of power, he came to Stanford to do a graduate degree. And Jim Fishkin was his teacher, and he loved the idea of deliberative polls so much that when he went back and his party came back into power, they passed this law, it's the first law in the world, which requires deliberation on constitutional amendments before they can be considered by the parliament. And so, you know, there's this bizarre vision of deliberative democracy where 700 Mongolians randomly selected representative from Mongolia. So Mongolia is a country the size of Western Europe with a population of 3 million. So half of these people had been on a bus for two nights to get to Ulaanbaatar to assemble in the parliamentary assembly. But there they were in their finest clothes, dressed, ready to deliberate. And I watched them over the course of the three, three days through a translator, struggle with these constitutional questions. Now, you know, I confess, as a constitutional law professor, I went into it thinking, they'll never be able to work this stuff out. This is really hard. But at the end I was convinced, you know, it's just not rocket science. And they had sussed out the incredibly important trade offs and they'd made recommendations on these proposals that were really incredibly sensible, and they absolutely affected how the process moved forward. The idea that the deliberative poll rejected it was a fatal blow to some of the proposals, and it guided other proposals. So this was an incredible demonstration of this potential, even in a context where obviously the average education level is far below what you'd expect to see in a more developed democracy. Even without that, they were able to deliberate on these issues in a really powerful and effective way.

I'll let you have a final word on Mongolia. I'm just pausing for. Usually you're getting a response from me, but I thought you nailed that one, so I'll just leave it alone.

Yeah, but the question that this often raises is whether these processes should be controlling or just advisory. And what's so interesting about the project which you wrote this book on, the Citizens Initiative Review, is that it's humble in its aspirations. It's not trying to decide on a policy that should be. That will be implemented, or even that should be implemented. What the Citizen Initiative Review is doing is trying to improve the initiative process in Oregon by giving people a different perspective on that process that is produced through this deliberation. So give us a little bit of the history of how this came about and what it's trying to do.

Sure. So I'll start by describing what is the Citizens Initiative Review in Oregon. And as a matter of law, it only exists in that state. It's Been pilot tested kind of around the country. Massachusetts has a law, it's considering to adopt it. It's been tried in Europe, but Oregon's the only place where it's a state law. So here's how it works. The Citizens Initiative Review Commission chooses an issue or two every couple years. When Oregon has statewide ballot measures to be subject to a review, a random sample, but really a stratified sample of the population is brought together, about 20 people, and they get four full days to study one one issue on the ballot. At the end of those four days, their job is to finish writing a one page statement that has some key findings. They think these are things you need to know before you vote on this. And what they consider to be the strongest pro and con arguments, the best reasons to pass, reasons to oppose. Now how that came about is Ned Crosby, who created the Citizens Juries and myself had met years ago and talked through a bunch of ideas and, and we both started writing about this concept. And I wrote a book called By Popular Demand, came out back in 2000. And a couple graduate students in Oregon, you know, this is your story of Mongolia, is actually not that unusual. A couple graduate students in Oregon read the book and said we could do that here. They found their way to Ned Crosby and the rest is history. By the way, the reason it's getting considered in Massachusetts was a student, I believe, at Brown, read, you know, some of our writing and met and talked. So it's, this is not unusual that often a younger person is looking for the solution and, you know, grabs onto these things. You know, Thomas Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolution said revolutions happen partly because graduate students look at two theories and say this new revolutionary theory that everyone's rejecting is a lot simpler. And I think it could do the same job, you know, and so this is a kind of almost generational turnover in democratic reforms, I think is a theme. Anyway, back in Oregon, they, they lobbied the legislature and the legislature actually passed the law. Now they passed it initially in 2009 and ran one one year of pilot testing with a couple reviews, but then the following year they institutionalized it. They said, all right, we're going to make this a permanent part of Oregon's elections. We'll establish this commission. And by the way, majority of the commissioners are made up of former randomly selected review panelists. Credit to Ned Crosby for that clever idea. So it's, you know, kind of random selection and deliberation all the way down. Now they've held these every couple years. This, if you, if you think about history, you'll think, oh, boy, wasn't the US Right in the middle of a recession when they passed that? That's correct. And so the state of Oregon did not fund the review. So the funding has had to come from nonprofits. In fact, this last election cycle in 2018, there wasn't funding for a statewide CIR in Oregon. So even though it's on the books, all they were able to do was just a pilot testing out a regional approach in the Portland metro area. That's the simple idea of it. Our research has focused on two questions. One, what actually happens on those panels? Are they doing a good job of deliberating? Are they writing good statements for voters to read? And then that statement, this is crucial, is distributed in the official Oregon Voters Guide by the Secretary of State to every Oregon voter. So the second half of our research is often a lot of survey experiments and so on, looking at the voters who received this voting guide and this ballot. Oregon, again, is a vote by mail state. Are they being influenced by the statement they read written by their fellow citizens? And it's the conclusion of those two branches of research that leave us titling the book Hope for Democracy, because we do end up pretty hopeful about both the quality of the deliberation and the statements and ultimately the impact of those statements on the larger electorate, which isn't taking four days to study the issue, but probably something more like four minutes.

So what's so critical here is that this process be familiar, right? I mean, again, going back to the jury, everybody takes for granted that we are going to hand over to the jury the ability to decide whether Exxon has to pay $40 billion for an oil spill or whether somebody goes to prison for 50 years or gets executed.

Right?

We take it for granted. We don't question or second guess the idea that maybe we should have a right to participate in that or that just because they're ordinary people, we shouldn't respect what they say. And so the question I that your book led me to wonder about is how in Oregon, how visible or present is this institution in the minds of ordinary voters? Because it's pretty convincing that at least the output is having an effect on certain voters. Because you can, through your experiments, demonstrate that people who read it behave differently from people who didn't. But how. But do Oregon voters kind of understand that their democracy has at its core this process too? Or is it something that's accidentally known by people or not?

Well, let's take a look at some of the evidence, and we'll answer that question first. One of the things that came from our experiments and credit to my co author, Katie Knobloch, who had this hypothesis back when she was working on her dissertation. She thought that actually it would change Oregonians a little bit just to be aware of the circumstances and then to have the experience of reading it. And the CIR apologizes. The Citizens Initiative Review. Her thinking was that, imagine you live in a state and your government says, hey, we know you have to vote on all these laws, but maybe you want some support in the same way we have staff and services we can use when we're deciding how to vote. And indeed, simply becoming aware of the Citizens Initiative Review actually increases your sense of what we call external efficacy, your sense that the government is responsive. And that was. We showed that longitudinally and then replicated it later. Meanwhile, reading the statement itself makes you feel a little more efficacious internally, that is, you feel a little more politically competent. So there is a sense in which the Citizens Initiative Review, both its existence and the actual material it produces, is having a real effect on Oregonians attitudes that is deeper than the particular issue that they're getting guidance on. On. Right. So that. That's an interesting fact. Well, how many Oregonians are even becoming aware of it? Initially, back in 2010, it was more around 40% of the state learned about this. In the course of things, we were curious what the ceiling would be, and it looks like the ceiling is probably under 60% because it did climb up to about 50% and it stayed there. And these were statewide phone surveys. Often we do, you know, Internet survey experiments, but we needed a more reliable sample. So we used the phone approach, but it doesn't appear to be getting much higher. And I had a mental metaphor for this problem, which Weird Al Yankovic, the famous musical comedian, once said, every album I produce is a comeback album because I'm in the public eye. I have some great parody. Everyone thinks I'm a genius. And then, you know, two, three, four years later, when I produce the next album, they say, oh, is he still around? And so I think that happens to the Citizens Initiative Review. It's like, oh, right, that thing we've got. But a lot of Oregonians still don't know about it. And they may be the same people who aren't even picking up the voter's guide. Right. Just because it's mailed to you by the Secretary of State doesn't mean it doesn't go immediately to the bottom of your birdcage. So again, it's all as you said earlier in this, it is the old glass, half empty, half full. Problem we have with cultural cognition too is, well, is this bad news or good news? If you talk to people who run campaigns and you propose to them that you have a message that can reach roughly half the electorate, they would say, how much does that cost? That would be incredible if I could do that. So it is remarkably powerful piece of information put into the voting system, which is why it has made some professional consultants nervous because they fear its power in the course of an election. But I think that's good news for democracy because you don't want this deliberative cue to be all powerful. You don't want this group of 20 people to simply dictate how everyone's going to vote, but at the same time you want them to have an impact. Otherwise it is kind of just a demonstration project that's a little too expensive.

Yeah, so. But is there any evidence that people view what the process produces with a kind of skepticism or cynicism? I mean, like, I'm thinking about so much.

No. No, the evidence is pretty strong that they view it as equivalent to kind of the most trustworthy government information. That is, it's not kind of a blind trust. But we've asked this various ways and it's viewed very favorably across the political spectrum. Now, there's a study I'm working on with a colleague in Iceland. We did a piece in Political Psychology last year on how this process cuts against the kind of motivated reasoning we see in cultural cognition. But in our most recent study that we're working on now, we are seeing a partisan difference in the perceived legitimacy of sortition and these little mini publics in general, such that conservatives are a little more skeptical of these bodies of everyday citizens. It's not a huge effect, but it is there

in the same way in both Iceland and the United States. Or it's just.

No, just the United States. My colleague happens to be Icelandic. He's actually finishing his PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sadly, his advisor was Eric Olin Wright, the co author of Legislature by Lot last year. But I failed to recruit him to Penn State. But I kept in touch and he and I now continue to do work and write about this process in Oregon. The bottom line is that though the information is viewed favorably in general, there is some degree of skepticism that may be a little more associated with political conflict. Conservativism in Oregon.

So in Canada, with the Citizens assembly, which famously, you know, made certain recommendations that were Famously not followed. Was there a. Was there a partisan spin there? Or what's. What explains the Canadian story.

So the British Columbia Citizens assembly was also one of these incredible precedents, just like the Irish Constitutional Convention more recently, that really people around the world took notice of. And the Citizens assembly was tasked with writing new electoral rules in British Columbia. They perennially had the problem that a party could win not even a majority of the vote and wind up with almost every seat in the legislature. And a political party that was more conservative in British Columbia was so frustrated by having experienced this that they actually put into their platform that they would propose a revision to the electoral rules. But they recognized that they wouldn't be credible if they made those rules themselves. So they would hand it over to a random sample. And the origin of, you know, where did they get the idea of sortition? Right. It's just as goofy as anything else, right. Somebody met somebody who read something and, you know, and it was. It was just that. And there it went into their party platform. Then they won the election with the same kind of result where they won overwhelmingly in spite of the fact that they didn't have a large margin. And they followed through. Right. So it's. I love the example because it's a conservative political party implementing this kind of a process. The tragedy is that they said, okay, now once they come up with their recommendation, and they did come up with a voting system called single transferable vote, which is a pretty technical system, they set the threshold for passage at 60%, and almost 60% of voters in British Columbia then approved this proposal, and almost every single district in British Columbia approved it overwhelmingly. But again, it didn't quite meet that threshold. They wound up kind of trying it again a couple years later and putting some money into the election, but by then it had become a little bit partisan. And so if initially the parties kind of stayed out of did great. But once the parties kind of put their thumb on the scale, it was going to be hard to reach that threshold.

But the mix is really important. The fact that it was a conservative movement there is critical to really taking the essential partisan spin out of it. We see the same fight about ranked choice voting in the United States where the most prominent recent examples are examples that seem to have benefited Democrats. But, you know, states like Utah have used ranked choice voting in the Republican Party forever. And so it's important to tell the story in a way that makes it clear that there's no necessary political valence to it. It's just a design feature for making the process work better.

You know, I wish I had done a screen grab when the Tea Party protests started. Right.

Yeah.

All, you know, they were called, I think, the Tax day protests. Initially, somebody had a sign and it said, no taxation without deliberation.

Wow.

And deliberation historically in American politics has sometimes been viewed as with suspicion by the left, as this conservative impulse to once again slow things down. Right. To oppose revolutionary bold action. And if you look at these deliberative processes, what do they do? In some ways, sure, they celebrate equality. Right. Equal voice. Right. As you say, elected officials should be equally dependent on all their citizens. So there's definitely equality baked in. But it's also about authority in the sense that, well, we want to hear from experts, people who have expertise. Right. We don't think of everyone as equal in that sense. Right. We want to hear from the person who actually understands the state budget or who knows what genetically modified seeds are. So there are principles that are in conservatism, baked right into deliberation that can be foregrounded, but just rhetorically in the United States, everything about democracy and deliberation seems to be getting attached to kind of the cultural left. And we go all the way back to cultural cognition. That's very unfortunate, but it doesn't have to be that way. We really could celebrate the conservative and liberal values that are expressed in all sorts of democratic designs. We just need to do a better job of that.

Okay, so here's the final part. I have an assignment for you. I want you to design a process to solve the following problem. Okay, so we've been working a lot on the Electoral College or reform of the Electoral College. And it's actually a hard project to convey comprehensively because it's a complicated question. I mean, there's a simple solution for the Electoral College, which is to repeal it and to just have national popular vote. And I personally would favor that. But, you know, I think politically the idea of an amendment repealing the Electoral College and just having national popular vote is a non starter. So I just don't think that's going to happen. So if we, we can say that's a great idea, but what else could we do? And we shift to the channel of, okay, how could we repair the Electoral College? We've talked about three kinds of problems. The most important problem by far is the fact that states allocate their electors in a winner take all fashion. So what that means is if you get 50% plus one of the votes in Pennsylvania, you get every one of the electors from Pennsylvania. And what that means nationally is that the only states that matter in an election are the so called swing states. So Pennsylvania matters, but California and Utah and Wyoming and Texas don't matter because we know who's going to win in those states. And so what we know is candidates spend no time and no money trying to persuade those voters to support them. In 2016, 99% of spending was in 14 swing states. So that's the winner take all problem. A second problem is the electors problem. We have electors, not electoral votes. So electors are people. And the framers certainly thought electors were people who had discretion. So does an elector have a right to vote however he or she wants? And if you think that we shouldn't have such a system, then the question is how do you fix electors? And the third, which is really in one sense the worst of the problems, but in another sense is not so important because it doesn't happen very often, is the contingent election problem. So if the Electoral College doesn't find a majority, then it goes to a process called the contingent election process. And what that is is that the House of Representatives picks the President, but not through a straight up vote of Representatives. Instead, every state gets one vote. So Wyoming gets as much power in selecting the president as California, which of course from a Democratic perspective is just crazy. And most people think that this is just a design flaw to today. Whether it made sense 230 years ago is a separate question. Okay, so it's a complex question. And so from your experience, if I said to you, how would you design a process to enable ordinary people to think about this in a constructive way, what would you do? How would you do it?

Well, I'll start off by saying I agree with you that I think the Constitutional amendment would be the best solution if that were available. I think the multi state compact appears to be a constitutionally doable workaround, right? Where we get, you know, a majority, the states that hold the majority of the Electoral College votes to agree to all support the popular vote winner. So there may be a workaround. But I'm going to honor your question, which wasn't really how do you feel about those things? What would you do about these, given what you do? So I'll take it for granted. So first we have the problem of the swing states and the rest of the nation being ignored. I think that's a terrible problem with a hidden benefit, which speaks to one of the other concerns often on this podcast, which is it makes running for president a lot cheaper. So that's something we're uncomfortable to acknowledge, right, that if you do have to campaign in California all of a sudden, sudden you have to pay for these incredibly expensive media markets. Well, now the Internet changes that a bit, so maybe that's mitigated now. But I worry about alienation. One of the things that the Citizens Initiative Review is meant to do, and in fact the jury reforms in both Argentina and Japan and other countries are meant to do, is to make people feel more engaged as democratic citizens, right? Reconnect them to that civic spirit. And so if you feel more informed about an issue in the state of Oregon, our surveys are showing that you actually become more likely to not drop off as you're moving down the ballot, right? You feel like, hey, I know something about Measure 73, I'm going to vote on it. Well, obviously the Electoral College has the exact opposite effect for the most important single office in the world, right? We're telling most Americans that their vote doesn't count. That's not good. And it again contributes to this problem of the non voter, because presidential elections are the big bump in turnout in the US and if we just keep repeating that message that your vote doesn't count, we can expect turnout to go down now, which will have perverse indirect consequences on all the other things on the ballot in those states that are not swing states. Right? So we need the presidential election to feel important, to draw people into the election so that they participate in everything that is in that election, not just the presidential itself. So, number two, the electors are people and they're supposed to have discretion. Well, again, if I accept the premise, at a minimum, I could say the Electoral College is a wasted opportunity. So I may feel that the electors should not be acting independent of what the voters directed them to do. And I understand that depends on state law and how the Supreme Court rules on a case that is near and dear to you and others. But let's set that question aside and just say, hey, we are getting these people together. Wouldn't it be something if, regardless of whether in fact they had any agency with regard to the presidential election, what if they had the chance to say something? What if they got the chance to comment on the election, the quality of the election, the electoral process, right? They are the Electoral College. And, you know, when you ask people about random samples and the wisdom of them, one of the things that people will say is, you know, if there was anything I wouldn't trust my legislature to do, it's to pass laws about legislatures, right? And about elections. So it could be an interesting repurposing of the Electoral College to give it a voice on electoral quality questions. Right. Not necessarily a definitive one, but what if, you know, and again, we're just playing with it. What if they were empowered to, like the Citizens assembly in British Columbia, to propose legislation, national legislation, or propose rules or guidance or something at the federal level that could be worked with the states on? So that's one exciting repurposing of the Electoral College. And I like the idea that if in fact the electors had no, no agency, that is no ability to say something that would affect the outcome of the presidential election, well, then that takes the pressure off, choosing partisan hacks as your electors. Right. Then the states can say, well, sure, you know what? We'll just do a random sample. Because it doesn't, you know, there's no political stake. So that's interesting. And then finally, your third part is this contingent election where it goes to the House and each state gets one vote. Well, that's just a catastrophe. I don't know what I can tell you about that other than, holy smokes, how demoralizing and how alienating to voters, especially from larger states, which means voters disproportionately from urban populations, which means voters who are disproportionately progressive or liberal. So we've got this politically conservative process, very biased process, baked right into the presidential selection process, and God help us if we comes to that.

Okay, but, but I, and I agree with everything you've said about what the answer could look like or how to think about the answer, but I'm asking a slightly different question. I'm saying, how would you design the process to engage people deeply enough that they could come to an understanding of why what you've just said makes so much sense? I mean, what, what would you do? How would you design it or build it? I mean, so how would I engage

the national public as opposed to just the electors?

Yes, the national public. And, you know, we're living in Covid time. So how would you do it? Right now, like tomorrow, if I said to you, I'm hiring you to run this as a process, what would you do?

Well, I'll tell you the direction all my research is heading. As I seem to work on things for about 10 years, and as we're wrapping up the grants and things that funded the Hope for Democracy book, my attention is shifting into probably my next crazy design idea, which I call tongue in cheek, the Democracy Machine. The idea is, what if we took the best features of online affordances and drew People in to spaces where we might be able to motivate them to actually deliberate and say meaningful, thoughtful things. And it's kind of the opposite of the Twitter and Facebook experience of being online, where we take principles from game design, from everything from mobile gaming to video games and so on. And you can, in interesting ways, give people incentives and so on that get them to think, that get them interested in getting it right. Just to take one concrete example, you know about prediction markets, right, where people can say which candidate they think is going to win a primary. And there's all sorts of prediction markets online that you can play during a presidential election, and you're just playing for status. If only your friends were paying attention, it would be more valuable. But what that means is that if I support Bernie Sanders and there's a primary coming up where Hillary is strongly favored, if I say that Bernie is going to win, I know I'm undermining my own cause. Not the cause of Bernie getting elected, but the cause of me getting status for being able to effectively predict outcomes. Now, you can apply that to any kind of issue. And there's some great work on the. The fancy term is super forecasting, where you can actually show that think tanks which are ideologically committed to a particular world, if motivated by a large enough prize incentive, will suddenly start producing predictions that are quite reasonable and appear to be grounded in facts. So what I would say to your question is I would try to engage the public nationally progressively in some kind of process like this, where there are real incentives to actually learn things, get things right, talk to people with different points of view. So, for instance, your voice might be amplified if you're able to reach an agreement and thus have a collective voice with people who are politically the opposite of you. You might get more voice and more credit if you can recruit into the process people who are historically outside of the process, people who aren't even showing up online. So again, you build in these kind of corners requests and incentives that get people's behavior channeled in really interesting ways. So that may seem a little bit out there, but you put a pretty tough problem on the table. And I'm coming at it with a pretty radical design solution that would obviously have to be tested, just as all of these ideas do. But, you know, it would have a shot.

It's really exciting. Is there anybody doing something like that now, or is this the thing you're going to do? And when you do it, then the world's going to say a little from

column A, a little from Column B. I keep drawing on examples from around the world, but one of the problems I identify is that when you create a digital innovation like this, often it comes from a grant or a nonprofit. It tends to disappear. There's a process and software called Consul C O N S U L, which was developed in Spain, Corporate. Quite a bit of money was put into Barcelona and Madrid and in fact it created two different open source systems. But now Spain changed governments and so Consul has drifted to Scotland and other places. So these software innovations keep popping up. They get better and better, but they also tend to disappear. Taiwan has had some really good innovations along these lines, and those appear to be sustained for now. But yeah, I think we need to have a more sustained effort on this. Working with a colleague at Stanford, we've pitched an idea which we're not. The only ones arguing for is a corporation for public software where you would actually have a national effort. In the same way we have to create some good programming through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You'd try to create good software that could be used by any government at any level to engage the public in really constructing of ways like this.

What a great idea. I mean, obviously the Obama administration had a lot that was trying to do something like this, but to generalize it and to make it a central part of what we can imagine public service to be, that would be incredibly valuable.

Well, had the 2016 election come out differently. We had proposals ready to go, but it did not go differently than it did, unfortunately, at least in this reality.

John, thank you so much. This has been incredibly interesting and valuable to a lot of the work that we're doing, and I'm sure many people are going to find it incredibly interesting when they hear it on the podcast.

Well, thanks for doing your podcast. I love how you're bringing together ideas not just about elections, but about the kind of, the bigger questions of democracy, which are always going to be with us. And I hope listeners don't get discouraged that some of the great ideas in here haven't been implemented yet in their lifetimes. Democracies change, they grow, they evolve. Sometimes it takes a long time, but you have to keep pushing forward the best ideas. So thanks for doing that.

Yeah, thank you. And we know right now there's huge demand for fixing these problems. So having ideas out there is the essential first step. Thank you very much, John.

Take care.

So that's the podcast. These podcasts are produced by citizens us. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us and this podcast at Equal Citizens us another way. There's a place there to share the podcast, to give us your ideas and your feedback. Please do both, especially if you have candidates who you think would be particularly good for us to talk to, not because they've checked off the box of reform, but because they've made reform fundamental to what they want to talk about. As I've said again and again because I think it's such a clever line, so I'm just going to say it again here. Whether or not the philosophers can resolve, whether a tree falling in the woods, when no one hears it creates any sound, we're absolutely sure that a podcast that is not shared does not produce any change. As I've said many times in these podcasts, some of the ideas here are discussed in the books that I published last fall. They don't represent us. We're going to launch a book club on democracy, and this book is going to be the first of those. It's going to be an interesting way to run a book club where the author will present parts of the book over the course of a number of weeks and will bring people in to a conversation, virtual conversation, that will allow them to raise questions or deliberate about parts of the book. So stay tuned for how that will work. But the ideas that relate to the ideas that you've just heard John Gastel talk about are really critical to develop in the context of that book, and I'm eager for the conversations that come out of that. So thank you again for listening to this podcast. Thank you for your support of Equal Citizens us. This is Larry Lessig. Until the next one of these.