Concrete Achievements

Tag: citizen assemblies

  • Glucksmann and Citizen Convention on Immigration

    The French presidential candidate Raphaël GLUCKSMANN has published proposals for how he would run the country – in book form, of course, this being France.

    A striking proposal highlighted by Le Monde today is a Citizen Convention on Immigration. This would be a design challenge (to say the least) but, given how toxic and deadlocked the immigration issue is in France and elsewhere in Europe, it might be a way to change the conversation.

    It’s the sort of issue for which citizen assemblies/conventions are well-suited – big picture, politically deadlocked, with a strategic or moral question at their heart.

    It’s not simple, though. Given how immigration is used as *the* core issue by anti-system parties, it would be a challenge to disentangle the actual question from side-questions about rural depopulation, economic changes, demographic shifts, and people’s sense of the past.

    But European mainstream politicians seem to have no solution to the immigration issue other than “copy the far right” and “hope it goes away” – this at least might move the conversation forward.

  • I wouldn’t necessarily start with LA but I would be fascinated to see this sort of…

    I wouldn’t necessarily start with LA but I would be fascinated to see this sort of experiment actually executed for a fixed 8/10-year period in a reasonably-sized city (“has its own newspaper” size). twitter.com/ArthurSmid/sta…

    This is such a whole-system all-at-once change that you can’t really pilot it without doing it. I personally think it would create more democratic problems that it solves, but I’m very open to being proved wrong. And better to try it at a scale where you can find the problems

    I’m not naïve – I know the logic of political power is that no one will make the sort of self-denying decision that would be needed to make it happen, and even if it failed we would endlessly hear it was because it had not been done right … but still, it *would* be interesting.

    (I am also conscious of the argument that sortition lawmaking is a denial of fundamental human rights as they are defined in some places, ECHR Paris Protocol Art 3 for instance).

  • Just watched the opening speeches at the @DemNext_ launch event from last night (on…

    Just watched the opening speeches at the @DemNext_ launch event from last night (on YouTube via their Twitter account and well worth a watch), and @ClaudiaChwalisz‘s vision of what the sortition-governed future could like got me thinking about numbers.

    The question I wanted to answer is how often would an average citizen be likely to be called to serve, and how many “veterans” or currently-serving people would they be likely to know.

    I decided to plug my home country into a spreadsheet. Belgium has 11 million people and a famously multi-layered governance structure, so lots of opportunities. I also assumed that 20% of the population were not of voting age.

    The top level is the Federal Government. Let’s assume a Federal executive assembly would be 300 people (twice the size of the current Federal Parliament). With annual selections you would be selected every 30 891 years.

    We then have five regions (Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels, German-speaking region and the Wallon-Brussels Federation – I told you it was complicated). If there are 200 people on a regional executive assembly, you get selected every 9 267 years.

    Then, there are ten provinces (Brussels is in historic Brabant but is a region not a province, so I discounted it). If each provincial executive assembly has 100 members, your chance of selection is once every 8 067 (and never in Brussels).

    Finally, 581 communes from Antwerp (500k people) to Herstappe (79). Some are divided into districts so I’ve upped the number to 700. If each local executive has 75 members, your average chance of selection is once every 177 years – though it’s every year if you live in Herstappe!

    There are of course also lots of topic-specific panels on things like judge appointments (to use Claudia’s example), so we have to make some assumptions there too.

    I’ve assumed that each panel is half the size of the relevant Executive Assembly, and that there are 40 at federal level, 30 in each region, 20 in each province and 10 in each locality each year.

    In total, that means that the chance of serving on any one of those bodies in any given year is 3,2% – so in other words you might be selected every 31 years, or twice in your adult life (at all, not to a specific Assembly).

    On assumptions about sizes of family and friends group, you could expect someone in your extended family to serve every 2-3 years, and if you have 100 friends, 3 of them would be serving at any one time, so by middle age half of your friendship group would be veterans.

    Because there are two levels of selection, if we assume a 10:1 ratio in first invitation responders to second invitation then you could expect an invitation letter for something every three years or so, but nine times out of ten you would not be selected.

    How does that compare numerically to the Belgian system? Not every part of the Belgian system is directly elected (some of the regional bodies and the provincial councils aren’t directly elected), and there are local, regional and national elections on a regular timetable.

    If you live from 18 to 80, on these assumptions about sortition you will be invited 20 times and serve twice. On the current system you will vote about 34 times (12 times each for region and federal, 10 times for the 6-year commune councils).

    Now, voting is a very different sort of democratic transaction from being invited to take on actual political power in an executive assembly, but one of the challenges for the sortition-only model for me is whether people are going to be prepared to give up

    a less-effective vote every five or six years for a much more powerful role in a process (that they can’t select) at two random points in their life, and maybe not at all.

    It goes without saying that there are huge caveats here. If there are 400 or 4000 national panels rather than 40 that changes the numbers – it depends on what level of decision would need a panel and which would be left the to bureaucracy.

  • While I don’t think fair elections can be called undemocratic, it’s clear that the…

    While I don’t think fair elections can be called undemocratic, it’s clear that the Chilean constitutional assembly didn’t work. A sortition-based process + referendum could be a better alternative, with strong anti-gaming and anti-corruption measures. twitter.com/ClaudiaChwalis…

    It would certainly be an interesting facilitation task – though having facilitated a good number of CAs, I suspect you might get the long list of social rights again (though perhaps the process would be less open to attack from the right as being a leftist wish list).

    In general, the big principles are well suited to deliberative exercises if validated by referendum – the fine controversial detail perhaps less so.

  • Negative piece in @ladh on politics of Brussels Parliament’s joint citizen/MP panels -…

    Negative piece in @ladh on politics of Brussels Parliament’s joint citizen/MP panels – headline calls it “Noddy Politics”. Notable for me is how the parties quoted are more critical the further to the political right they are. Eg the right-liberal MR: dhnet.be/regions/bruxel…

    The other notable points (for me) are:
    1. Citizens profited from the experience
    2. Follow up is essential (and seen to be lacking, though that’s hardly the fault of the process)
    3. The link made between citizen assemblies and the intention of abolishing representative democracy

    The last one is a risk for those of us who want to continue experimenting with these approaches without seeing them as an alternative to representation.

  • Very much enjoying the guided walk of Floréal and Le Logis, garden suburbs in…

    Very much enjoying the guided walk of Floréal and Le Logis, garden suburbs in Watermael-Boitsfort on the edge of Brussels. On next weekend too, with events around the region, celebrating 100 years of cités-jardins in Brussels agenda.brussels/fr/article/bru…

    Notable how bottom-up and self-organising the community was in the early days. Particularly in Floréal which was linked to the socialist party and particularly housed the print workers of its journal Le Peuple, whose amazing 30s building still stands in central Brussels.

    You can tell they were inspired by the English garden city movement. Just need a couple of pubs (though like a lot of garden suburbs, they were deliberately built without cafés).

    Next weekend’s programme.

  • I wasn’t in Florence for #cofoe #TheFutureIsYours, though @demsoc colleagues were.

    I wasn’t in Florence for #cofoe #TheFutureIsYours, though @demsoc colleagues were. I see a lot of people here talking about one recommendation (on more European citizen assemblies) but it’s worth saying there were almost 40 others, on a much wider range of issues.

    For me the most interesting recommendations were those on rule of law and media freedom, confirming that these aren’t just elite/Brussels bubble concerns but the concerns of citizens from around Europe.

    Also worth noting is how much citizens overall saw Europe as a level of government that needed direct accountability to them – not surprising in some ways but a big change from the state-based proto-confederalism that is the structural logic of today’s EU.

    This came out most clearly in the recommendation on (what are known in Brussels as) transnational lists for the European Parliament – a voting system that would force candidates to appeal across national boundaries.

    So read the whole list to see a lot of interesting ideas, beyond more CAs, delivered in a very short time. Over to the citizen ambassadors and the others at the conference plenary to see what they can do with this raw material.

  • This is the perfect example of Dominic Cummings being a great campaigner but an appalling…

    This is the perfect example of Dominic Cummings being a great campaigner but an appalling politician. « Turkey is joining » is non-deniable enough to whip up FUD but is not *usefully* true, a fact you can base any policy decision on. twitter.com/Dominic2306/st…

    It ironic that someone whose constant theme is that society is too complex and fast moving to be governed by the dullards in the civil service or Brussels has as his only concrete achievement something that is based on deliberate « true enough » obfuscation.

    The problem with « true enough » campaigning being that it gets you the win but gives you neither the intellectual framework nor the alliances to make any concrete progress. If you’re anti-EU I guess that leaving the EU is a sort of progress but

    it’s the progress of ripping out an old kitchen … your sense of achievement ends with a heap of rubble, some broken pipes, and no kitchen.

  • Good for it to start, but it will need adaptive structures, particularly around citizen…

    Good for it to start, but it will need adaptive structures, particularly around citizen engagement, that can develop and connect to new initiatives over the 18-24 month run of the #COFOE twitter.com/schwarzmar/sta…

    It won’t be good enough if it’s either a single citizen assembly type process with no horizontal or vertical connectivity – or if there is too tight a prescription of process at the start. This area is developing fast – and as long as the connections are clear

    the detail can be left more flexible.

  • Links from the week of 7 September 2020

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.