We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province's electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitution-making and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens' assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens' assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice.
Charged with the task of evaluating the existing electoral system and deciding whether to recommend its retention or selecting a superior alternative, members of the Citizens' Assembly drew on three primary sources of information as they reached their decision: educational material distributed during the “learning phase,” written submissions and oral presentations made by members of the public during the “listening phase,” and the preferences of their fellow Assembly members voiced and debated during the “deliberation phase.” The CA model had been explicitly designed to expose members to these three forms of counsel but they were left to decide for themselves how to reconcile the overwhelming support for a mixed member proportional (MMP; see page 130) system expressed by members of the public with their own evolving preference for a single transferable vote (STV; see page 130) system.
Conflicting messages sent to Assembly members by particular institutional features of the process made this decision more difficult. On the one hand, the members' intensive education on electoral systems made them more informed on the topic than most of the members of the public they consulted, while on the other, the members were conscious that the first step in adopting any new system required the support of at least 60 percent of voters in a referendum with no significant public funding committed for a pre-referendum public education campaign.
In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold experiment in institutional design: it empowered an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to spend eleven months assessing the province's electoral system. The government asked the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) to recommend a new electoral system if the Assembly concluded that the existing system could be improved. And the government committed to putting the recommendation of the BC Citizens' Assembly to a referendum, and then to legislating the results of the referendum in to law, should it pass.
Though citizen bodies have in the recent past served as advisory bodies to constitutional commissions, the CA represents the first time a government has responded to citizen discontent by empowering a citizen body to redesign fundamental political institutions. The case stands out for the care with which the experiment was conceived. The CA approximated the kind of process a political scientist might well design to test key propositions of deliberative democratic theory. The CA was conceived with deliberation in mind, and then given the time, power, support, and financing to return a credible, representative, and deliberate decision. The selection of CA members was designed to bypass the electoral system, and yet function as a representative body through the device of near-random selection. It was carefully insulated from established political interests.
By
Mark E. Warren, Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy University of British Columbia,
Hilary Pearse, University of British Columbia
Edited by
Mark E. Warren, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,Hilary Pearse, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Although electoral democracies have been spreading across the globe, democratic development in those countries where electoral institutions have been long established appears to have stagnated, their citizens beset by a democratic malaise with respect to the formal political institutions of representative democracy. The indicators are well known, including declining rates of voter turnout, disaffection from political institutions, and widespread judgments that politicians are untrustworthy and often corrupt. Over the last few decades, citizens have been increasingly likely to view governments as overly attentive to special interests, while also ineffective, wasteful, and inattentive to the public good (Nye 1997; Norris 1999; Putnam and Pharr 2000).
The essays collected in this volume examine one example of recent responses to citizens' discontents: the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA). The CA was an assembly convened over eleven months in 2004, consisting of 160 citizens chosen by a nearly random method. The Assembly was charged with examining the electoral system of the province, and empowered to propose a new system for a referendum, should they conclude that the system should be changed. The case has captured the attention of those interested in innovations in democratic institutions and governance: the CA represented the first time in history that ordinary citizens have been empowered to propose fundamental changes to political institutions to their fellow citizens.
These chapters share the view that the CA should be assessed within the context of democratic deficits in the developed democracies.