Citizens' Assemblies: The latest on our Third Demand

As radical as XR’s first two demands are — to “tell the truth” and to “end all CO2 emissions by 2025” -- the most revolutionary demand of all is the one requiring a Citizens’ Assembly to determine how we respond to the climate and ecological emergency.  And it is the one least appreciated by most rebels and least understood by the general public.  It is a demand for a new kind of politics and a thoroughgoing reinvention of popular rule.

While Citizens’ Assemblies (CA) are unfamiliar to most of us in the U.S., they are popping up all over in the rest of the world.  Ireland has been using them for a decade to guide major public decisions, including revisions to the Irish Constitution.  The UK, Scotland, France and Germany recently held national ones to address the Climate Crisis.  Spain is launching one at the national level and Amsterdam is planning a municipal one (the full list of governmental jurisdictions which have sponsored some version of a CA over the last 20 years exceeds 300).  A Global Assembly (virtual) is currently underway to deliver its recommendations to COP26. So such assemblies are not some rare, untried strategy.

What is more, the argument for their use is gaining force and credibility. One of the most visionary theorists of a brand new kind of politics, Helene Landemore of Yale University, has just published Open Democracy.  Here, she more fully develops the very critique of our current so-called Western democracies that explains why XR chooses not to spend its energy endorsing particular candidates or developing its own legislative program (i.e., XR’s own “green new deal”).  Instead, XR is once again choosing to tell the truth about the fundamental lack of inclusive participation in the way we make decisions, and demanding that what we do be determined by a more universal and transparent process.

While we can’t fully summarize this powerful book, here are some portions of a recent review followed by an interview with her (published together in The Nation) that can help us more fully appreciate our own Third Demand as well as advocate for it.

Here are some ways the reviewer summarizes her argument:

Landemore traces the problem back to the 18th century and the emergence of modern representative democracy…which equates the decisions of elected elites with the people’s choice to vote for them. The problem, argues Landemore, is that this equating has proven false; as the system is explicitly oligarchic, elites all too often proven unresponsive to the wishes of the electorate, and we have reached the point where the people are rebelling against the system. 

Rather than reject democracy, though, Landemore calls for a more inclusive version of it that she describes as “open democracy.” It is undergirded by five key principles: participation rights, deliberation, majority rule, democratic representation, and transparency.

The purpose of these principles is to make democracy less elitist by making it open to all citizens equally. She believes that this can be done by instituting novel forms of non-electoral democratic representation: for example, there is the lottocracy, a system in which representatives do not run for office but are randomly selected to serve fixed political terms. A lottocracy, Landemore suggests, would limit the chances that representatives will be bought off, since they are not running for office, and would likely allow for greater political, ethnic, gender, and economic diversity, since candidates are randomly selected.

Here are some Interview excerpts where Landemore expands on these themes:

• Because our current systems fail to meet the democratic ideals of inclusion and equality, they end up also failing the good governance standard of basic responsiveness to citizens’ preferences. This failure in turn leads to citizens’ profound feelings of alienation from the systems that govern them, leading some of them to endorse various forms of reactionary populism.

• One interpretation of our current predicament [the so-called “crisis of democracy] is thus that people are not rejecting democracy as an ideal but simply rejecting a system that claims to be a democracy but really isn’t. And if that’s the case, that’s healthy and a sign of democratic vitality, in my view.

• But at the same time, once you have this right to vote, it’s still a very limited mechanism for participation and, indeed, self-rule. You don’t get to choose the candidates who run for your vote, you don’t get to shape the platform on which they run, and at the end of the day, these candidates, once in office, are free to ignore your preferences. So, the right to vote in elections is an important political right, but it’s not a real participation right in the sense of a right that allows you to meaningfully shape laws and policies.

• As the Greeks knew, having a choice of rulers is not the same as ruling. What you really need for authentic people power, in addition to an inclusive definition of citizenship, which the Greeks crucially lacked, is to be able to directly deliberate and decide outcomes where feasible, taking turn in representative functions where representation is needed, and retaining the ability, whatever your position in the system is, to shape the agenda of and deliberation on issues from the onset and throughout the process.

• The American people deserve and can handle the honest truth, not some noble lie about the exceptionalism of American “democracy,” which anyway is no longer credible since January 6, if it ever was. American “democracy”—like many so-called democracies around the world—is a vulnerable oligarchic system that disproportionately benefits the rich. We’ve exported it, by force, to a lot of places, where it has often failed. In the 21st century it’s time to call a spade a spade and try to do better.