S5E23: Lifeboats: Claudia Chwalisz

This is Larry Lessig. So we're back in this episode to the innovation of citizen assemblies. And we're going to talk today to somebody who is building a practice around the world of citizen assemblies. Not an academic, not a politician, but a woman who is leading a nonprofit Democracy Next that is trying to inspire the next generation of democracy innovation. Claudia Chawalis is an author, activist and entrepreneur. In 2022, she founded Democracy Next, a research and action institute that describes itself as aiming to, quote, shift political and legislative power to everyday people through citizens assemblies. Democracy Next is about building new institutions that are based on the principles of citizen participation, representation by lottery, what's called sortition and deliberation. She was involved in designing the world's first permanent citizen assemblies in Paris and in Belgium and in Brussels, the Brussels one on climate. This year she was named one of the Obama leaders in Europe. And she's on the global advisory council of the Data Tank, a think tank and do tank that works with people around the world to unlock data's potential, gathering, assessing and reusing it responsibly. Claudia grew up in Canada, though she was from a Polish family and she went to university at Queen's University and then University College London. She's now located in Theory in Marseille in France. And I say in theory because I can report to. She is herself everywhere, as is her influence now, everywhere. Stay tuned. So, Claudia, thank you so much for talking to us about what I think is the most interesting lifeboat that we can conceive of in the context of democracy reform. So you've been working extensively on projects that are referred to in Europe as citizen assemblies. Why don't you help us understand what those are and what you've been doing?

Yeah. So, you know, maybe rather than giving you a standard definition, I'll just very briefly describe a recent Citizens Assembly. So this doesn't sound abstract. So where I live here in France, in December of this past year, 2022, the French government convenes the French civil Citizens assembly on End of Life. It brought together 184 people selected by lottery to be broadly representative of French society to deliberate on whether France should change its existing legislation on end of life issues and if so, how. So to be able to answer this question, this group of 184 people heard from around 60 experts, but experts in that wider sense of the term, also with state stakeholders, with faith group leaders, philosophers, people with lifelong illnesses. And after hearing all of this evidence, they weighed this up, they deliberated with one another and they worked to find common ground on a shared set of propositions to the government. So they came up with 67 detailed proposals about how the legislation should change, and they found 92% consensus amongst themselves for these proposals. So a Citizens assembly is a group of people selected by lottery to be broadly representative, convened around a specific policy issue. And then they have the deliberative space, though, to really grapple with the complexity of the issue and do the hard work to find common ground on some shared proposals for it.

So how long did the assembly actually assemble?

So they met for 27 days of deliberation over the course of four months. And it was at the beginning of April of this year that President Macron convened the assembly members to hear and receive the recommendations.

And so just practically, when you think about the citizens who are participating, how is it possible for them to be able to devote that amount of time and where do they do it and how do they travel and what are the details like that?

Yeah, so these are very good questions. So practically, people met over the course of often three day long weekends. So it wasn't 27 days consecutively. People were paid for their time. They're paid the same thing as what they would get paid for jury duty here. So I think it's something like €87 a day. Childcare was provided, all their transport costs were covered, accommodation covered. And out of the initial group, so at the start there were 185 people. Only one person dropped out because they changed jobs. And because of that, it was really impossible to continue. But everyone else was there for almost every session, if not every session. So the dropout rate really tiny, and we actually have the evidence that that's quite often the case. So we see that when this is something that's truly meaningful, when there's a commitment from a government to actually take this seriously, people are more than willing and able to be able to commit a large amount of time that it's both a privilege and a responsibility to be a member of such a Citizens Assembly.

So what does it mean for the government to take it seriously? How did Macron make that?

Yeah, well. So? Well, Macron doesn't have the unilateral right to decide, at least in this instance. Let's avoid commentary on the wider French political context right now. So it's not like this will now magically automatically become law either. So this will now be connected into a parliamentary process. Macron did call on the government to really take on the Citizens Assembly's proposals and for the legislation to be changed by the end of Summer of this year. So. So at the moment, things are kind of going through that traditional parliamentary process. So there is that connection. It's not guaranteed, but there is that strong, let's say, normative pressure that's being put on both by the President, who's like, we should listen to the citizens, but also there is a lot of media coverage. So Le Monde did an editorial also calling on Parliament to accept fully the recommendations. There was coverage in every single main French newspaper about this, also in lots of regional papers, on the main radio shows, press primetime, 8pm News talk shows. Members of this assembly were interviewed. So all of this also contributes to a sense of this assembly actually needing to be taken seriously, that there's that spotlight and accountability that also comes from media and journalists as well.

And so how was it actually funded? Was it the French government that paid for it?

It was the French government that paid for it. I think it cost something like four and a half million euros, which sounds like a lot, but it's also a tiny fraction of what gets spent on the whole infrastructure for elections. So it's obviously more than a typical consultation, even though there's a lot of money that goes into consultations as well. But it's actually a really, I think, reasonable amount of money to be spending on a process where the vast majority of those costs go to paying people for their time, paying facilitators to make sure this is neutrally and independently facilitated and this sort of thing.

So the sample that constituted the Citizens assembly, who drew that sample?

It's a good question. I don't know the specific details of this French example, so I don't want to go into making things up. So what I'll do, though, is explain the way that the kind of lottery selection process typically happens. So there's different methodologies, but the most common one occurs in two steps. So usually in a first instance, there is a very large number of invitations that go out completely at random, usually in the post. So something like 30,000 letters will go out at random, addressed by either the President or Prime Minister or a minister or the mayor who's behind the initiative for a Citizens assembly, inviting people to put themselves forward as an assembly member, and that letter will explain what is the problem that is being solved. Should we change this legislation? If so, how? And how the process will work, the amount of time it'll take, who will they hear from, that they will be paid, childcare provided answers, common questions like, no, you don't need to wear a suit, you know, trying to break down those barriers to participation that makes it as likely as possible that people. People will say yes. And amongst everybody who says yes to that initial invitation, there's then a second lottery process, this time controlling for the technical word stratifying for that final group to be broadly representative of society when it comes to things like gender, age, geography, and something that captures socioeconomic differences. Here in France, it was education level, and there might be one or two other criteria, but usually it's at least those four for upon which that group gets constituted and how that process works.

Okay, so the French example is extremely inspiring, but I want to step back a bit and understand how were you inspired to think about this as a reform for democracy? What were the examples that you were exposed to or you learned about that made you think this is something we should do in the 2020s? Yeah.

So, yeah, we've been focusing a lot on this one example. But actually, what's partly inspiring to me is that this is one of hundreds before founding Democracy Next, which is the research and action Institute that I'm leading now. I was at the OECD where I had established and was running the work on Future of Democracy, where together with my colleague, we collected almost 600 examples of these citizens assemblies that have taken place around the world, different levels of government, all sorts of issues addressed by them. And I came to be doing that work, though, in the first place, from initial research I was doing back in 2010 around populism, though. So given your question about what even led me into thinking about these assemblies, it was actually research on populism and trying to understand the extent to which people's disillusionment with politics and the system, but also their lack of agency and voice in really shaping decisions, affecting their lives, affecting their communities, was driving people towards these actors and movements and so on. Now, it's obviously a complex phenomenon, so this is not the only thing, but from the research that I've done, I've become really convinced it's a core part of it. And if that's the case, then how do we actually create meaningful ways for people to have agency and voice in public decision making? And that was my first foray into what's this kind of broader territory of democratic innovation. But it was when I first came across citizens assemblies that there was this light bulb moment of feeling like, oh, this is not just trying to address some of the symptoms of these deep problems, but actually getting to those deeper roots of them. And I came across this first through David Van Raybrook's book Against Elections. So I think back in 2012, because I read the French translation before the English. And I got in touch with him because I found it just so incredibly inspiring. And he put me in touch with a lot of different leaders doing this work when I was doing research for my book, the Populist why Politics and Democracy need to Change. And I think one of the most inspiring examples that remains inspiring to this day comes from Ireland, where back in 2016, the Irish government had convened the Citizens assembly around constitutional issues. Now, they had been tackling actually a bunch of different constitutional, but one of the five was around abortion, an extremely divisive issue, for a very long period of time. And this group of Irish people that were convened for about five months to deliberate on this issue in particular, after hearing from lots of different experts, advocates on both sides of the issue found 67% consensus amongst themselves that, yes, there should be a constitution, constitutional referendum to change this constitutional part. But also they came up with the details for how the legislation should change if people vote for change. So when the referendum happened, people were also not going into it blindly. There was also a sense of, you know, under what conditions, with what support, because this is often framed as a yes or no issue, as though it's black and white, but actually there's a lot of detail and nuance into it. And so that referendum happened and it was passed. But I think what's become inspiring too is that this is now one of many examples at the national level in Ireland that have taken place. So it's the most widely known. But they've had four constitutional referendums, the other ones being on same sex marriage, divorce and blasphemy. There's another one planned this year on gender equality. There's discussion of another one around biodiversity loss to introduce protection of biodiversity into the constitution. But they've also dealt with issues to do with devolution of power. The one that's going on right now is about drug policy reform. So a real kind of wealth and diversity of important issues that have been tackled at that national level. And I think what's interesting is we're seeing how this is really transforming the relationship between government and citizens, that it's less confrontational, that on both the side of citizens, there's a recognition of how complex and difficult it is to take these decisions, but also on the side of government, that there's a sense that actually we can really trust in everyday people if we create these deliberative conditions for them to be able to deal with the complexity of the issues and to find common ground with one another, and they're really starting to rebuild trust in that way and really just tackling difficult issue after difficult issue. The most recent public polling in Ireland shows that most people see the assembly as the place where we deal with Ireland's hardest problem problems. And on the side of the government, ministers are sort of fighting with one another that their issue is the next issue for the next assembly.

Right, right. So what's striking about the Irish example is it might suggest a general rule for when these make sense. So take the abortion issue or the same sex marriage issue. It was pretty clear that the Irish Parliament was. Was not actually free to address those issues in a way that reflected the views of ordinary people in Ireland, because obviously those are highly divisive issues, especially in a religious context. And that institution probably just couldn't address it properly. So you shifted outside of that institution into a different kind of institution, one that's not constrained by these particular distortions, and it can address it effectively. And so that suggests maybe a kind of balance between the extreme view that you replace all legislators and representative bodies with sortition and the status quo, where you say basically none can be done through sortition. Instead, you might think of sortition as addressing the sort of issues we have good reason to believe the legislature just is incapable of addressing. And so in the United States, you might think of money in politics as a perfect issue for this kind of assembly, because we know the politicians are not going to be able to address that on their own. Maybe guns is another example of that, where we know that the public overwhelmingly supports the sort of reform that legislators can't bring about, but it's a complement then to the legislative process that makes the whole democracy much more effective. Is that a way you would think about it?

Yes and no, because I do largely agree with a lot of what you've just said, and I'm not by any means suggesting let us just replace Parliament or replace all elected politicians with people selected by lot. So just to be clear about that, I don't think that's the case. But I don't think it's enough to just say that this should be just a compliment to the existing system either. I think actually we need to be also more ambitious with thinking about how is our democracy evolving and can and should it evolve for the future. So I really think that today when we think of democracy, most people think of elections, and even when we look into an art and, you know, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, for instance, it really enshrines democracy as elections in that document. And I think this is a very limiting and narrow view of what we mean mean by it. And it's part of what kind of holds most of the power in those institutions. And I think what we're seeing with the evolution of citizens assemblies and also them becoming more institutionalized in many places is that these are not just another tool in the toolbox for the politicians to use if or when they want to. If there's political will in a moment in time. I think we really need to actually be thinking about how are we building new democratic institutions for another democratic paradigm that could be defined by these principles of citizen participation, representation by lottery and deliberation. And that we're working to actually transfer real power to these assemblies and thinking about how does this properly connect in to this wider system that has electoral institutions and other bodies that are part of it, so that we're widening the ecosystem of democratic institutions, but also being able to shift, you know, even the notion of what is democracy. Because for the moment, most of these assemblies, I mean almost all of them really, all of them have been advisory in nature. And at the end of the day it comes back to elected officials to decide whether or not to take on those recommendations. And I think we really need to be exploring seriously what would that mean to, to make these citizens assemblies actually decision making authorities. What does that mean for legitimacy, for accountability? I don't think these are unanswerable questions. I think they've been really under explored both by the academic community and by practitioners in the field. And this is part of the avenue of thinking that we're trying to open up at Democracy Next. And these are the questions that really animate me because I think we really need to think about how do we shift political and legislative power to people, not just give a voice.

There are two different directions I want to go and I want to make sure we get to go each way. One direction is to just recognize actually what's the nature of the problem that citizen assemblies helped solve. In the United States this is very pronounced. And I think in Britain it's pronounced. In France less so because you've got really effective regulation of on political speech. But in the United States we have an infrastructure for media that pulls people into partisan camps and like wants them to be ignorant and angry because that's what turns them into engaged viewers or participants on Facebook or something. And that's just an, that's just an, I think unavoidable flaw with the current incentives around media. We're not going to Go back to the days where people watched one of three television shows and they were moderate in their character. Okay? So if we have to accept that as, like a reality of modern life, the thing that citizen assemblies enable is to bring people into a context where they actually can be exposed to the other side, and they can see that the other side is not a bunch of lizards, that they're actually people who have kids, too, and they're just trying to figure out how to make their life work, and they're not out to. To demonize or destroy anybody. And so the point is, you protect the democratic process from this poisonous media environment by bringing people into a process where they're, in a sense, insulated from that. Does that sound like a fair description of what you're doing?

Yeah, I definitely think that's one set of the sort of benefits of citizens assemblies as well. And I think in addition to that, though, the fact of random selection and the principle of everybody having an equal chance of being selected in the first place is also an important signifier, actually, that everybody should have the agency and the dignity of playing a meaningful role in shaping these decisions. It's a reflection of true political equality. And again, creating the. By bringing people together in this sort of lengthier period of time, it creates that deliberative space for people to really bring out the collective intelligence of the group. Because we also have a huge amount of research which shows us that people tend to come to better decisions the more diverse and heterogeneous a group is. And so there's just so many different elements, actually, of why these processes both lead to better types of decisions that come out of them, but are actually also more genuinely democratic than the way we're doing things within our current system of electoral politics.

Yeah, that's really great. Okay, so then the second dimension of this is, what's striking about this, is the way this is often discussed is that these are innovations that are happening outside of the United States, but from within the United States. I think it's a fair description of the last, the history of the United States, that we have always shifted enormous political power to really imperfectly representative citizens who get to exercise government power. I mean, I'm actually building a database that tries to evince this point, but there are billions of dollars that are shifted in America every single year because of the decision of seven or eight jurors sitting on a jury. I mean, there are people, unfortunately, in the United States who are executed every year because jurors have decided that they are guilty beyond a Reasonable doubt. So the point is, like we in the United States have already embedded into our governing system the idea that certain decisions will be handed over to citizens unelected representatives, and they will make those decisions in some ways unreviewably, because if it's a finding of fact, that's it, Nobody gets to overturn it. The only problem is that those institutions are just so imperfect from the standpoint of what we understand about representativeness or the opportunity for reflection. So in the American context, I feel like if you get people to recognize we already have citizen assemblies, they're just really bad because they're not really representative. Lawyers get to screw up who sits on them. They are not given the kind of support. I mean, you said in Europe you get 80 some dollars euros a day to sit on a jury. In the United states it's like 10 or 15 and there's no childcare. So it's a really horrible process in the United States. But it's a tradition that speaks to the idea that we already recognize important decisions need to be vested in citizens, not in elected officials. And if we could build on that, we actually have a pretty good platform to try to aspire to the things you've accomplished already in France.

Yeah, definitely. And I think maybe the analogy of jury duty for policy is something that people can quickly wrap their heads around. But. But as you're saying, actually much better and more democratically designed and implemented jury duty because, yeah, I think having that larger group, but also all of those things that break down barriers to participation, that make it much more inclusive, are just as important to make sure this does not turn into some sort of technocratic exercise either, but actually is something that's democratic in nature.

So what do you mean by technocratic? What's the thing you're criticizing?

Well, so the thing I'm criticizing is that I think there's a way of doing citizens assemblies or doing other forms of deliberation in a way which is more driven by things like, let's say the elements of, like trying to find a stable statistically significant sample size and doing research around opinion change within the group, rather than focusing on the elements of the process which are about fulfilling a principle that everybody had an equal chance of being selected to be part of this process, that people were paid fairly, that childcare was provided, that there was independent facilitation, perhaps that invitations went out in multiple languages, which is what happens in many multilingual contexts. So all of these additional design criteria, which are really important, if you really see this as A democratic exercise and not something to just get to maybe a slightly more informed view of what the public think, like an enhanced deliberative opinion poll.

Yeah, so this is the. I mean, there's an interesting tension in the movement, I think, between the great work of Jim Fishkin and deliberative polling and citizen assemblies. And that's what you're pointing to here, right, that deliberative polling is really focused on being a great pole and citizen assemblies is really focused on being a great part of democracy. And those are not necessarily the same thing, is that.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I'm very familiar with Jim Fishkin's work, and I think, and I really respect it for many things, but we need to remember actually that the origins of that work was how do we improve. Improve opinion polling methodology? Not how do we improve democracy? And I think it really does significantly improve opinion polling methodology, but at the same time, it has a much more rigid structure where there's much less of a blank page given to people involved, there's much more emphasis into, I don't know, narrowing the set of options which are even on the table. The deliberations are much shorter on average than. Than in citizens assemblies. And actually, many of the deliberative polls that Pishkin and his colleagues have run have had no connection whatsoever to policymaking. So, again, I mean, that's fine. They've been showing that it's a better form of opinion polling, but I think it's very different. When you think of going back to the first example I mentioned, the French Citizens assembly on end of life, 27 days of deliberation, hearing from over 60 experts, coming up from their own blank page, 67 recommendations for how this legislation should change. That's just incomparable to the methodology of a deliberative poll in so many ways.

Okay, so I wonder whether you're familiar with what has happened in Mongolia around the Mongolian constitutional process.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the few examples where deliberative polls have been used in connection to, I mean, constitutional change in this instance. But, yeah, direct public policymaking with a very large number of people. I don't remember all the details off the top of my head, so I don't want to go into that, but I am generally familiar with.

Right. I mean, I think what's exciting about that idea is that actually that's a case where. Where you could call it a deliberative poll or a citizen assembly, whatever, but it actually constrains what the government can do because the Constitution says you can't have an amendment to the Constitution until it's passed through this process. And then the process is introduced into the deliberation about the amendment inside of Parliament. And that example has inspired me in the United States to think about ways we could democratize elements of the constitutional process which right now are thought of as having no connection to democracy at all. For example, we have a very difficult process for amending our Constitution. Every amendment that has been passed has been proposed by ordinary organizations of government, Congress. And it's very hard to imagine Congress proposing an amendment in the current world because the amendments require 2/3 of Congress to agree. And there's literally nothing that 2/3 of Congress agrees on. So there's no possibility of amending through that process. The alternative has been the idea of an convention under the Constitution that terrifies people because they think, oh my gosh, a whole bunch of right wing or left wing crazies would, would take over the convention and they would propose amendments and who knows what would happen to them. But the idea that we're beginning to build out in the United States is that imagine there's a convention, but the delegates to that convention are legally constrained not to vote in a way that's inconsistent with the views of a citizen assembly. So Massachusetts, for example, could set up a citizen assembly. It could begin to review proposals to amend the Constitution. Constitution. It could just be running perpetually, and every six months it would get together and here's the latest proposal, here are the sides, and you view it. And then the end of the consideration, they would vote. And the rule could be something like if the proposal didn't get 60% support in the citizen assembly, you as a delegate to the convention, are not allowed to support it. So that it would be an effective way to democratically tie the convention process to this idea of the citizen assembly. And if you imagine 50 states developing their own assemblies, all of them deliberating on these constitutional issues, it would raise the salience of this issue in the United States in a dramatic way that could begin to break through the obsessive focus on the horse race between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans running for Congress over the presidency. This sounds closer to your vision of what citizen assemblies should be, or seems close to it. And I just wonder whether that's something that you think makes sense in the context of constitutional reform.

Yeah, well, I think that's really interesting to think about, and I think you're quite right to point out that this is one way to work within some of the constraints of an existing system and to think A bit creatively about how to change that. And actually, the last paper I had written for the OECD before I left was 8 Ways to Institutionalize Deliberative Democracy. And this form of actually having a legal requirement to have a deliberative process, whether that's a Citizens assembly or otherwise, before certain types of decisions can be taken, taken, exist in numerous forms as well. So actually, in France, for example, there's a law which stipulates that for any changes to legislation, either new legislation or changes to existing legislation around bioethics, there must be a really rigorous deliberative assembly process that takes place. There's no obligation for legislators to have to take on board fully those recommendations. Recommendations, because that still is against the limits of what's within the French constitution. But the process itself must take place and must have serious weight in whatever happens next. So I think the premise of exploring those sorts of requirements that could make a Citizens Assembly's propositions have some real weight. They already have some form of precedent in different places that we can draw inspiration from, from, and I think certainly would help get around some of the partisan divides in the United States to have processes where people are brought together through random selection, but then convene for lengthier periods of time to find those larger thresholds of consensus amongst themselves. Often in these citizens assemblies, it's either 70 or 80% consensus, which is required for a group's recommendation to really get ratified. So there's a way of thinking about the checks and balances and how do you create legitimacy behind this, which is interesting.

Yeah. The way you just phrased that is extremely interesting as a description of the United States. How do you get around the partisan divide? And that's particularly compelling right now because it's. If you. Polling started in 2004 asking Americans whether they were what their party affiliation was, half of Americans claimed a party affiliation in 2004. Today, half of Americans say they are not a member of any party, that only 25% are Republicans and 25% are Democrats. And so this is a really effective way to think about what the citizen assemblies could be doing. They could be empowering people to participate in the political process that isn't bound by parties that don't even represent a majority of America anymore. And it's an effective innovation to continue to build on democracy without that one resistance that people often have, which I think is not based in fact. But I just wonder how you deal with it. To the idea of citizen assemblies is that they see them as puppets controlled by the experts who are presenting their views. And so how do we make sure that we trust the process to assure that the views the citizens are getting are actually the views that properly represent what the issue is? So climate is a great example. I mean, in the United States it's been rendered deeply partisan, as everything has. I take it it's less partisan in the States, United, European, the French context, it's like reality is accepted in France about this. So it might be more about how do we just deal with what we agree as the problem. But how do you address the anxiety that the process has been staged or predetermined or is just the control of whoever controls the experts here?

Yeah, well, in some ways it's a very fair question because who chooses the experts? How many experts? Which experts are all questions that have to be answered and which have a big impact on actually how do people understand this issue and the complexity of it or not? So in the international standards that we had developed at the oecd, based on the evidence base of looking at hundreds of examples and how does this work around information and experts, there were two main principles that we tended to emphasize, which is first, that there needs to be genuinely both a breadth and a diversity of expertise that gets presented to a group and that that doesn't just take the form of like a research paper or the academic, but that there's also stakeholders from different angles and perspectives of this issue that are part of that, people with lived experience related to this issue, that that also forms part of an evidence space, but that also people are able. The second principle is that people are able to request additional information before going on to formulate any recommendation. So if they're feeling like we still haven't fully comprehended this or it feels like we haven't heard really these different parts of the story here, that there's actually time within this process that people request that additional information and that does happen, happen often. And that this is for me why the principle of enough time is also crucial for ensuring that this is genuinely, truly possible and that it can even pass a common sense test of someone looking at this from the outside and being like, okay, well, yeah, after 27 days of deliberation, I feel like these people can probably have a very well founded, grounded view on the complexity of and the trade offs involved in this issue. And perhaps why I'm personally a bit more critical of the deliberative poll model, which is a lot shorter in time, because I think the shorter the time is, the more influence the few chosen experts do have on how People perceive the complexity of whatever issue they're deliberating on.

Are the citizens who participate in the assembly instructed about who, who they're supposed to be talking to or what kind of influence they're not allowed to accept? I mean, you know, is the oil industry allowed to take them out to dinner every night in the period leading up to their participation in the Assembly?

Right. No, it's a good point, actually. So one of the things that's probably worth specifying is that actually, before people get into any learning or deliberations about the issue themselves, there's often some form of kind of induction that happens as well, where people, they decide on what are going to be the kind of rules and values that will ground their deliberation amongst themselves. They hear a little bit about bias and just to be conscious of it, and how do you look out for this? They get some small amounts of training about how do you question experts and the fact that these people will all appear to have a lot of authority on these, on these issues. But, you know, these are different tips and things to keep in mind in terms of ways to approach this. So, you know, there's multiple elements to that, but I think that it's not perfect in itself, but it helps to counter and prepare people a little bit for what's to come. We haven't experienced a huge amount of the kind of lobbying you're describing about, like someone from an oil company trying to take someone out to dinner. But actually, during the French Citizens Convention on Climate, there were a number of people that were assembly members that were approached by a few of the stakeholders that had presented to the group. But those people all called them out to the media, being like, we were approached and they tried to talk to us individually. And I think that. So there's much stronger kind of safeguards against this when. Because in our existing system, with the logic of political parties and with ministers, we holding a lot of power over a portfolio, there's actually only very few people you need to lobby to get what you want. Whereas in an assembly where there's 150 people all selected by lottery, none of them can be reselected or reelected. It's a completely different logic of what's driving people's desire to be there. The public good really does come up on top as one of the reasons of what are we thinking about here when we're formulating. So am I saying it's perfect and there won't be corruption attempts? No, but I think, like, by design, this is much more kind of Safeguarded against that.

Right. And when. And when the result is really a fuzzy result, you know, it's like 70 or 80%, it's hard to really lobby against that because, you know, in an ordinary legislative process, a majority is a majority, so if you can take one away from the majority, you win. But in this process, 70 or 80%, it's a pretty vague number, so it's hard to really imagine how you can have an effect. But are they instructed that they are not allowed to accept gifts or contributions from interested parties, or is it just something you leave untouched?

You know, that's actually a very good question. I don't know if there's formal official rules. I mean, I think there should be. I feel like, because it has so much not really been an issue up until now, it's been a bit of an afterthought. But I do think that's actually part of the considerations of what needs to be in place and the rules around this process, because there are rules and a set of governance around these assemblies as well. So.

Yeah, right. Okay. So one other issue about this is I say this even though I don't believe it, but, you know, so in the American jury context, for example, nobody complains that they were not on the jury, but you can imagine that if citizen assemblies became significant, people would say, yeah, but why wasn't I included? Like, I should have been included. And, you know, the scientist types can say, yeah, you were included in a sense, because we have a representative, random representative, and so everybody had an equal chance to be there. But, you know, you still say, I wasn't there. And that leads me to wonder whether we shouldn't also think about how to complement the process with a parallel. You know, it's not binding or it's not actually even normatively significant, but a parallel process where people could even participate virtually. So, like, we have been building a deliberative platform, Jim has one as well, to enable virtual deliberation. It's called Deliberations Us, and it enables small groups, infinitely scalable. So you could have a million people deliberating in six to eight people at a time, but who are given information up front. They then deliberate. They're polled in the beginning, they're polled at the end, but you can imagine that process running alongside the actual citizen assembly. So everybody in principle could be part of the deliberation, and some are part of the deliberation and also relevant to the ultimate result. So if you're in the deliberative, you know, in the process, we're Trying to imagine if you're in the Citizen assembly and you decide that the balanced budget amendment is not supported, then you know, the delegates from your state will not vote for the balanced budget amendment. But if you're in the virtual deliberative process, you can, like, give your views and we will see how Democrats evolve or Republicans evolve on the basis of view. It seems like this could easily complement what you're describing. Is that right?

Yeah, well, there's a. Yeah, there's a few elements to pick up on and what you've just said. So one of them is this kind of critique that can come up about, well, you know, I wasn't selected to be part of this assembly, but you know, if we imagine a future where actually these assemblies are taking place at different levels of government on all sorts of issues and so on, people are much more likely to be selected at some point in their lives than to ever sit on Congress or be part of any other elected body. So it's also like, what are we compensated in terms of people's ability to actually have a direct influence on decision making? And it comes with this principle of rotation of both the privilege and responsibility of being an assembly member. And for me, this is also why the vision and the mission of the work that we're doing is about how do we make these assemblies a normal part of how democracy functions at all levels of government in different places, so that actually at all moments in time, there are multiple assemblies that are running and everyone at some point in their lives has been part of one of these. And they know that on other issues and other levels and other things, it's other people like them, their mother, their friends, their sisters, their colleagues, you know, that they are the ones who are also part of these assemblies. And so I think that to me is the main principle, because I don't think we can, nor we should all be involved in every decision all the time. So to go to your second point about the complementary aspect, I mean, I think, yes, we need to be thinking about how do we also make sure there is a more participatory element and that those inputs can feed as part of that one part of the wider evidence base, as I was saying earlier. But yeah, I think I believe in that principle that we cannot all, nor should we all, be involved in everything. And we should rather have a system where on rotation we have to become a lot more informed and take a lot more time to better understand the complexity of an issue that contributes really to a much deeper understanding and a considered public judgment. On it rather than having continuous public opinion polling, even if it's more deliberative in nature happening. But I do think we need to be creatively exploring what are are better ways to have that more participatory element complementing the deliberative components that are going on. So I'd be interested to learn more about what you're doing. We've been having some conversations and actually you've probably spoken with him about this as well, but with Deb Roy and the team at MIT center for Constructive Communication because I think the technology they've been developing with their group at Cortico, this kind of platform that, that people are using to record voice conversations around an issue and then having AI enabled synthesis of what comes out of those conversations as well as some analysis. Again, back to the voice recordings of all of this is to me an interesting compliment of thinking about how could you be encouraging people to actually have the in person conversation about these issues and recording them and for those recordings also to feed in to a much wider network of other recordings. So I don't know, I guess the technology element to me is about how do we use it to also complement some of the things that we know are kind of working better in person. As much as I think like the virtual deliberations, we've seen them happening more, especially after Covid times. But it's just not the same to deliberate on a really especially controversial issue when you haven't also had time to like have a drink with someone and spend a little bit of time with them in a more informal setting. Because there's actually also been so much recent research which has found that it's those more informal moments that both contribute to people building trust with one another, but also enable people to better deal with the complexity of the issues that they deliberating on. So we can't neglect that as like just an additional fun. Nice to have that people have dinner together before they deliberate on something. But I think it even makes sense to us intuitively that if you bring people together that way before bringing them to talk about gun control or abortion or anything else, it really helps actually that people can see each other just as other humans before getting into those deliberations too.

Right. But one point you said, which I think is really important to reflect on. You know, we take it for granted in modern democracies like the United States that the public's view is relevant to what, what policymakers do. But we're almost presuming that the public's view on anything at any Time is relevant. Like, we take a poll and we ask the public, what do you think about a carbon tax? And the public says what it thinks about a carbon tax? And we think, oh, that's relevant. But obviously the public hasn't had any time to understand what the issue of a carbon tax is. They don't, you know, they're living their lives. They're too busy already. And so it's. It's a sham view the public is being labeled with, and yet it's democratically relevant. Like you, you know, policymakers, you know, members of Congress will stand on the floor of Congress and they'll say, say 47% disagree with you, as if that's a relevant number. And I think one of the important things you're doing in what you're building is helping people to see that, yes, the democracy is ultimately the public, but it doesn't make sense to imagine that all of us at any moment understand anything enough to actually have a meaningful view. So let's begin to imagine processes where we can get a set of us to think about it. Like, we can just delegate for a period of time to this group, and we have faith in the group because it's representative random, blah, blah, blah. But. But that begins to be the way that we express the idea of the public. And what's interesting is, like at the founding of the American Republic, that was kind of necessary because there was no technical alternative. There was no way to do public opinion polls. There was no way to gather the whole of the United States in a group at a time. So the idea of juries has having a real role made sense? Because what was the alternative? And I think part of the problem we have right now is people do imagine the alternative. They talk about, oh, let's give everybody an app on their iPhone, and they can vote on every issue in Congress at any moment, as if that would be a solution to anything.

Sounds like a dystopia to me.

Yeah, it's dystopia, exactly. And what you're building, I think, gives people space to begin to understand this really critical point, that democracy is actually not what we all happen to think at any particular moment of time. Democracy is what we, Jim would put it, what we could think if we actually were informed and had a chance to deliberate about it with our fellow citizens. We can't do that. All of us, all the time. Let's find a way to get some of us to do it some of the time for us. Claudia, I'm so grateful. You take some time. Time to talk to us about this. And even more grateful for the important work Democracy Next is doing. And I hope the United States is the next place that Democracy Next gets to have a significant influence. And we're going to do whatever we can here to try and make that possible.

Yeah. Thank you, Larry. And we are starting to do more work in the United States because there is growing interest in this. And I think actually precisely just last small point is, you know, public, public opinion is also shifting on this. So not as much in the United States because awareness levels are still much lower than elsewhere. But we've seen over the past few years how in the countries that have had most of these assemblies happening, like in France and Ireland, the uk, Germany, most people are aware of these assemblies. And actually about two thirds of people want their recommendations to be binding, which also signals that a sense of trust in them, legitimacy. And I think with time there's a sense of this kind of democratic change actually being something that is demanded by the people as well. So it gives me hope, actually that we can be having another kind of democratic future.

It gives me hope too. Thank you very much for your time. This has been the 23rd episode of the season five of the podcast Another Way, produced by Equal Citizens, but produced physically by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens us. Give us your feedback and your ideas and share this podcast with your friends. That's how knowledge used to spread. We're not buying ads to spread this podcast. It takes you. We're grateful for that support. And if you can give financial support to keep Equal Citizens alive by paying the very few people who keep the lights on, I would be grateful. Go to Equal Citizens US Donate. Thanks again and stay tuned for the next episode.