Representative government and citizens’ assemblies
Citizens’ assemblies might reflect a more compelling conception of ‘representation’ than traditional electoral politics.
An advantage of citizens assemblies is that they provide citizens with the opportunity to more directly participate in important policy decision-making.
But this comes at a disadvantage: the selection of participants is not done through elections. Representative government requires that ‘the people’ can vote into Parliament those they wish to represent them on political matters. Citizens’ assemblies don’t satisfy this requirement and so, in one sense, are incompatible with Australia’s constitutionally-prescribed system of representative government.
But in three key ways citizens’ assemblies might do ‘representation’ better than representative government does it itself, despite the fact the public has no say over the identity of the participants. Fundamentally, citizens’ assemblies can offer citizens a keener and more creative mode of democratic representation.
If this argument holds, then citizens’ assemblies can be justified not only on the grounds that they 1) offer more participation to the public or 2) can resolve divisive problems traditional politics cannot — but also on the ground that citizens’ assemblies better ‘represent’ public needs than classic representative democracy.
1. No elections
The absence of elections in citizens’ assemblies can ironically enable better representation.
The winning of an election requires savvy marketing. The candidate must be able to sell a product that a large number of people are willing to purchase through their vote. But what we are persuaded to buy is not always good for us. The need to win elections can produce politicians who appeal to lowest-common denominators, like fear, greed, and tribalism. Participants in citizens’ assemblies, unbound by the need to ‘win’ anything and expressly linked together by the principles of deliberation and reciprocity, are less likely to slide into this lowest-common denominator reasoning. This improves the chance of creating a government that can effectively tackle the ‘big’ public problems that most hold back wellbeing — in other words, producing policies that better respond to, and represent, the actual public good
2. No hostile partisanship
Our political representatives struggle to reach across partisan lines. Rather than deliberating with persons who differ with them — those from competing parties — our politicians often belittle and demean. To concede that one’s opponent might have a point is to risk relinquishing hard won turf. It’s to threaten one’s very own job security. That’s because opposing politicians are never potential partners but only ever threats. Indeed, even those in the same party are often closer to antagonists than helpers.
But a willingness to expose ourselves to opposing viewpoints — even from those people whom we dislike — is necessary to making high-quality decisions. While institutional electoral politics struggles to do this, citizens’ assemblies does not, for there is nothing to lose in an assembly by accepting that the participant on the other end of the table has a better argument. Indeed, the whole enterprise is centred on reaching the best possible outcome, rather than avoiding electoral defeat.
3. Assured demographic representation
Citizens’ assemblies might also produce a higher quality of representation through the fact that they reflect a cross-section of society. Despite having no say over who is selected in the citizens’ assembly, a member of the public is guaranteed to have someone placed in a formal position of political power who shares a demographic link. Obviously not everyone in the same demography agrees on the same issues, though at least the members of the public are assured that some decision makers will hold similar needs and wants to themselves personally in virtue of common age or culture etc.
Indeed, as a recent report notes, the participating citizens in the recent French citizens’ assembly on climate themselves recognised the representative role their demographic selection granted:
Many CCC participants started acting as defacto representatives — in some cases, speaking on behalf of the whole convention (or sometimes their region) to the media and gathering input from those they believed they were representing.
Put this way, it might be better to think of participants in citizens’ assemblies as politicians in their own right, offering a competing form of political action to our traditional representatives. If so, the public might find through time that they prefer the representation of their citizen’ assembly rather than the elected politicians.
Conclusion
The absence of elections and hostile partisanship in citizens’ assemblies, combined with the assurance of demographic representation, offers a potent counterpoint to traditional representative politics. As such, citizens’ assemblies can be justified on terms of ‘representation’, not just participation.
