S5E25: Lifeboats: David Farrell

This is Larry Lessig. In the last episode we heard the story of a citizen assembly failing. The drama of that story is actually even greater than I or Kata suggested, and I predict we'll eventually see a new constitution in Iceland based on the draft the council deployed. Parliament's failure is a constant and nagging outrage among many in Iceland. That nagging will grow. At some point it will boil over. But this week we turn to an extraordinary success. Ireland Ireland's effort at remaking democracy began about the time Iceland's did, and for the very same reason, the financial crisis of 2008. Footnote there's an extraordinary comparison between these two nations that I've not seen made very well about financial crisis, but let me know if I'm missing something. The comparison is this. Both Iceland and Ireland suffered enormous fiscal losses because of the 2008 collapse, but astonishingly, because of a case decided in some international court on the basis of some technicality, Iceland was forgiven its debts while the Irish people were forced to assume the bank debt and will be paying it off for a very, very long time. I know we spe of the luck of the Irish, but if there was ever evidence for the existence of elves, it is this. Anyway, back to the story Today we're going to speak with David Farrell, a professor of politics at the University of Dublin. David was a close observer of the extraordinary experience Ireland has had with what we call citizen assemblies. He's observed them as a political scientist and as a citizen of Ireland, as you'll hear in this convers conversation. He's an inspired critic, by which I mean both that he is an inspiration to academics everywhere and that though he is an appropriately critical academic, he's inspired by the practice he is critiquing and so obviously am I. David is a specialist in the study of representation, elections, parties and deliberative mini publics. His most recent books include the Oxford Handbook of Irish Book Politics, Deliberation Mini Public's Core Design Features, and Reimagining Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Front Line. These are just three of more than 20 books that he's published, but the focus in his current work, which is primarily deliberative mini publics, is the focus of our conversation today. David was the head of the school at University College Dublin from 2010 to 2013 and and again from 2016 to 21. Prior to his move to Dublin in 2009, he was a professor and head of Social Science at the University of Manchester. He's held visiting positions at Australia National University, Harvard Mannheim and the University of California, Irvine, from 1995 to 2018. He was the founding co editor of Party Politics and the president of the Political Studies association of Ireland from 2012-16. Stay tuned to this conversation with David Farrell. David, thank you so much. Most people in America, as in practically every American, has no clue about what's gone on in Ireland. What kind of extraordinary innovation has happened in Ireland? Not innovation in a historical sense, because obviously the idea of citizen assembly is something that we've had ever since the beginning really, of self government, but in a very modern sense. So I just want you to introduce the story to help us understand what got set up and why it became so significant.

Yeah. And it's a long story, so I'll do my best to try and condense it as much as I can. It really all starts with the Great Recession in and around 2009, 2010, and Ireland was very badly affected by that. Probably one of the worst affected of all the countries in Europe anyway. So there was a deep crisis in the country. Politicians were very much on the defensive. The existing government was kicked out of office in an election in 2011. And so there was an air of crisis. And I could go into the details, but it was about as bad as it can get. We were on our knees as a nation. And it was in that context that the Irish political science community decided to try and make our case for how we could try and change things so that we could try and avoid crises like this in the future. We felt we needed an argument about political and constitutional reform. And in the mix, we said one of the things we should think about is rather than having the angry citizens outside the Parliament banging on the gates, why not bring them in, into the center of the discussions so that citizens, ordinary citizens, can have an input? So the government in 2011 were receptive. And in 2012, they established the first process. It wasn't a citizens assembly. It was called the Convention on the Constitution, but to all intents and purposes, it was a citizens assembly. What was unusual was that this first process, a third of its members were members of parliament, and that's very significant. So it discussed, among other things, marriage equality. And so a subsequent referendum led to Ireland being the first country in the world to introduce marriage equality by popular vote of the citizens, and also the first country in the world to have a successful deliberative process result in a major policy change of that kind.

So let me stop you there, just because it's. The details are important. Even with this first convention structure. So there are 33 members of parliament and there are 66 randomly selected members of the public. Right. And then there's one person who's like the chair of the event of the process, right. These 66 that were randomly chosen, were people obligated to participate or were they chosen? And then they could say, no, I don't have the time or the ability to, to do this.

The latter. And you'll find in, in all the cases of these citizens assemblies, that's the, that's the way it's done there, there is no obligation. So in that sense it's not quite like jury duty. And there are details about the recruitment process which we could go into, which were far from perfect. At least in these early Irish cases. They've, they've improved of late. The 33 members of parliament, four of those 33 came from the Northern Ireland assembly and the others all came from the Parliament, the two chambers of parliament in the Irish Republic. And they were not randomly selected, so they were proportionate to the size of the party groups within the Parliament. But the significance of it was that to this day in our Parliament, we still have people who were part of that process, legislators and who have very fond memories of being involved. They had first hand experience of being in the room, literally in the room as part of a deliberative process. And if ever there's a reason as to why we've had so many of these processes since that's probably the biggest

reason and that's a very important design choice that we're going to see. Other countries weren't open to. I guess they were much more skeptical of including parliamentarians, but I think it turned out to be genius because it really got buy in from the political process in a way that these systems don't necessarily assure. So that, so that was pretty important. But then as you shifted to the process that began in 2016, that changed. Right. So that's the ongoing process that exists right now. So how did that get teed up and what's distinctive about that?

Yeah, correct. It changed in that we now adopted the title of citizens assemblies, which is the more normal way one calls this particular form of deliberative mini public. And no one really knows exactly why they changed from what they did in 2011, but most people realized the probable reason for it was because the first thing that this 2016 Citizens assembly was asked to discuss was whether to legalize abortion in Ireland. And that was an extremely hot topic. It remains a hot topic, as I know it is, in your own country, but it was clear that the politicians, particularly of the mainstream right of center parties, would have struggled to get any legislators willing to be part of a process of that kind. So that themed it up. It was made clear, no, let's just run this as a regular citizens assembly.

So how did it work with the abortion assembly? The assembly to discuss issues of abortion. So it's again, it's 100 people, 99 participants in one chair. Does the chair have some cool Irish name for it or is there some way to refer to the chair?

We would say Cahillock in Irish.

Okay, but these are randomly selected again. And tell us a little bit more about that process now as we're talking about the regular citizen assembly process.

Yes. So the random selection process, which was used again in 2016, was the same as 2011, which is where the government civil servants who are running the process commissioned a survey company, a regular survey company, and gave them the task of recruiting 99 people, which involved cold calling at people's doorsteps. So every tenth door, they'd knock on your door and they'd be looking for a certain demographic profile and depending on who opened the door, they would make the invitation and hopefully the person would come. And as you may know, the more common way of recruiting for a lot of these deliberative processes is a different method. It's a two stage method where you send out letters and people self nominate. And Ireland has now adopted that in subsequent citizens assemblies. But in 2016 it was this less perfect system. And I say less perfect because one of the problems that you tend to find with this cold calling approach is that it's quite easy for me to say to the person at the door, yeah, this sounds interesting, I'll do it. But I haven't shown much commitment in engaging with it. And so for that reason, what we tended to find with a lot of the early Irish processes was very low turnout and very high turnover of members.

So when did the citizen assembly process shift to being this more normal process?

It happened with the most recent ones. We're now on to our sixth such process. Right now there's one on drugs, but just proceeding this way. It was the one on. There were two run in parallel. One on whether to elect a Dublin mayor and one on the question of biodiversity in Ireland. These were run in parallel and for these two, they adopted the more normally best international practice of this two stage process.

So that's the process that France used in the Climate Assembly.

Exactly. And organizations like the Sortition foundation have been promoting this method CD in its discussions of best practice in the deliberative wave have talked about this as an advantageous method. So most practitioners and experts would say this is the better approach than the one that the Irish were using back then.

And why not to dawdle on this question, but why has the jury method not been tried or considered appropriate? Because at least in the American or the Anglo American tradition, this is an important part of public service, a jury duty. And it would seem that you could answer a question about whether you're really getting a random selection of the attitudes of people if you actually had an obligation to show up. So is it just too expensive or what would the real limitation be?

I'm guessing that the key one would be it would be a brave politician who would pass a law that would require its citizens to accept an invitation to come to one of these things. My guess is that depending on how this evolves as we get into the realm of potentially embedding these things and maybe moving towards the sort of hybrid, you know, dream of a democracy that some promote, where, for example, your, your second chamber of parliament is a sortition chamber, once we get into those sort of areas where they really have significant decision making powers, perhaps then that's the moment in which you'd have to explore that kind of change you're talking about.

And so have people, academics, who've looked at this gold standard process, the one that's now used most usually where there's a general inquiry and then people volunteer and then a random selection from that. Have academics tried to evaluate what kind of bias there might be in that group? Or what way would we want to think about discounting because of a potential bias?

There's a fair bit of academic discussion, as you can imagine, on this, and I think it's safe to say that everyone accepts that there is going to be a bias, that there is a bias, but one can always do one's best to try and control for that as much as possible. I mean, we know, for example in the case of the delivered to polls that I know you're very familiar with, that is just as much a risk as it is with these sort of citizens assemblies type approaches. And you try to balance for that in terms of getting a sense of how the demographics might vary in terms of if they haven't been involved versus if they have been involved. That's one approach. Another approach, which is actually quite interesting, we see it in the case of many of the British citizens assemblies, is that you don't just recruit on demographic, you can also recruit on attitude. So, for example, when the British House of Commons set up a Citizens assembly on climate change a few years ago, they carried out in the survey, in the recruitment, they surveyed people on their attitudes towards the climate emergency and, and they reflected that in the membership. So there's ways in which you can try to mitigate the worst effects of this. But I think everyone accepts that there's always going to be a bias. And I mean, I don't know enough about research on jury duty, but I'm 63 and I've never been on a jury in my life. So it makes me wonder, is there a bias issue anyway, even if you have supposed obligation?

Yeah, no, it's certainly true. Jury duty has evolved in a very corrupted way. I mean, not only do people have lots of ways of getting out, the lawyers are pretty good at making sure it's not really a random representative sample that's sitting on a jury because they want people who are obviously going to be strong for their side. But it's just the tradition of obligation that I think is interesting. Okay, so that's the way they're selected. And obviously the early ones were extremely important around questions of gay marriage. And the abortion one was very important too. Tell us what happened with the abortion Citizen Assembly.

Yeah, because the abortion one, I think was where Ireland really showed how this could be done very well. And it still held up as probably the best of the ones we've run so far. I mean, a little detail just to be aware of was that one that was appointed, that was set up in 2016. As I said, it discussed abortion first, but it had five other topics that it had to discuss afterwards. I think it was five, it's way back in time now, but certainly a number of other ones. So, you know, and they weren't run nearly as well, but the abortion one was a top priority for that government and they had allowed the Citizens assembly much more space than had been the case, for example, when they discussed gay marriage. So that the Citizens assembly in the end had five weekends, effectively five months, in which the process deliberation occurred. So that was one big positive about how that was run. But the second and probably even more important was a very clear instruction when it was set up on what would happen after it produced its report. And what followed when it sent its report to the Irish Parliament was that the Parliament set up a special all party committee of both houses of Parliament to review that report. And it took, I think from memory 9 months to review that report in detail, calling up many of the same experts that had appeared before the Citizens Assembly. In other words, it didn't ignore it, it didn't put it to one side. It didn't sort of say, that's fine, let's move on. And as professional legislators try and see how we might do this ourselves, it engaged with. It agreed with a lot of the recommendations, not all of them, but agreed with a lot of them. And then in turn, that report was debated in the plenary of the Parliament and then ultimately by the government, and then it went to a referendum. So what we saw in the abortion case was a much better way of embedding the output of the Citizens assembly within our parliamentary structure. And subsequent citizens assemblies have sought to try and follow that same approach.

Okay, so let's just be very basic about the actual process at the abortion assembly. So you had randomly selected people who show up. What are they given before they show up? What do they know before they actually

meet together, when they first show up? Very little. And when they first show up, the common way we do it in Ireland is it's a sort of big event in Dublin Castle, which is our main sort of venue for these sort of things. And the Prime Minister and the, you know, and leading politicians and others are there to greet them. And then they're given a nice dinner and they all go home. So the real work starts a few weeks later when they all come to the hotel ballroom. All our events are run in a hotel ballroom for reasons I can go into if you want to. And they're all at little round tables. So the entire. For the duration of the Citizens assembly, they all sit on effectively at the same table. You would have a wedding reception that evening, a round table with a facilitator and a note taker at each table, and they start to receive information. So before they would have arrived on the very first weekend, they will have received short documents produced by the experts who were being commissioned to provide some briefings for them. And these documents are kept very short and written in a language that the layperson can understand. And then they start to be educated. So the common way is you get a bit of information in advance. You get some presentations by experts that you can then question, and then also practitioners and lobbyists and people who have been impacted. We had, you know, we had presentations done confidentially, of course, by women who had either had abortions or decided not to have abortions, who could talk about their own personal experiences. So gradually, over the course of the various weekends, the members are brought up to speed on the topic and are

the Members, public in the sense that they go around and identify themselves as somebody who's in the abortion assembly.

It's a really important question. With some topics which are less controversial, everything is open. You generally get the names and the counties that the members come from, and they're all on camera for the plenary discussions. And a lot of the plenary discussions are put up on our Parliament channel or live streamed on the website. When it came to abortion, they treaded much more cautiously. Members were allowed to indicate if they didn't want to be seen on camera, so their tables were positioned in a way that the camera would never pick them up. And the identities of the members were kept quiet for as long as possible. One thing that's done in all of the Irish cases, which is important here, is that at the start of the process, the chair makes an announcement which is carried on the media to the effect that no lobbyist or any other individual should attempt to interfere with an individual member. And so far, we've had no experience of that.

Yeah, so they shouldn't attempt to, in the sense of it's a crime to. Or it's just inappropriate to.

It's inappropriate. There's no legal sanction. The only sanction is that they say in the event that, let's say, a lobby organization or an NGO tried to, that they would be excluded from having any right to come into the room to speak to members.

And so in the process of the initial stage, is there, you know, a typical, as you know, deliberative polling will have asked people upfront what they think about something and then ask them after the deliberation. Is there any upfront polling done before the process starts?

It's very limited. And, you know, every. As you. I'm sure you know, there have been loads of these citizens assemblies all around the world. I'm only here now talking about the Irish case. And again, we can go into more detail on this, but the Irish case tends to be very tightly controlled by government civil servants. And so academics like myself are allowed into the room under sufferance. And so I've been involved in providing an evaluation of some of the earlier citizens assemblies. I've become more critical and so somewhat excluded of late. And the experience there was, yes, we were allowed to ask questions, but the questions had to be cleared with the civil servants, you know, so not, for example, on the abortion topic, we were not allowed to ask the members opinions on abortions until the third week. We were specifically excluded from asking them. So we've published a paper in which we Tried to show how we used a proxy measure to try and assess how their attitudes changed on abortion, but we were somewhat restricted in that regard. So there is a possibility to survey them, but it's very limited in the Irish context. There's no control groups like you might find in some of the deliberative polls, so there's no one to compare against. And also in the Irish process, we're specifically excluded from recording the table discussions, which is a serious limitation on any research.

And the plenary discussions, though those are broadcast or those are obviously recorded.

They're recorded, and to this day, you could download all of them. They're all still on the website.

And so the ones where there's a more extensive survey right from the beginning, is there something we can learn about how the deliberation actually affects people or affects attitudes? Do we typically see attitudes veering further apart, or we do see them coming closer together, or what are we learning from that process?

So I haven't been involved in the more recent ones where there's been much longer periods to try and assess that. Most of the ones I was involved with, you were dealing with one weekend or two weekends of discussion. The one where we really had something to play with was the abortion one, and we published a paper on that that does show that attitudes liberalized on abortion somewhat. What could have been controversial if our data had been released before the finish of the Citizens assembly, but I can clearly say it now, is that there was a distinct bias in favor of abortion among the members from day one. And of course, we now know with hindsight that that was just simply reflecting that public opinion was already well ahead of the politicians on the need to liberalize abortion. So that actually they were a good representation of where public opinion was. However, they appear to be skewed in favor of abortion. So there was a large number who were in favor of abortion. There was sort of middle ground who were really unsure, and a really small number. It was almost in single figures of those who were against abortion. And as we tracked them across the weekends, what we saw was a shift towards a liberalization in a liberalizing direction

and in the construction of the actual room with the people sitting around the tables. Is there some effort to think about who's sitting with whom? Is there some effort to make tables diverse or assure that there isn't polarization possible because of the dynamic of the tables?

Yeah, it's sort of more in an artistic way than in a scientific way, I suppose is the way to put it. But what tends to happen is that there's a senior civil servant who's seconded from other duties for the duration, and that civil servant, among other things, makes sure that the tables are organized appropriately. So what you tend to find, as I'm sure you'll have seen yourself, is quite quickly, as you observe these processes particularly close up, you get a sense of who are the more big beasts, who are the ones who are a little bit more circumspect. And they try to balance the tables accordingly. So what table you sit at is prescribed by the organizers, and every weekend you sit at a different table.

Oh, I see.

But they try to do it in a certain way that if there's a somebody who's quite vocal, they might balance that with another person who's quite vocal, for example, or they'll make sure that their better facilitator is managing that table.

Is there a sense that 100 is not enough? Or is 100 a good number?

I think the view is that 100 seems to be about right. So somewhere in the area of 60, 70, 80, up to 150 to maybe 200 seems to work quite well in these citizens assemblies. And I suspect one of the reasons why one wouldn't go much bigger than, much higher than that is because you're asking these people to come back on a number of occasions. It could be 6, 7, 8, 9, even 10 occasions. And getting that sort of size of a group to continuously keep coming back is quite a big ask.

So, I mean, I have a sense of the geography. But how long are people traveling on average to come to. To the event that they're supposed to participate in?

I mean, it's not bad. It's clearly worse in larger contexts, but it's not so bad in Ireland. But I can remember having dinner with two ladies who had come from Donegal. And Donegal is the most northern part of the island of Ireland with no train connections. So you're talking about. And these are people who relied on public transport, they didn't own cars. So you're talking about people who were taking two or three buses and trains to get to the destination. And the idea is that people generally arrive on the Friday evening. The work takes place all day Saturday and then Sunday until the early afternoon, and then they go home to their. And go back to their day jobs. So it's a huge undertaking for particularly those who are coming from far flung parts of the island.

So gay marriage and abortion were obviously two issues that the Parliament would have found difficult to address in a way that was really reflective or representative of the public, for obvious interest reasons. And both of them then produced something that had referenda that supported the ultimate. The people voted in a way that supported the ultimate liberalization in both contexts. Does that sort of looking at that experience and then the other referenda which have been, some of them quite technical, like should we have a mayor of a particular place? Others pretty existential, climate change, problems around population aging and things like that. Is there a way to identify which types of topics it makes most sense to use an assembly for. For. As opposed to topics where ordinary government should be able to deal with it quite well?

I think it's such an important question and it's one that there's a lot of debate over. I mean, you know, there's a specific Irish angle which you've intimated a few issues of in your question there, where some of the issues that have been given to a Citizens assembly are frankly daft and should never have been given to a citizens Assembly. Some of them are issues that are showing a sort of sense of kicking a can down the road where it shouldn't require a citizens assembly to discuss it. And then there are some, like the gay marriage and the abortion ones, which are exactly right. So there's an Irish angle to that. And we know from best practice that's emerging, particularly in Belgium, there are ways around that sort of problem. But you're also asking a more fundamental question about what are the right kind of themes to give to a Citizens Assembly? And I remember I used to give what I call the Ken Carty answer, my buddy from British Columbia, who you adopted this phrase from a friend of his about how you should never have a. You would not want to fly an airplane designed by Citizens Assembly. I remember I used to give that answer when I gave talks. And then a friend of mine said, no, that's wrong, David, because you wouldn't set up a Citizens assembly to design an airplane, but you might set up a Citizens assembly to parse out certain questions to it, you know, large or small, fast or what, you know. So you, in theory, you could have a citizen assembly on, on anything. And providing you frame it carefully enough so that it can be done that way. But, but honestly, I think if you're really going to use this because it's an expensive, cumbersome kind of device to use, I would be of the view that you should use it sparingly. And for big, emotive, hot, normative inclined topics, I think that they are the ones that work best.

I mean, as I reflect on it, I would think that if you had a methodology that said if you've got an issue where there's a gap, significant gap between what we know from general polling, the public wants to happen and what we know the Congress or state legislature is actually doing, and that gap is sustained over a significant period of time, time, five years, let's say, then that seems to be the sort of issue that it would be ripe to put in a citizen assembly. So, like gun legislation in the United States is a perfect example where there's overwhelming support for some kind of gun safety legislation in the United States, but it's almost impossible to move in every single legislative context because of the effect of. Of the gun lobby. So that's money in politics. I mean, those sorts of issues are ones where we can observe this gap. And you might think of the assembly then as a kind of corrective, democratic corrective, where we have reason to believe the representative body is not actually doing what the public wants. Let's invoke a different process to test whether the representative body is correct or whether the public's, you know, in the sort of crass polling is correct. Is that. Would. Would you agree with that as a procedural description?

I would indeed. I mean, I guess the only thing then is what enables or what encourages the politicians to take that leap of faith and effectively hand over a degree of autonomy or, you know, agency on the issue to this other body.

Yeah, I mean, you could even turn that into a political process. You could say that the president has the right to call an assembly every term that he or she is elected to. So president could call two assemblies if they're reelected, Or a House of Congress could call an assembly where somebody moves. And if the House of Congress agrees, then you would call an assembly for that. Or state legislators or governors could call. But you could identify a process where ordinary government could trigger an assembly, and then a process where citizens might trigger an assembly, but both of them could have, like, filtering mechanisms to say it does make sense to do it here because we do see a democratic gap. And I do have the intuition about airplanes, although I agree that there's all sorts of value judgments about airplanes that we might put in. But I'm anxious about citizen assemblies that seem to call on ordinary people to make the sort of judgment that if I were called upon to make, I would say, look, that's what we pay you the big bucks for. Like, you know, what should traffic policy in downtown Boston look like? Well, you know, there are a thousand questions that take real science to answer, and I'M not going to be able to figure that out. But, you know, ask me about value questions about like who should be included in our democracy. I think everybody should be able to do that.

Yeah, it's a really tough one. I mean, there are a few things there that occur to me. I mean, one is I can remember giving in a response to a journalist about the abortion topic in Ireland. And you know, because what, what happened at the end of all this was we had a referendum that changed the constitution, inserting a new clause that gives the power to the parliament to legislate on abortion. Straightforward. That's now the clause in our constitution. Whereas before there was a right to life of the unborn in equal to the right to life of the mother, which created this mad impasse. And I remember saying to the journalist, you know, if we hadn't had the Citizens assembly, we probably eventually would have had that referendum and we probably eventually would have had a legalization. But the question that would have been put to that referendum would have been a very different question. But for the Citizens assembly it would have, I'm sure it would have been inserting a clause that said abortion should be allowed in Ireland only under these specific circumstances and under no other words. To that effect. The game changing role of the Citizens assembly was that it educated the political class and the elite more widely about things that many of them readily admit they hadn't considered before. Abortion pills. The fact that in modern day reality women were already accessing abortion in Ireland. What do you do if you really strongly feel that a woman should have a right to abortion if she's been raped? How do you in a judicial system facilitate that in the time that's required to have that? You know what I mean? So that it opened it all up in such a way that it was pretty clear after the Citizens assembly had concluded that old thoughts about how to frame the question needed to be changed. And so I think the role of the Citizens assembly isn't just about guiding the politicians about where public opinion is. It's also about helping to frame how it is you're going to try and resolve this particular conundrum that you, you think you need legislation to deal with it for.

So, I mean, you obviously are living in Ireland, you have been involved in this process, you've been somewhat critical of the process. But I wonder, as you just kind of think as an Irish citizen, I'm assuming you're an Irish citizen, how do Irish people think about this innovation in Ireland? I mean, do most people know about it and for those that know about it, do they think this is cool or do they think this is, you know, do they roll their eyes like, what, what is the, what's the reaction?

I think it's safe to say most people don't know about it, but then there are certain moments when it hits the headlines for some reason or another, and people are briefly aware of it. So we, we only have limited research to go on, but we know from research we, we carried out during the referendum day on, on abortion, we know that from survey questions. A large proportion of the people about, I think from memory it was 2/3 of respondents to a survey on polling day were aware of the citizens assembly, aware enough to answer correctly, objective knowledge questions on the citizens Assembly. And we know that that had an impact on them voting yes. So it's a very indirect and hardly perfect information. We know. I know from word of mouth from one of the civil servants who'd run one of the more recent citizens assemblies. I haven't seen the data yet because they haven't been released, that when they were recruiting, they sent out all those letters in the stage one, and from international best practice suggests that maybe 4 or 5% will, will respond, will send a response. In Ireland, it was 10%. And when they surveyed them, that's really high. And when they surveyed them, apparently one of the reasons given as to why they sent their letter back was because they were aware of citizens assemblies. So there is some knowledge of it, but I wouldn't say it's extensive or certainly extensive enough for people to have formed strong views about the merits of citizens assemblies.

So characterize your critique or the concerns that you've begun to identify in a way that helps us see what we might do better.

Well, I've learned a lot in recent years because I sort of fell into the space by accident back in 2010, 2011. And I've become more educated on it because I've been involved in advising on citizens assemblies in other countries, and particularly in Belgium, and to see how practice could be run much better than here in Ireland. And I think there are sort of three things I'd say briefly on why I think the Irish case isn't perfect. One is, as I've been saying, it's run by the civil servants and whatever about how it works in your country, in the UK style of parliamentary democracy that we've effectively adopted for historical reasons, you can understand the civil servant is the creature of government and the civil servants is there to do the bidding of the government minister. And so that already Creates a problem that it's so tightly controlled, it's not given to another agency, as you see in other countries. The second problem is that the agenda is completely set by government. And that's how, as I said, you get some daft issues coming on the agenda. Issues that people literally scratch their head. Why are we discussing this? Whereas in Belgium, we see some really good practice on how you can open up the agenda and democratize the agenda process, which I could go into. And then the third, and I'll stop then, is what happens at the outcome. Because the outcome very much depends on whether the government are inclined to say, yeah, we'll go with that or not, which they did in the marriage equality and the abortion cases. But in so many of the other cases of Irish citizens assemblies, they just ignored it. And again, there's good practice we're seeing in Belgium and other places of how you try to influence that output stage. You don't take the power from the politicians, but there's some willingness on the part of the politicians to try and share that a little bit with others.

Okay, so you've had a lot of experience in Belgium. Would Belgium like if some alien landed on Earth and said to you, David, tell me the place on Earth that's doing citizen assemblies the best, Would you say it's Belgium right now? So help us understand what's distinctive about the Belgium case.

I think what's distinctive about the Belgian case, it's kind of interesting. I mobilized with a bunch of political scientists back in 2010, 2011, and independently, there were a bunch of Belgian political scientists, particularly led by a public intellectual called David Van Raybrook, who's, you know, wonderful book and done so much wonderful work in this space. But David was sort of a key figure, but there were a load of political scientists working with him and we got to know each other in that year. And what was kind of instructive was in a sense, we succeeded very quickly. 2011, 2016. So Ireland was the trailblazer. Nothing much seemed to happen in belgium until about 2018 or so. And ever since then, suddenly it's really blossomed and it's blossomed from the regional level. It's only now that the Belgian authorities are doing their first citizens assembly at national level. So up to now, it's developments in Brussels and in the German speaking community where we've seen some of the most interesting innovations. And what's really nice to see in the Belgian case is that the civil servants and governments are letting professional agencies play a key role and they're listening to the academics and being prepared to adapt and experiment with good practice in a way that we don't see here in Ireland.

So what have been the most interesting issues that the Belgian, both at the regional level or at the national level have considered?

I think it's too early to be able to give a definitive answer on that because both. The national one is only about to start. It's about to have their first national Citizens assembly on a just transition. So that's going to be kicking off in the next couple of months.

Just transition? What's that mean?

Just transition? So the whole idea that if you're going to address, you know, the whole climate change agenda, the whole agenda about evolving how we run our systems generally, can you do it in a just way that recognizes the difficulties of, of different groups for all sorts of reasons, demographic and other. So that's going to be a really interesting one and I'm going to be one of the advisors on that. But what you've seen in the case of the regional ones is that they're focusing on what were they? I can't quite remember some of the topics offhand, but they tend to be very regional focused topics by their nature because of the jurisdiction that they deal with. But what's really nice is the model that they're developing rather so much than what we've seen in terms of output. So you know, briefly the OS Belgian model, which is the model for the German speaking community, not known that there is a third language in Belgium which is the Germans, and it's about 90,000 strong. It's a tiny community with the most beautiful parliament in the world, I think, in Eun in east Belgium. And they decided in 2018, 2019, to establish a permanent Citizens assembly, it's called, and what it consists of very briefly is a permanent Citizen Council. I don't quite remember the titles correctly, but it's more or less along those lines. About 50 people who are regular citizens and they decide that in this year we're going to have a Citizens assembly on topic X. And then as an administrator who randomly selects the citizens to produce the topic, have the Citizens assembly, its report goes to Parliament. Parliament is obliged to debate respectfully with that report, even call the members of the Citizens assembly in to discuss with them. So they can't ignore it, they can't kick it into the long grass, they at least must engage with it respectfully. And then there's a random selection from that Citizens assembly that replaces a third of the members of the Citizens Council, so that every 18 months. The membership of the Citizens Council is changed completely. But critically, they've all been involved in these things, so they have some. And so you create this feedback loop and you create a system where the agenda is largely outside of Parliament, but Parliament is not obliged to accept it. But they're obliged, as I said, to treat with it respectfully. And I think once you play around with frameworks like that, you get a really interesting innovation.

And these are also people selected in the way you described. And, and are they compensated at all for participating?

Yeah, the common way is you give an honorarium of some kind. It's usually a token. It might be €100 or so for a day, but there is some compensation. Yeah.

And like, if I have childcare needs, are there extra resources available to cover those needs?

Yeah, commonly you get childcare. And increasingly there's also an awareness of the need to engage all citizens, and in fact, not just citizens, all residents in countries. So you're seeing a lot more efforts of outreach. And so if you're talking about people who have disabilities, that they're accommodated as well. So, for example, in all the Irish processes, they have sign language all the way through.

And so Belgium is your favorite. But, like, if I were to talk to you in five years, where do you think, think the most interesting places in five years will be? What are you seeing right now about where it's spreading and, and who's taking it up?

I mean, what, what. I don't know if immediately I'll be able to answer where the most interesting places will be. Well, what I, what I'm really finding fascinating is how fast this is spreading. I mean, France has now had a few. Germany's now establishing these things as well. And so it's, it's creeping in Berlin or beyond Berlin? Beyond Berlin. Now we're also seeing at the German, at the Bundes, at the Bundestag level, they're setting up new ones up. So it's spreading across more and more countries. I've mentioned the UK already, but actually, I think that the thing that's really interesting to watch is what's happening within the European Union. So they recently had a conference on the future of Europe, which concluded its work, I don't know, about a year or two ago. And at the heart of the Conference on the future of Europe were four citizens of panels, they called them, but they were effectively citizens assemblies, each with 200 members randomly selected and each given a set of topics. I won't pretend to say it was perfect, but it was fascinating to see this experiment and one of their meetings was held in Dublin and I was helping to facilitate some of it. So I was able to be a fly on the wall for this and to be sitting in a room in Dublin Castle with 12 citizens from, from all different European countries, all speaking different languages, all of us wearing headphones, translators in Brussels translating simultaneously, documents being translated automatically as they were being typed up and as seamless as you could get it. So we're seeing multilingual deliberative practices. And in the light of that experiment now, the European Commission, which is the body that drives the agenda setting process within the European Union, has now started the process of establishing citizens panels to debate with it on proposed provisions before they send them to the Council and Parliament. So the European Union is now really going for this and in a five years time I'd love to see how far that goes.

So if you look across the pond, it's a pretty desert like location. The United States, I mean Canada has done interesting innovation around this, but the United States has not. What do you tell yourself about why that's true? Is it just we don't take seriously what's happening in Europe? Or is there something that feels more fundamental about the failure for this to be picked up over here?

It's such a tough one, it really is. I mean, we know there are really important innovations that in the United States, not least the work of your colleague Jim Fishkin with his deliberative polls, but also the citizen initiative review process in Oregon that it's spreading in other countries, including Switzerland, is now starting to use the CIR process there. So another American innovation that seems to be picking up, so we see pockets of it in certain parts of the us Whether it's just the politics of size, whether it's just that you're, your political system just doesn't lend itself to it. I'm not sure. I mean, I do remember about eight years ago or so, I was part of a small group who were invited to a discussion in Chicago with an NGO that was looking into the possibility of possibly having a deliberative process in Chicago itself. And we had a two day discussion about how that would work and how it would operate. And my abiding memory of that two day was when we got to the second day where we were discussing how you would finance this. The amount of money that was being discussed was off the scale. I mean an Irish Citizens assembly costs about a million euro. The French one I think cost about 3 or 4 million, maybe 5. The UK one cost about 500,000. These guys were talking 20, 30, $40 million to run these things because they were talking about, well, all the NGOs are going to get involved. You're going to need lawyers involved. If you're going to have a referendum that might follow from this, there's going to be all the setting up that's going to have to be done. And I don't know, all the material that's going. It just went on and on and on, and nothing ever came of the discussion. My guess is it was because it just looked like it was just going to cost too much and they didn't have the funds for it. So I don't know if it's just the complexities of your system, the size of your country, or just an unwillingness on the part of politicians yet to embrace it. We had this accident of our crisis. Politicians on their knees, receptive, a change of government, and we were coming into the room at just the right time in 2010, 2011 in Ireland. And maybe that helped. And maybe you still have to have that dreadful crisis, which we're optimistic there'll

be lots of crises going forward in the United States. But it is interesting how hard it is to get people to imagine some governmental process outside of the ordinary political process. And what's bizarre to me about it is if you look at the American Constitution, the only power that's really entrenched as a right to participate in critical government decisions is the people through juries. Right. So the jury power is quite substantial in the United States. I mean, for federal criminal prosecutions, you could only be indicted if a jury agrees that you should be indicted. So we, the people, can only. You can only be indicted if we give you up and you can only be convicted if we agree that you deserve to be convicted. So we, the people, can extend pretty extensive immunity in all sorts of contexts because of this power. That's right in the Constitution. And we know it's developed in a way that has enormous economic consequences. So, you know, a jury decides $50 billion has to be taken from an oil company because of an oil spill. That's real governmental power exercised by ordinary citizens. Citizens. You would think, against that background of a system that has always handed to ordinary citizens enormous governmental power, not advisory power like real power, take money or abominably execute people in the United States because of these decisions. You would think that tradition would leave people open to the idea that, well, maybe we should be doing this in other contexts, too. But I can tell you, every time I raise the. This question People are astonished with the very idea. It's like wow, how could we even do that?

I mean the only thing I would say is I was involved in a multi authored book a few years ago. It was a slim little volume on deliberative mini publics. And one of the things that became apparent in our group, there were about eight of us writing this book quite early on was we should no longer adopt this notion that there are different kinds of deliberative processes that deliberate public, a citizens assembly, a cir. A citizens jury. That because the blending and the hybridization that's ongoing is such that this thing is evolving in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways that we could go into and you know, the work of Esteline and Neblo playing with congresspeople, you know, in terms of what they call deliberative town halls shows an interesting experiment. So who knows what interesting way one could try and make a little chink in the American system in the future.

Well, we're trying. I have a proposal about. We have this very difficult to amend constitution and the only amendments that have ever been proposed have been amendments that have ever passed have been amendments proposed by Congress. And we know that Congress is such a broken institution that there's almost no way to imagine super majorities sufficient enough to propose an amendment. The other path that's outlined in the Constitution is a convention. Most people are terrified about the idea of a convention because who would these delegates be? And they could be taken over by the rights or by money and they would would propose crazy amendments and then what would happen like you would abolish birthright citizenship or something like that. So I've suggested that actually because of a case I lost in the Supreme Court. It's pretty clear you could bind the delegates at a convention. You could tell the delegates what they are allowed to vote for or not allowed to vote for. And so we're beginning to talk shop the idea around that states would set up their own citizen assemblies on constitutional amendments, like proposed constitutional amendments, and then they would be introduced the amendment. They would have a period of time where they could deliberate on it and then at the end they would make their views known. And initially it would be advisory, but eventually we could get to a place where you would say look, if you are a delegate from a state that had a citizen assembly, you can't vote for an amendment that the citizen assembly has not supported 60% or something like that. So that would be a way immediately to make this terrifying process to democratize or tie it to a democratic process. This terrifying convention process and make it something that's plausible as a way to amend the Constitution, recognizing that Congress itself has become an impossible one to do. So if that happened in the United States, I would predict you would see citizens Assemblies explode in all sorts of other contexts too, because its role would be so significant. It would get above the fold, as we say on newspapers or whatever the equivalent is online.

That sounds fascinating. And it reminds me of a colleague in Poland who runs Citizens Assemblies, where he gets the mayor of the local city to agree to the establishment of the Citizens assembly, including a super majority rule. I think it's 80. So if the Citizens assembly votes 80% in favor of X, the mayor gives an obligation in advance that they'll implement that. So there is real world case there.

Wow. So I'm going to follow up with you on that. I'm really appreciative, David, of the time you've given us and the work you've done to make this real, because it's hard not to see this as part of the future of democracy, if indeed there is a future for democracy. Democracy. So let's see whether we can save democracy with this. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Lawrence. Thank you for your discussion. That was fascinating. Thank you.

This has been the 25th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way, produced by Equal Citizens, made by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. Find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us. Give us your thoughts, your ideas, your criticisms, your feedback and spread this podcast, please, so that this work, these words, these ideas of mine, and the many who've joined us in this conversation are not lost and is if you can support us. There's a big red button at Equal Citizens us to donate that will help us keep these podcasts going and it will help us do the work that Equal Citizens is trying to accomplish. Thanks again for listening and stay tuned.