Participatory Democracy

In contrast to competitive democracy, two alternative notions now receive significant attention. Participatory democracy and deliberative democracy deal more with ideas about how democracy should be constituted than how governments commonly referred to as “democracies” function today. Both participatory and deliberative democracy were features of the democracy from the beginning.

Depending on design details, sortitional democracy can employ beneficial aspects of both. The participatory strain of democracy includes, but is not limited to, direct democracy, as in Athens and traditional New England town meetings. But this direct, participatory democracy is commonly dismissed as obviously impractical for communities with large populations. Such a system is generally deemed impossible on the scale of the modern nation-state. The advent of the Internet has prompted some to hope that the scale issue can now somehow be overcome. A leading participatory democracy advocate, Benjamin Barber, in his book Strong Democracy, rightly dismisses such “mindless plebiscitary democrats” as ignoring the lack of information and deliberation such instant votes entail (Barber 2009, 289). Democracy must be more than the mere aggregation of individual off-the-cuff preferences. Some reforms, such as participatory budgeting, allow some self-selected ordinary people from outside the electoral inner sanctum to make decisions on a few specific issues delegated to them by government officials. However, with thousands of public policy decisions being made at the national, state, regional and municipal level, referendums, voting online, or participatory budgeting can only scratch the surface. Some sort of division of labor and representation is essential.

Calls for popular participation also run up against the wall of average citizens’ unwillingness to devote the necessary time. The famous quip often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”, certainly applies to a pure notion of participatory democracy.

The practical limits of participatory democracy, simply in terms of people’s free time, were elegantly set out by Robert Dahl, who is often called “Dean of American Political Science”, in his slim 1970 book After the Revolution? (Dahl 1971).

Efforts at participatory democracy suffer from a “volunteer bias”. Those who have a vested interest (especially a self-interest) in a given issue are more likely to make the time to participate and may not necessarily share the attitudes of the general population on that issue. A participatory system, when combined with apathy or alienation, simply leaves an unrepresentative few in charge. But Barber’s vision of “politics in the participatory mode” does not suggest that all people participate in all decisions at all levels, but rather “frequently enough and in particular when basic policies are being decided and when significant power is being deployed” (Barber 2009, 151). He advocates a system where “all of the people can participate some of the time in some of the responsibilities of governing” (Barber 2009, 267).

Participatory democracy also suffers from the shortcoming that elections suffer from—rational ignorance. Indeed, many political theorists have argued that the complexity of modern society makes participatory democracy nonsensical. Aspects of participatory democracy have appeal. But the simplistic notion of allowing all those who choose to participate in making decisions for the vast majority who are busy doing other things is a very bad idea. Those who do participate will tend to be either poorly informed due to rational ignorance or unrepresentative due to self-selection bias. In either case, the decisions are likely to be epistemically poor.

Optimal Participation

Another major challenge for such efforts is citizen recruitment. Many people view participation as just a nuisance and have little motivation to get involved, preferring to watch television, hang out with friends, or pursue some hobby. Those who actually do participate in such civic engagement efforts generally report a lot of satisfaction and civic pride, though this may be because of the self-selection bias (people who like participating are more likely to participate). To overcome this self-selection bias, a sortition-based democracy might operate along the lines of the court “jury duty” model, where participation is semimandatory (with excuses) for at least the final decision-making bodies that serve short terms. Other sortition bodies, such as those that deliberate to draft proposals, set agendas, perform oversight functions, etc., which serve substantially longer terms with greater time burdens, could mitigate the unrepresentativeness of self-selection through stratified sampling, discussed later in this chapter. A vast number of policy juries, each dealing with a particular bill at various levels of government, and other sortition bodies, would also mean that most people would serve in some public decision-making capacity at various points in their lives.

Some citizens would certainly have no interest in getting involved, though this might shift over time as the entire culture evolves under the influence of sortition. But there are many people who desperately want to participate in at least certain public policy decisions—especially those that are close to home, of crucial importance, or would significantly impact their life. Voting in elections provides an extremely minimalist (though still cherished by many) means of “having a say” (even if it can be shown mathematically that such “say” is effectively ineffectual). Those who really want to participate currently have the option to go further by engaging in election campaign volunteer work, donating to candidates, or attending rallies. While rallies and protests would certainly continue in a democracy governed primarily through sortition, the electoral option would be either diminished or wholly eliminated. It would be ideal to provide an alternative means of participation in a sortition democracy so that anyone who wished, even if they were not called onto a jury, could engage in meaningful participation on any issue they wished. This is not only for the psychological benefit of participants, but also to enhance the legitimacy of the system, and potentially (if well designed) to improve the quality of public decisions.

The problem is self-selection bias. Those who seek to participate will almost inevitably not be representative of the general population and will tend to harbor narrow self-interested motivations or other biases. Allowing participants to self-select would violate the goal of descriptive, accurate representation. Therefore, such self-selected participation should be focused on providing input to more fully representative juries. Most political participation in electoral systems today is limited to campaigning or activities that serve campaigns. Politicians have an interest in steering participation toward the parroting of slogans of their favored party on social media, and voter mobilization, akin to massing for a feudal war, rather than developing the skills of open-minded deliberation. Only a few citizens seek to provide input to elected officials and bureaucrats. Most of the really significant input comes in private meetings between lobbyists and elected officials or their staff. Such input is doubly problematic. Firstly, it allows relatively out-of-sight corruption through the route of campaign contributions, whether seen through the common lens of “you-scratch-my-back-and-I-scratchyour-back” where wealthy interests buy influence, or the alternative lens of politicians extorting money from wealthy interests with implied threats on legislation of concern. But secondly, information shared in private is not subject to fact-checking by other interests. A good jury-like process would assure that all information, from the general public and lobbyists alike, would be subject to challenge and verification by jurors, their staff, and opposing sides.

In a sortition democracy, it would be appropriate to allow any resident who wished to join with others to form deliberative Interest Panels that might draft proposed legislation or prepare testimony for juries to consider. As I proposed in previous publications (see, for example, Bouricius 2013) and discuss later in this book, Interest Panels might be self-organized by like-minded people, or they might have members randomly assigned in order to promote broader diversity of opinion and provide for cross-fertilization of ideas. The notion is that anybody who wished could participate by generating ideas, arguments and input for the fully representative decision-making bodies. Since these Interest Panels would be providing input to other, more fully representative bodies, they would have a natural incentive to propose policy and arguments that could appeal to such a body, rather than preparing targeted proposals that could only appeal to their self-interest, or a narrow constituency. This can promote seeking win-win options, rather than maximizing the advantage of “winners” at the expense of “losers”.

Many advocates of sortition view it as primarily a participatory reform because vast numbers of ordinary people are directly connected to the decision-making process. Depending on the scope and specific design of a sortitional democracy, this could even involve far more people than participate in current elections. This involvement avoids the harmful effects of self-selection bias and rational ignorance, since it is embedded in a learning and deliberative framework, rather than the ill-informed referendum model. This makes the participatory democracy through sortition completely unlike all other recent proposals for participatory democracy.

One effort blending participatory and deliberative approaches was launched in Oregon. The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review process draws a randomly selected group of ordinary citizens to review initiative ballot questions, and the state publishes their findings or recommendations in the state voter guide. An analysis of survey data following the 2010 and 2012 referendums found modest increases in feelings of political efficacy, with only around half of voters even being aware that the report of the lottery-selected review body was included in the voter guide, and fewer having read it (Knobloch, Barthel, and Gastil. 2019). A similar proposal was put forward for a national system of deliberation by sortition and national referendum by former US Senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel, in his book Citizen Power: A Mandate for Change, first written in 1971, and revised and updated in 2008 (Gravel [1971] 2008). This “Oregon model” was subsequently adopted and implemented by many cities in Switzerland. A severe limitation of such proposals is that the deliberative portion is only advisory and is readily swamped by paid advertising.

Participation and Lottery

When proposing lottery selection instead of either an election or mass-participation self-selection (as in a referendum), there are two common concerns. The first concern, that random selection could generate an unrepresentative group of people, is not a serious issue, as I will discuss next. The second concern, that some people will agree to serve while others decline, so that those who end up actually serving will be unrepresentative, is a serious issue, which I will address subsequently.

Fear that an unrepresentative group will just happen to be drawn by chance is a frequent worry when people first learn about sortition. What if a group sympathetic to neo-Nazis happens to be drawn by lot? A short digression into sampling mathematics is necessary to appreciate the imagined and actual risks of random sampling.

The highly developed techniques of scientific sampling derive from what is known as the law of large numbers. It is obvious that a very small random sample of the population may by chance be extremely unrepresentative of the general population (though unlikely as unrepresentative as most elected legislatures). For a jury of twelve, the chance that a particular segment of society that comprises 30 percent of the whole population will happen to get a majority of seats in a random sample is 4 percent. But as the size of the jury grows, the odds of this happening drop precipitously. If the random sample has one hundred members instead of 12, the chances of that 30 percent minority of the population getting a majority of seats drops to 1 chance in 110,684 (or 0.0009 percent). In other words, if a new jury of 100 were drawn every year, it would probably take many tens of thousands of years before even one jury had a majority of members from that 30 percent minority. If the jury had 250 members, the chances of that minority group getting a majority of seats drops to just 1 chance in 79,792,344,770. A crucially important fact is that the size of the random sample required to get a “very accurate” sample is barely impacted by the size of the target population. In other words, a sample of 500 is extremely likely to create a very accurate representation of a population of 30,000 or 300 million.

Non-participation and Democracy

So, a random sample of reasonable size will be quite representative of the population. But not all of those selected will agree to actually serve, such that the issue of self-selection bias resurfaces. If all segments of society were equally likely to decline, the random selection dynamic would still apply, and the representativeness would not be affected. However, it seems plausible that certain sorts of people would be less likely to agree to serve than other sorts of people, which could stymie the descriptive representation goal. For example, new mothers, or entrepreneurs launching a new business, or people with severe social anxiety might decline even if there were extremely robust supports and accommodations. But it is also likely that people with limited education, or who feel discriminated against as part of a marginalized group, might decline. Depending on the issue being tackled, their absence could change the outcome of the panel’s deliberation and destroy the legitimacy of the citizens’ assembly.

Some theorists have called for quasi-mandatory service (akin to US jury duty) to avoid these concerns altogether. Others view “forced service” as a violation of freedom. It is also possible that those compelled to serve unwillingly may simply not pay attention or “do the work”, leaving the demographic or character they are hoped to be representative of, effectively unrepresented, despite their nominal inclusion. Alternatively, it can be argued that the “forced” juror, who attends but ignores the deliberation, or the one who simply doesn’t show up, is in fact accurately representing, by their very refusal, the refusal to participate in democracy typical of similar people in society. Regardless, such a body would still be dramatically more representative than any elected chamber.

The solution typically used by modern citizens’ assemblies is the use of scientific, stratified sampling among the pool of people who are willing to serve. Stratified sampling sets quota requirements for a variety of demographic traits, assuring that the final sample will match the general population in terms of age, sex, income, race, education, etc. Even attitudinal characteristics can be matched using surveys.

Stratified Sampling

Since quasi-mandatory service (like jury duty) is not a legal option yet, how is representativeness and stratified sampling currently being done for citizens’ assemblies in the real world? The standard approach has been to make an initial invitation by mail, phone or door knocking to a randomly selected list of people (or phone numbers, or addresses). In some instances (depending on the budget), follow-up contacts are made to encourage those initially contacted to step up, answering their questions and offering remedies to any impediments to serving. The random selection lottery process should be impartial and transparent, so that anyone who wishes can verify that it was done honestly.

From the pool of those who responded that they would be willing to serve, a second lottery is conducted, but using stratified sampling. Those who agree to serve provide various demographic and other details about themselves to allow the stratified sampling process to match the diversity of the target population (a municipality, a nation, or, in some cases, the entire world). Quotas are set according to the demographics of the population, according to age, education, sex, income, geographic location, etc., to make the final body as descriptively representative of the population as possible. It is even common to use polling data on the topic of the assembly to ensure the group’s attitude matches the population as well. For example, if the assembly is going to be examining a response to climate change, respondents are asked whether they think climate change is a big concern, somewhat of a concern, not much of a concern, or not a concern at all, so that the panel aligns with the population’s attitude on the topic, and is not full of deeply concerned activists, for example. Various procedures have been used to make the final lottery selection, often using a computer to generate a large number of random groupings with different potential participants, with each grouping satisfying the stratified demographic quotas. The final public lottery (perhaps using lottery balls, multiple dice, or other visible random process) picks one of these possible mixes of willing participants as the final body.

Whether stratified sampling adequately compensates for decliners depends on whether those who decline have consistently different interests, attitudes and policy preferences than those within the same demographic groups who do agree to participate. In short, would the outcome of a deliberative process be substantially different if decliners could be induced, or legally compelled, to participate (as with jury duty), as compared to having substitutes from the same demographic categories? Clearly, one requirement is the need to eliminate every possible obstacle to service, such as preventing any loss of income, providing needed childcare, etc. Inducements need to be considered as well, such as generous payment or the honor of helping one’s community, etc.

So, what are some reasons decliners decline? The research by Vincent Jacquet, interviewing decliners from real-world citizens’ assemblies, is a starting point for helping to assess whether stratification can work to fill in where decliners leave holes (Jacquet 2017). Jacquet found that responses¹ could be lumped into six kinds of reasons. The more common reasons for declining were: scheduling conflicts; preference for spending time in the private sphere, especially with family and at work; and low expectations of the assembly’s impact on the political system. The less common reasons were: feelings of low personal political competence; dislike of group situations; and alienation or distrust of politics generally.

A mature functioning sortition democracy in which participation generated clear public impact would mostly eliminate concerns related to lack of impact, and to some extent alienation from the political. With paid time off from jobs, childcare, etc., issues related to lack of time could also be ameliorated. Certain functions of a sortition democracy could easily be conducted with remote virtual participation to alleviate discomfort with group settings.

However, a fundamental factor this research didn’t tackle was whether pay and other inducements would change decliners into participants. None of these three assemblies studied offered remuneration for participation (while many others have). This research also couldn’t assess the crucial question of whether those who declined had significant similarities that would leave a certain segment of society out of the sortitional decision-making process, or if, on the contrary, non-participants were essentially also random, such that their lack of participation was statistically irrelevant.

But what if the non-participation is an intentional preference, rather than due to obstacles or social inequalities? A significant question is whether it is more oppressive to have quasi-mandatory service or accept that some kinds of people intentionally want to go unrepresented. When I was a politician knocking on doors, campaigning for re-election, I recall a resident who was a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. Members of this denomination decline to vote or participate in any political process at all, as too worldly. The irony, of course, was having the shoe on the other foot—with polite disinterest in what each of us is “selling” to the other, when politicians and Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizers knock on each other’s doors. I wouldn’t join their religion, and they wouldn’t join my politics. How should democracy handle representation when some people simply don’t want to participate in any form of democracy?²

More on Sample Size

The accuracy of representation is also deeply impacted by sample size, as well as serving versus declining. Large samples increase the probability of accurate representativeness, but have the downsides of increased rational ignorance (as each member’s input becomes less significant) and reduced ease of deliberation. The optimal size for a lawmaking body has long been debated. In Federalist No. 10, Madison noted that “however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude” (Madison 1787b). Active deliberation is enhanced by a smaller size, such that each member can communicate with all others. Most citizens’ assemblies have tackled this by including chunks of time using random, rotating break-out groups of ten or fewer members at multiple tables, to allow face-to-face deliberation. It is my strong conviction that there is no such thing as an all-purpose optimal size for sortition bodies. It depends on the task. A mini-public that is crafting (but not authorized to adopt) a proposal might benefit from a smaller size to enhance active deliberation, while a final decision-making jury that is only going to hear pro and con arguments, and ask clarifying questions before voting, could be substantially larger, to enhance accuracy of representativeness. This is a focus of my multi-body sortition concept discussed in later chapters (Bouricius 2013).