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Dave Johnson refuses to eat fish farmed near Minneapolis. The retired construction worker, who lives in a rural area 150 miles north of the Twin Cities, claims \u201ctourists\u2019 garbage, salt runoff and fertilizer\u201d make the metropolitan area\u2019s farmed fish inedible. But for Johnson, the \u201cdivide between city people and rural people\u201d is about much more than fish: it\u2019s about how individuals relate\u2014or don\u2019t relate\u2014to the environment. \u201cPeople in cities are busy living in the fast lane, while rural communities are really attuned to what\u2019s going on in nature,\u201d explains Johnson, who says he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and links the country\u2019s bitter urban-rural divide to bad policy making: \u201cA lot of the politicians at the state capital pass laws because there\u2019s peer pressure,\u201d he says. \u201cBut they don\u2019t really know what life is like up here\u2014and they don\u2019t care about us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shona Snater cites a different kind of divide. Instead of geography, the 31-year-old soil-health organizer in southeast Minnesota says \u201ccorporate interests [are] dictating how politicians think and act,\u201d especially when it comes to the environment. \u201cThere\u2019s progress at the grassroots level,\u201d she adds. \u201cBut when farmers are using half of the fertilizer they used to use, that\u2019s terrifying for agribusinesses.\u201d A registered Democrat, Snater says she believes both of the dominant U.S. political parties can be \u201cbought out.\u201d She blames corporations for supporting \u201cterrible policies\u201d that favor \u201ceconomies of scale\u201d and leave many people behind. \u201cSmall and midsize farmers say, \u2018These politicians aren\u2019t representing my best interests,\u2019\u201d Snater says, noting that Minnesota has been losing dairy farms at a rate of nearly one a day.<\/p>\n
Such frustrations around the usual mechanics of policy making are rife throughout much of the U.S. In a 2018 Pew Research Center survey of 10,000-plus Americans, 75 percent said trust in the federal government has been shrinking. And when the survey asked who<\/em> Americans trusted to \u201cact in the best interests of the public,\u201d the majority of respondents revealed they had the most confidence in scientists and the military\u2014and the least in elected officials. <\/strong>Brett Hennig, an advocate for alternative ways of conducting democracy, says he can understand why.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you believe an ideal democracy involves informed deliberation among a representative group of people, the current electoral system fails on both counts,\u201d says Hennig, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics. He believes something called \u201ccitizens\u2019 assemblies\u201d offer a better way to elicit policies in line with people\u2019s real interests\u2014with a little help from an algorithm.<\/p>\n Hennig explains citizens\u2019 assemblies using simple logic: society is made up of people who are young and old, rich and poor, and mostly in between, so decisions governing it should more directly involve a group proportionally representing these kinds of characteristics. But because many ordinary citizens may lack technical knowledge of the issues at hand, citizens\u2019 assemblies invite these individuals to make decisions in a \u201cdeliberative environment\u201d\u2014in which they can consult experts to \u201creduce the effect of biases, misleading information and ignorance\u201d when learning about a problem and assessing possible solutions, Hennig says. From there, these citizens collaboratively craft recommendations for policy makers to consider.<\/p>\n Philipp Verpoort, a Ph.D. candidate in physics at the University of Cambridge in England, is another scientist who advocates for citizens\u2019 assemblies. \u201cEveryone\u2019s talking about the three P\u2019s: pessimism, populism and polarization. And we\u2019re at this point where people split up into groups, don\u2019t trust their politicians, and nothing gets done,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when people see a decision being made by people like them, they trust it.\u201d<\/p>\n To turn their theories to practice, Hennig, Verpoort and their colleagues co-direct <\/strong>the Sortition Foundation\u2014a nonprofit organization that offers \u201cselection and stratification services\u201d for citizens\u2019 assemblies and similar deliberative bodies. The foundation (which is financed largely by payments received for its services) has supported about 20 such projects among the roughly 200 that various organizing bodies have hosted around the world, according to Verpoort and Hennig. One of the most famous efforts, which the Sortition Foundation was not involved in, was held in Ireland, where a 99-person assembly prompted the nation in 2018 to repeal a law that had effectively banned abortion. But much of the buzz today surrounds climate change and the U.K.: after a series of smaller city-based gatherings in 2019, 110 citizens were selected earlier this year for the country\u2019s Climate Assembly UK project. Through this deliberation, participants were invited to recommend ways the U.K. government could meet its legally binding target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.<\/p>\n After meeting in person and virtually over six weekends between January and May, the participants <\/strong>recently published their final report of policy recommendations, which range from levying a tax on frequent air travelers to investing in low-carbon public transportation.<\/p>\n With a mathematician\u2019s precision, Hennig explains how an algorithm he created generated the 110-person \u201cmini public\u201d from the U.K.\u2019s population of 67 million. The process began by sending invitations to 30,000 households from the nation\u2019s postal database. Hennig says completely random selection would have skewed the responses toward people with higher incomes (who are more likely to have the time and money to participate). So 20 percent of the sampled individuals were randomly invited from the \u201cmost deprived areas,\u201d and 80 percent were chosen at random from every region. To further reduce the effects of income-related selection bias, participants were promised a small stipend and travel reimbursements.<\/p>\n Out of the 30,000 people invited, nearly 2,000 accepted and completed an online survey indicating seven characteristics: their gender identity, age, ethnicity, educational attainment, location, description of their residence as urban or rural, and level of concern about climate change. Hennig applied his algorithm to those 2,000 respondents to select 110 participants who would proportionally represent the U.K. with respect to those seven categories.<\/p>\n To begin the process, the algorithm went through the survey answers and randomly and repeatedly selected from the \u201chardest category to fill,\u201d Hennig says. He adds that it was initially (and unsurprisingly) hardest to find respondents among those who reported they were \u201cnot very concerned\u201d or \u201cnot at all concerned\u201d about climate change. The algorithm continued by selecting for the \u201cmost in need\u201d demographic\u2014\u201cdetermined by the maximum of the ratio between number of people still required for fill a category quota and the number of people available for selection in that category,\u201d Verpoort explains\u2014until it drew 110 names. In the end, though the Climate Assembly UK Web site cautions that the algorithm \u201cslightly over sampled\u201d certain demographics, the selected group\u2019s distribution of the seven categories very closely matched that of the U.K.<\/p>\n But Jonathan Mattingly, a Duke University professor of mathematics who is also using algorithms in an attempt to help fix democracy, takes issue with that framework. \u201cWho\u2019s determining which categories inform decision-making? Maybe it\u2019s your family income before you turned 16, or whether your parents were immigrants,\u201d Mattingly says, referring to the seven characteristics used by Hennig and Verpoort. \u201cHow do we know which factors account for clarity, empathy and decisiveness?\u201d<\/p>\n Geoff Bedford, a participant in a \u201ccitizens\u2019 jury\u201d (a smaller kind of citizens\u2019 assembly) on climate, in <\/strong>the city of Leeds, England, also expresses concerns about how such assemblies are run. He points specifically to the expertise process. <\/strong>\u201cMost [participants] seemed to rely solely on the opinion of so-called climate scientists,\u201d says Bedford, who doubts that humans cause climate change. The participants, he adds, \u201cdon\u2019t have time to read the conclusions of [the experts\u2019] reports and, understandably, accept sound bites from the mainstream media.\u201d<\/p>\n Verpoort and Hennig counter that, for practicality\u2019s sake, most assembly organizers prioritize experts whose research is peer-reviewed\u2014and the vast majority of such research confirms anthropogenic global warming. But to make sure people like Bedford were still a part of the conversation, another algorithm was used during Climate Assembly UK. \u201cOnce you’ve got a diverse group of people representing society together in a room, you don\u2019t want all of the climate skeptics to end up on the same table and talk to nobody else,\u201d Verpoort says. To avoid this clustering, he created an algorithm to divide the 110-person sample into tables of eight individuals, among whom the seven categories\u2014age, location, and so on\u2014were proportionally represented.<\/p>\n Even if citizens\u2019 assemblies prove effective elsewhere, some doubt they would work as well in the U.S.\u2014and that the country\u2019s federal and local governments would take the resulting recommendations very seriously. But Crystal Chissell, vice President of operations and engagement at the nonprofit environmental organization Project Drawdown, says she is \u201cabsolutely\u201d convinced that ordinary Americans can help craft actionable policies. She points to Cincinnati, where hundreds of residents participated in developing the Green Cincinnati Plan of 80 evidence-based strategies to reduce the city\u2019s carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. \u201c\u2018Ordinary people\u2019 are very savvy when it comes to seeing the co-benefits of climate solutions,\u201d Chissell says, explaining that many simply want policies benefiting their health, well-being and finances while also addressing climate change.<\/p>\n One of the U.S.\u2019s prominent champions of people-powered policy making is James Fishkin, a professor of communication and political science at Stanford University. He is known for developing Deliberative Polling, a process that\u2014like citizens\u2019 assemblies\u2014uses stratified random sampling to gather a representative group of citizens, facilitate informed deliberation among them, and highlight \u201cactionable priorities\u201d for governments.<\/p>\n In the past, Fishkin\u2019s polls have been used to advance policies such as sustainable energy choices in Texas, Nebraska and Vermont. And he says that America in One Room, a recent national gathering of 523 citizens (a stratified, random sample that was representative of the American electorate in terms of attitudes and demographics) showed they can also build understanding across political ideologies. \u201cWhen a candidate wants to win an election, they deploy one-sided arguments just to generate outrage,\u201d Fishkin says. \u201cBut when you empower people to go beyond tribalism and consider an issue under the best possible conditions\u2014in an evidence-based discussion with multiple perspectives\u2014there\u2019s more policy consensus and less gravitation toward extremes.\u201d<\/p>\n Johnson, the retired construction worker, may offer some proof of that theory. He recently attended the Rural Climate Dialogues, a series of Minnesota-based \u201ccitizens\u2019 juries\u201d that were hosted by the nonprofit Jefferson Center, which was one of the earliest adopters of such juries in the U.S. After taking part, he says he now firmly disagrees with Trump\u2019s position on climate change and better understands its effects. \u201cTo hear how climate change is behind polar bears losing their homes, our changing forests and the heavy rains that keep my construction buddies from working\u2014I just learned so much,\u201d Johnson adds.<\/p>\n Snater, the soil-health organizer, also says the Rural Climate Dialogues opened her mind to new perspectives. Although she says she has spent much of her life researching climate change, Snater believes the jury helped her better understand how the phenomenon relates to the on the ground experiences of her neighbors. \u201cThis woman [from the dialogues] told a story about running out of fuel and living in a cold house for a couple of weeks with her kids,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a real moment where I realized, \u2018Not everyone is in the same position I am.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nUsing an Algorithm to Build a Scale Model of a Society<\/h2>\n
Can Citizens\u2019 Assemblies Work in the U.S.?<\/h2>\n