This morning’s Civic Learning Week blogpost comes to us from FJCC/LFI Civics Instructional Specialist Kimberly Garton. It’s a consideration of new perspectives, and we hope you find it helpful.
Recently I read a piece of advice that encouraged individuals to start saying “thank you” instead of “sorry”. While obviously there are situations where an apology is necessary, somewhere along the line, we became a society that constantly apologies and the phrase lost its value. So, the idea is, instead of “sorry I am late” to swap it with “thank you for waiting for me”. The psychology behind the change in behavior says that when we start saying thank you more often, we become more confident, improve our self-worth, stop judging ourselves harshly, and it overall helps us see the good in the world around us. A simple change from a negative connotation to a more positive outlook can certainly do wonders.
In the world of education, especially civics education, the negativity can be overwhelming. Recently for teachers in Florida, it has been a constant bombardment of negativity towards education and educators. Whether accurate or not, the messaging has tended to focus on limitations placed on teachers and schools: don’t read these books, don’t teach these topics, don’t say these phrases, don’t use these resources. As educators, we often choose frustration and feel “sorry” for content or pedagogy we perceive to have lost the ability to engage with. So instead, this Civic Learning Week, let’s try some “thanks”:
Thank you for the opportunity to teach about the brilliant young individuals who founded this country. Individuals who read, debated, compromised, and fought to build any incredibly durable system of government.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach about the language and components of the U.S. Constitution, a framework for government that also protects sacred rights and liberties.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach about individuals from all walks of life and their courageous struggles and endeavors to fulfill the promise of democracy and bring us closer to “a more perfect union”.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach about ways citizens can and must be involved with their government, and the power and responsibility behind the phrase “We the People”.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach the meaning and importance of rule of law and due process in the United States legal system.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach about world affairs and U.S. foreign policy methods available for interacting with the international community.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach patriotism through our country’s aspirations. In the words of Fredrick Douglass “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes and at whatever cost.”
Thank you for the opportunity to teach using a vast number of primary sources that allow for deeper understanding, greater student connections to past events, and as the National Archives puts it, “History in the Raw”.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach students how to “develop an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms, and examine what it means to be a responsible and respectful person, for the purpose of encouraging tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society and for nurturing and protecting democratic values and institutions.” (Florida State Statute 1003.42-Required Instruction)
Many Framers had concerns about the practicality of the newly established government. But in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “education would facilitate the people’s good sense on which we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty”. The ability to teach or be a part of civics education in any way is truly a gift and a blessing. Together, we ensure this “great experiment” continues and each generation is equipped with civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions to be citizens capable of participating in civic life.
So I encourage you to take this Civic Learning Week and reenergize your passion. Re-read your standards, benchmarks, and state statutes and remind yourself of all of the amazing content and skills you get to teach and share. Listen to a new podcast, attend a professional development opportunity, pick up a book, or engage your colleagues in a conversation about their favorite civics topic. Take a moment to see the good in the world of teaching civics and government.
A city or town newspaper was nicely designed to keep people informed about their own elected representatives. Traditionally, it appeared on your doorstep, offering a mix of features that might encourage you to open it up. Election news would often appear above the fold on the main page. Elections in your own community would be emphasized. You didn’t have to be curious about politics to receive the most relevant political news.
As the chart with this post shows, most Americans (69.3%) claimed they read a newspaper “every day” in 1972, but that proportion has been around 20% since 2016, mirroring a 50% decline in the number of paid journalists. People still consume news, but cable television is national, local television tends to skip politics, and online sources require you to seek them out. (They mainly reach those with prior interests.) Besides, very few people are paid to report factual information about local politics.
I wish I could test whether the decline in daily newspaper journalism and readership explains current low levels of political knowledge. Perhaps that can be shown, but I have not found a long-lasting survey that asks about both news consumption and political knowledge in consistent ways.
The American National Election Survey (ANES) did ask individuals how often they read the newspaper and whether they recalled the names of the congressional candidates in their district. That series lasted from 1984 to 2000. Each year, just about twice as many of the regular newspaper readers recalled the candidates’ names correctly. For instance, in 2000, 51.8% of the regular readers and 24.2% of non-readers got that knowledge question right.
I’d conjecture that if these survey questions had continued, the proportion of news readers would have fallen in the ANES, and with it, knowledge of people’s own local political candidates. But I can’t quite prove it.
Today’s post for Civic Learning Week comes from our own Christophe Spinale, Associate Director of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. He writes for us about the importance of student civic practice!
Despite consensus that civics education is important, there is certainly no shortage of opinion of what civics education should like. Whether from the left, right, or middle, it seems everyone has a view of what civic education should be. This cornucopia of views got me thinking about the common “threads” that make up civic education and whether or not there will ever be agreement about which ones to use. I am a bit pessimistic on this point. As a nation of 50 states, all with their own education policies regarding the teaching of civics, depending on which state students live, the type of civics education they receive is varied. With all this variance on what civic education should be, how can American democracy be expected to survive when, for example, students in Illinois are learning civics differently from students in Florida? Is there enough common ground for the next generation to understand the fragility of our constitutional democracy and what it will take to make it stronger?
Some argue that the focus should be on the knowledge, but is that sufficient? I would argue no, and I know I would be in good company. Those considered experts in the realm of civic education have long advocated that knowledge be put to use. This is not a novel approach. For a thousand years, people have learned by doing. The practicum is foundational to this idea. Seriously, how can this nation’s students learn to “keep the Republic,” if they are not afforded the opportunity to practice citizenship as part of their schooling? Why not afford the opportunity to students to be citizen apprentices? Semantically, I think this is an acceptable approach as the apprenticeship is not novel to education. When I think about those common “threads” and the ways in which they may be “woven” to form a “tapestry’ of civic practice, I am awestruck at the possibilities. Civic education policy makers should be too.
With all the research that shows the effectiveness of coupling civic knowledge with civic skills, the citizen apprentice affords teachers the opportunity to become weavers of civic practice. They are able to take the common “threads” of knowledge and skills and “weave” them together to develop practical learning opportunities around the habits of good citizenship. Of course, this begs the question, what habits?
When thinking about this question, I often think about how the Founders. This is mostly because they are the ones invoked by the “knowledge advocates” as the basis for understanding our origins. No matter whose story I read, three things strike me – how young many of them were, how well read they were, and how they practiced what they preached. Obviously, their education provided a foundation of knowledge upon which they could develop the necessary skills to be able to accomplish what they did, but the ages they did it, now that is remarkable. I guess the point is we celebrate these young, bright, accomplished men for their writings, debates, protests, and fighting, so why is there hesitation to include a practice component to learning civics where students learn to deliberate, collaborate, and propose solutions to community issues of concern to them? Shouldn’t there be an expectation to engage in the American experience and participate in political processes as part of learning how to be a good citizen? Shouldn’t these types of “threads” be a basic component for all students engaged in civic learning?
As a parent, I want my children to have this type of civic education. I don’t want them being distrustful of democracy. I want them to engage their elected officials responsibly. I want them to have civil discourse and find common ground on issues where there may be disagreement. In other words, I want them to know how to be a good citizen, having discussed current events and controversial issues, engaged service learning, and participate in simulations of democratic processes. Imagine the possibilities of allowing our schools and teachers to be weavers of civic practice, where students can truly learn what it means to be a good citizen, but more importantly, act like one.
I am color-blind. I have the common red/green type sometimes called Daltonism.
I do not mind. In fact, I don’t think I would accept a permanent “cure,” if there were one. I might like to experience the colors that most sighted people see, but I wouldn’t want to leave the world I know on a one-way journey. I love what I experience.
Miguel Fructuoso, Maria Sanchez and Miguel Angel Tornero are established Spanish artists. Although Fructuoso was born in 1971, he was recently diagnosed with Daltonism. I am curious about that story. Adults realized that I was color-blind when I was still a little kid. Fructuoso is a painter, and he has the same physical condition I do. I am not sure how he remained undiagnosed for half a century. It has been suggested, but not widely accepted, that the English landscape painter Constable was color-blind at a time before that condition was recognized.
In any case, Fructuoso’s realization “initiated an intense collaboration” with Sanchez and Tornero, who have co-produced works as “formal exercises” that help them to explore “empathy and exclusion, the rare and the common, individualism and the collectivity.”
They have created several such works for the Centro Jose Guerrero in Granada. Guerrero was born here in 1914, spent a considerable portion of his life as an abstract expressionist painter in New York City, and died in Barcelona in 1991. He was known for vivid color. That makes his eponymous museum a perfect location for an exhibition about color-blindness.
The photo (above) that illustrates this post shows a painting by Guerrero from ca. 1970 (I think), copied by the three contemporary artists, with color-blind “Bill” choosing the paints. Yes, the two images look very similar to me, except along the top band.
Below is the result when many people with red/green color-blindness were offered a large selection of paints and asked to paint a line of a single color around the room in the Centro Jose Guerrero. Yes, I perceive a green line going all the way around.
And here, the artists have reproduced the standard tests for color-blindness as gallery works in paint and print. (No, I cannot see any numbers, but I do like these images.)
Since I have not felt mistreated as a result of color-blindness, I was not deeply moved by the exhibition’s message of empathy and inclusion, although it’s certainly benign. And I suppose I am sympathetic to Fructuoso, although he has done very well in a conceptual/expressionist mode.
I find aesthetic questions about color-blindness interesting. For example, how might we compare the art that I see (and love) to what most of you see? Does it matter that I don’t see what was intended? And how should I feel, as a person with Daltonism, about monochrome art, expressionist art that is meant to look different from the real world, or impressionist works that reproduce nature’s colors for me even though both the paintings and their objects look different to you?
Proposals are welcome on any topic at the “frontiers of democracy”—for instance, political reform, organizing and social movements, dialogue and deliberation, journalism and media, civic education from K-12 to college or community settings, nonviolent resistance, collaborative governance, social entrepreneurship, democratic theory, online forums and tools, issues such as climate change or racial justice, engaged research methods, democracy in any region of the world, and more. Many formats are welcome with a preference for interactive designs over pure presentations.
The last face-to-face Frontiers conference before COVID-19 drew about 140 people, of whom 30% were nonprofit staff, 25% were scholars/researchers, 15% were educators, 5% were community-organizers, and the rest came from many fields, including the arts, philanthropy, business, and government. Most came from beyond the Boston area and a few from overseas.
Most proposals for 2023 are not expected to address the special theme: religious pluralism and robust democracy in multiracial societies. That theme will mainly be a topic for two of the plenary sessions, which will be panel discussions involving Cornell William Brooks, Brandon Thomas Crowley, Diana Eck, Andrew Hanauer, Aminta Kilawan-Narine, Eric Liu, Cristina Moon, Simran Jeet Singh, Michael Wear, and others to be named. Some conference participants may be interested in considering connections between religion and your proposed topic, but you do not have to mention religion in your proposal.
The submission form for a session requires a title and description for the conference agenda, some thoughts about your format and audience, and the contact information of confirmed collaborators.
This year’s conference will be in-person, not hybrid. However, session organizers may propose to include remote people in their own sessions.
Time and location: July 13 (5 – 7 PM) to July 15 (noon) on Tufts University’s Medford, MA campus near the Medford/Tufts Station on the Boston Green Line.
Cost: $240 for a standard ticket with discounts for current students. This includes hors d’oeuvres on July 13, breakfast and lunch on July 14, and breakfast and lunch on July 15. Other meals and lodgings are not provided.
This Democracy Works podcast from Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy is a conversation between me and Chris Beem about my 2022 book What Should Do? A Theory of Civic Life. I enjoyed our discussion!
I’m in Granada, Spain, for three months, as part of a sabbatical. We’re living in a “carmen,” which is a “a type of urban housing” typical of two specific neighborhoods in this city, “with an attached green space, both garden and orchard, that constitutes an extension of the dwelling, according to the classic definition of Seco de Lucena. A Carmen is a space closed to the outside, surrounded by walls about two meters high, usually whitewashed, with lush vegetation” (per Wikipedia).
That describes our rented house quite well. We’re located near the summit of the Albaicin, the neighborhood of which the young Lorca wrote, “[El] tiene sonidos vagos y apasionados y esta’ envuelto en oropeles suaves de luz oscura” (“It harbors vague and passionate sounds and is wrapped in soft tinsels of dark light”). I see what he meant, but the views are usually crisp and vivid–with the snow-capped Sierra Nevada rising behind the sharp angles of the Alhambra–and the birds that provide most of the soundscape seem raucously cheerful rather than wistful for the lost world of al-Andalus.
I’m busy with several research projects that will benefit from concentration, including an interesting collaborative study that involves trying to diagram the logic of open-ended responses to a political survey. I appreciate the quiet hours when Americans are asleep, although I’m glad to hear from people once dawn breaks in the USA.
Although I’m certainly learning about Granada and Spain, I feel too much of a novice to post much about those topics yet. I presume I will blog normally about civic engagement and related matters.
For proponents of deliberative democracy, the last couple of years could not have been better. Propelled by the recent diffusion of citizens’ assemblies, deliberative democracy has definitely gained popularity beyond small circles of scholars and advocates. From CNN to the New York Times, the Hindustan Times (India), Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), and Expresso (Portugal), it is now almost difficult to keep up with all the interest in democratic models that promote the random selection of participants who engage in informed deliberation. A new “deliberative wave” is definitely here.
But with popularity comes scrutiny. And whether the deliberative wave will power new energy or crash onto the beach, is an open question. As is the case with any democratic innovation (institutions designed to improve or deepen our existing democratic systems), critically examining assumptions is what allows for management of expectations and, most importantly, gradual improvements.
Proponents of citizens’ assemblies put representativeness at the core of their definition. In fact, it is one of their main selling points. For example, a comprehensive report highlights that an advantage of citizens’ assemblies, compared to other mechanisms of participatory democracy, is their typical combination of random selection and stratification to form a public body that is “representative of the public.” This general argument resonates with the media and the wider public. A recent illustration is an article by The Guardian, which depicts citizens’ assemblies as “a group of people who are randomly selected and reflect the demographics of the population as a whole”
It should be noted that claims of representativeness vary in their assertiveness. For instance, some may refer to citizens’ assemblies as “representative deliberative democracy,” while others may use more cautious language, referring to assemblies’ participants as being “broadly representative” of the population (e.g. by gender, age, education, attitudes). This variation in terms used to describe representativeness should prompt an attentive observer to ask basic questions such as: “Are existing practices of deliberative democracy representative?” “If they are ‘broadly’ representative, how representative are they?” “What criteria, if any, are used to assess whether a deliberative democracy practice is more or less representative of the population?” “Can their representativeness be improved, and if so, how?” These are basic questions that, surprisingly, have been given little attention in recent debates surrounding deliberative democracy. The purpose of this article is to bring attention to these basic questions and to provide initial answers and potential avenues for future research and practice.
Citizens Assemblies and three challenges of random sampling
Before discussing the subject of representativeness, it is important to provide some conceptual clarity. From an academic perspective, citizens’ assemblies are a variant of what political scientists normally refer to as “mini-publics.” These are processes in which participants: 1) are randomly selected (often combined with some form of stratification), 2) participate in informed deliberation on a specific topic, and 3) reach a public judgment and provide recommendations on that topic. Thus, in this text, mini-publics serves as a general term for a variety of practices such as consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, planning cells, and citizens’ assemblies themselves.
In this discussion, we will focus on what we consider to be the three main challenges of random sampling. First, we will examine the issue of sample size and the limitations of stratification in addressing this challenge. Second, we will focus on sampling error, which is the error that occurs when observing a sample rather than the entire population. Third, we will examine the issue of non-response, and how the typically small sample size of citizens’ assemblies exacerbates this problem. We conclude by offering alternatives to approach the trade-offs associated with mini-publics’ representativeness dilemma.
Minimal sample size, and why stratification does not help reducing sample size requirements in complex populations
Most mini-publics that we know of have a sample size of around 70 participants or less, with a few cases having more than 200 participants. However, even with a sample size of 200 people, representing a population accurately is quite difficult. This may be the reason why political scientist Robert Dahl, who first proposed the use of mini-publics over three decades ago, suggested a sample size of 1000 participants. This is also the reason why most surveys that attempt to represent a complex national population have a sample size of over 1000 people.
To understand why representing a population accurately is difficult, consider that a sample size of approximately 370 individuals is enough to estimate a parameter of a population of 20,000 with a 5% error margin and 95% confidence level (for example, estimating the proportion of the population that answers “yes” to a question). However, if the desired error margin is reduced to 2%, the sample size increases to over 2,000, and for a more realistic population of over 1 million, a sample size of over 16,000 is required to achieve a 1% error margin with 99% confidence. Although the size of the sample required to estimate simple parameters in surveys does not increase significantly with the size of the population, it still increases beyond the sample sizes currently used in most mini-publics. Sample size calculators are available online to demonstrate these examples without requiring any statistical knowledge.
Stratification is a strategy that can help reduce the error margin and achieve better precision with a fixed sample size. However, stratification alone cannot justify the very small sample sizes that are currently used in most mini-publics (70 or less).
To understand why, let’s consider that we want to create a sample that represents the five important strata of the population and includes all their intersections, such as ethnicity, age, income, geographical location, and gender. For simplicity, let’s assume that the first four categories have five equal groups in society, and gender is composed of two equal groups. The minimal sample required to include the intersections of all the strata and represent this population is equal to 5^4×2=1250. Note that we have maintained the somewhat unlikely assumption that all categories have equal size. If one stratum, such as ethnicity, includes a minority that is 1/10 of the population, then our multiplier would be 10 instead of 5, requiring a sample size of 5^3x10x2=2500.
The latter is independent of the number of categories within the strata, so even if the strata have only two categories, one comprising 90% (9/10) of the population and one comprising 10% (1/10) of the population, the multiplier would still be 10. When we want to represent a minority of 1% (1/100) of the population, the multiplier becomes 100. Note that this minimal sample size would include the intersection of all the strata in such a population, but such a small sample will not be representative of each stratum. To achieve stratum-level representation, we need to increase the number of people for each stratum following the same mathematical rules we used for simple sampling, as described at the beginning of this section, generating a required sample size in the order of hundreds of thousand of people (in our example above 370×2500=925000).
This is without even entering into the discussion of what should be the ideal set of strata to be used in order to achieve legitimacy. Should we also include attitudes such as liberal vs conservative? Opinions on the topic of the assembly? Metrics of type of personality? Education? Income? Previous level of engagement in politics? In sum, the more complex the population is, the larger the sample required to represent it.
Sampling error due to a lack of a clear population list
When evaluating sampling methods, it is important to consider that creating a random sample of a population requires a starting population to draw from. In some fields, the total population is well-defined and data is readily available (e.g. students in a school, members of parliament), but in other cases such as a city or country, it becomes more complicated.
The literature on surveys contains multiple publications on sampling issues, but for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that without a police state or similar means of collecting an unprecedented amount of information on citizens, creating a complete list of people in a country to draw our sample from is impossible. All existing lists (e.g. electoral lists, telephone lists, addresses, social security numbers) are incomplete and biased.
This is why survey companies charge significant amounts of money to allow customers to use their model of the population, which is a combination of multiple subsamples that have been optimized over time to answer specific questions. For example, a survey company that specializes in election forecasting will have a sampling model optimized to minimize errors in estimating parameters of the population that might be relevant for electoral studies, while a company that specializes in retail marketing will have a model optimized to minimize forecasting errors in predicting sales of different types of goods. Each model will draw from different samples, applying different weights according to complex algorithms that are optimized against past performance. However, each model will still be an imperfect representation of the population.
Therefore, even the best possible sampling method will have an inherent error. It is difficult, if not impossible, to perfectly capture the entire population, so our samples will be drawn from a subpopulation that carries biases. This problem is further accentuated for low-cost mini-publics that cannot afford expensive survey companies or do not have access to large public lists like electoral or census lists. These mini-publics may have a very narrow and biased initial subpopulation, such as only targeting members of an online community, which brings its own set of biases.
Non-response
A third factor, well-known among practitioners and community organizers, is the fact that receiving an invitation to participate does not mean a person will take part in the process. Thus, any invitation procedure has issues of non-participation. This is probably the most obvious factor that prevents one from creating representative samples of the population. In mini-publics with large samples of participants, such as Citizens’ Assemblies, the conversion rate is often quite low, sometimes less than 10%. By conversion rate, we mean the percentage of the people contacted that say that they are willing to participate and enter the recruitment pool. Simpler mini-publics of shorter duration (e.g. one weekend) often achieve higher engagement. A dataset on conversion rates of mini-publics does not exist, but our own experience in organizing Citizens Assemblies, Deliberative Polls, and clones tell us that it is possible to achieve more than 20% conversion when the topic is very controversial. For example, in the UK’s Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit in 2017, 1,155 people agreed to enter the recruitment pool out of the 5,000 contacted, generating a conversion rate of 23.1%, as illustrated below.[1]
Figure 1: Contact and recruitment numbers UK’s Citizens Assembly on Brexit (Renwick et al. 2017)
We do not pretend to know all the existing cases, and so this data should be taken with caution. Maybe there have been cases with 80% conversion, given it is possible to achieve such rates in surveys. But even in such hypothetical best practices, we would have failed to engage 20% of the population. More realistically, with 10 to 30% engagement, we are just engaging a very narrow subset of the population.
Frequent asked questions, and why we should not abandon sortition
It is clear from the points above that the assertion that the current generation of relatively small mini-publics is representative of the population from which it is drawn is questionable. Not surprisingly, the fact that participants of mini-publics differ from the population they are supposed to represent has already been documented over a decade ago.[2] However, in our experience, when confronted with these facts, practitioners and advocates of mini-publics often raise various questions. Below, we address five frequently asked questions and provide answers for them.
“But people use random sampling for surveys and then claim that the results are representative, what is the difference for mini-publics?”
The first difference we already discussed between surveys and mini-publics is that surveys that aim to represent a large population use larger samples.
The second difference, less obvious, is that a mini-public is not a system that aggregates fixed opinions. Rather, one of the core principles of mini-publics is that participants deliberate and their opinions may change as a result of the group process and composition. Our sampling procedures, however, are based on the task of estimating population parameters, not generating input for legitimate decision making. While a 5% error margin with 95% confidence level may be acceptable in a survey investigating the proportion of people who prefer one policy over another, this same measure cannot be applied to a mini-public because participants may change their opinions through the deliberation process. A mini-public is not an estimate derived from a simple mathematical formula, but rather a complex process of group deliberation that may transform input preferences into output preferences and potentially lead to important decisions. Christina Lafont has used a similar argument to criticize even an ideal sample that achieves perfect input representativeness.[3]
“But we use random assignment for experiments and then claim that the results are representative, what is the difference for mini-publics?”
Mini-publics can be thought of as experiments, similar to clinical trials testing the impact of a vaccine. This approach allows us to evaluate the impact of a mini-public on a subset of the population, providing insight into what would happen if a similar subset of the population were to deliberate. Continuing this metaphor, if the mini-public participants co-design a new policy solution and support its implementation, any similar subsets of the population going through an identical mini-public process should generate a similar output.
However, clinical trials require that the vaccine and a placebo be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. This approach is only valid if the participants are drawn from a representative sample and cannot self-select into each experimental arm.
Unfortunately, few mini-publics compare the decisions made by members to those who were not selected, and this is not considered a key element for claiming representativeness or legitimacy. Furthermore, while random assignment of treatment and control is crucial for internal validity, it does not guarantee external validity. That is, the results may not be representative of the larger population, and the estimate of the treatment effect only applies to the specific sample used in the experiment.
While the metaphor of the experiment as a model to interpret mini-publics is preferable to the metaphor of the survey, it does not solve the issue of working with non-representative samples in practice. Therefore, we must continue to explore ways to improve the representativeness of mini-publics and take into account the limitations of the experimental metaphor when designing and interpreting their results.
“Ok, mini-publics may not be perfect, but are they not clearly better than other mechanisms?”
Thus far, we have provided evidence that the claim of mini-publics as representative of the population is problematic. But what about more cautious claims, such as mini-publics being more inclusive than other participatory processes (e.g., participatory budgeting, e-petitions) that do not employ randomization? Many would agree that traditional forms of consultation tend to attract “usual suspects” – citizens who have a higher interest in politics, more spare time, higher education, enjoy talking in public, and sometimes enjoy any opportunity to criticize. In the US, for instance, these citizens are often older white males, or as put by a practitioner once, “the male, pale and stale.” A typical mini-public instead manages to engage a more diverse set of participants than traditional consultations. While this is an obvious reality, the engagement strategies of mini-publics compared to traditional consultations based on self-selection have very different levels of sophistication and costs. Mini-publics tend to invest more resources in engagement, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, and thus we cannot exclude that existing results in terms of inclusion are purely due to better outreach techniques, such as mass recruitment campaigns and stipends for the participants.
Therefore, it is not fair to compare traditional consultations to mini-publics. As it is not fair to compare mini-publics that are not specifically designed to include marginalized populations to open-to-all processes that are specifically designed for this purpose. The classic critique of feminist, intersectional and social movement scholars that mini-publics design does not consider existing inequalities, and thus is inferior to dedicated processes of minority engagement is valid in that case. This is because the amount dedicated to engagement is positively correlated with inclusion. For instance, processes specifically designed for immigrants and native populations will have more inclusive results than a general random selection strategy that does not have specific quotas for these groups and engagement strategies for them.
We talk past one another when we try to rank processes with respect to their supposed inclusion performance without considering the impact of the resources dedicated to engagement or their intended effects (e.g. redistribution, collective action).
It is also difficult to determine which approach is more inclusive without a significant amount of research comparing different participatory methods with similar outreach and resources. As far as we know, the only study that compares two similar processes – one using random engagement and the other using an open-to-all invitation – found little difference in inclusiveness.[4] It also highlighted the importance of other factors such as the design of the process, potential political impact, and the topic of discussion. Many practitioners do not take these factors into account, and instead focus solely on recruitment strategies. While one study is not enough to make a conclusive judgment, it does suggest that the assumption that mini-publics using randomly selected participants are automatically more inclusive than open-to-all processes is problematic.
“But what about the ergonomics of the process and deliberative quality? Small mini-publics are undeniably superior to large open-to-all meetings.”
One of the frequently advertised advantages of small mini-publics is their capacity to support high-quality deliberation and include all members of the sample in the discussion. This is a very clear advantage; however, it has nothing to do with random sampling. It is not difficult to imagine a system in which an open-to-all meeting is called and then such a meeting selects a smaller number of representatives that will proceed to discuss using high-quality deliberative procedures. The selection rule could include quotas so that the selected members respect criteria of diversity of interest (even though, as we argued before, that would not be representative of the entire group). The ergonomics and inclusion advantages are purely linked with the size of the assembly and the process used to support deliberation.
“So, are you saying we should abandon sortition?”
We hope that it is now clearer why we contend that it is conceptually erroneous to defend the application of sortition in mini-publics based on their statistical representation of the population. So, should sortition be abandoned? Our position is that it should not, and for one less obvious and counterintuitive argument in favor of random sampling: it offers a fair way to exclude certain groups from the mini-public. This is particularly so because, in certain cases, participatory mechanisms based on self-selection may be captured by organized minorities to the detriment of disengaged majorities.
Consider, for instance, one of President Obama’s first attempts to engage citizens at large-scale, the White House’s online town-hall. Through a platform named “open for questions,” citizens were able to submit questions to Obama and vote for which questions they would like to be answered by him. Over 92,000 people posted questions, and about 3.6 million votes were cast for and against those questions. Under the section “budget” of the questions, seven of the ten most popular queries were about legalizing marijuana, many of which were about taxing it. The popularity of this issue was attributed to a campaign led by NORML, an organization advocating for pot legalization. While the cause and ideas may be laudable, it is fair to assume that this was hardly the biggest budgetary concern of Americans in the aftermath of an economic downturn.
(Picture by Pete Souza, Wikimedia Commons)
In a case like the White House’s town-hall, the randomization of people to participate would be a fair and effective way to avoid the capture of the dialogue by organized groups. Randomization does not completely exclude the possibility of capture of a deliberative space, but it does increase the costs of doing so. The probability that members of an organized minority are randomly sampled to participate in a mini-public is minor, therefore the odds of their presence in the mini-public will be minor. Thus, even if we had a technological solution capable of organizing large-scale deliberation in the millions, a randomization strategy could still be an effective means to protect deliberation from the capture by organized minorities. A legitimate method of exclusion will remain an asset – at least until we have another legitimate way to mitigate the ability of small, organized minorities to bias deliberation.
The way forward for mini-publics: go big or go home?
There is clearly a case for increasing the size of mini-publics to improve their ability to represent the population. But there is also a trade-off between the size of the assembly and the cost required to sustain high-quality deliberation. With sizes approaching 1000 people, hundreds of moderators will be required and much of the exchange of information will occur not through synchronous exchanges in small groups, but through asynchronous transmission mechanisms across the groups. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it will have the typical limitations of any type of aggregation mechanism that requires participant attention and effort. For example, in an ideation process with 100 groups of 10 people each, where each group proposes one idea and then discusses all other ideas, each group would have to discuss 100 ideas. This is a very intense task. However, there could be filtering mechanisms that require subgroups to eliminate non-interesting ideas, and other solutions designed to reduce the amount of effort required by participants.
All else being equal, as the size of the assembly grows, the logistical complexity and associated costs increases. At the same time, the ability to analyze and integrate all the information generated by participants diminishes. The question of whether established technologies like argument mapping, or even emerging artificial intelligence could help overcome the challenges associated with mass deliberation is an empirical one – but it’s certainly an avenue worth exploring through experiments and research. Recent designs of permanent mini-publics such as the one adopted in Belgium (Ostbelgien, Brussels) and Italy (Milan) that resample a small new group of participants every year could attempt to include over time a sufficiently large sample of the population to achieve a good level of representation, at least for some strata of the population, and as long as systematic sampling errors are corrected, and obvious caveats in terms of representativeness are clearly communicated.
Another approach is to abandon the idea of achieving representativeness and instead target specific problems of inclusion. This is a small change in the current approach to mini-publics, but in our opinion, it will generate significant returns in terms of long-term legitimacy. Instead of justifying a mini-public through a blanket claim of representation, the justification in this model would emerge from a specific failure in inclusion. For example, imagine that neighborhood-level urban planning meetings in a city consistently fail to involve renters and disproportionately engage developers and business owners. In such a scenario, a stratified random sample approach that reserves quotas for renters and includes specific incentives to attract them, and not the other types of participants, would be a fair strategy to prevent domination. However, note that this approach is only feasible after a clear inclusion failure has been detected.
In conclusion, from a democratic innovations’ perspective, there seems to be two productive directions for mini-publics: increasing their size or focusing on addressing failures of inclusiveness. Expanding the size of assemblies involves technical challenges and increased costs, but in certain cases it might be worth the effort. Addressing specific cases of exclusion, such as domination by organized minorities, may be a more practical and scalable approach. This second approach might not seem very appealing at first. But one should not be discouraged by our unglamorous example of fixing urban planning meetings. In fact, this approach is particularly attractive given that inclusion failures can be found across multiple spaces meant to be democratic – from neighborhood meetings to parliaments around the globe.
For mini-public practitioners and advocates like ourselves, this should come as a comfort: there’s no shortage of work to be done. But we might be more successful if, in the meantime, we shift the focus away from the representativeness claim.
****************
We would like to express our gratitude to Amy Chamberlain, Andrea Felicetti, Luke Jordan, Jon Mellon, Martina Patone, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Hollie Russon Gilman, Tom Steinberg, and Anthony Zacharewski for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this post.
[1] Renwick, A., Allan, S., Jennings, W., McKee, R., Russell, M. and Smith, G., 2017. A Considered Public Voice on Brexit: The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit.
[2] Goidel, R., Freeman, C., Procopio, S., & Zewe, C. (2008). Who participates in the ‘public square’ and does it matter? Public Opinion Quarterly, 72, 792- 803. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfn043
[3] Lafont, C., 2015. Deliberation, participation, and democratic legitimacy: Should deliberative mini‐publics shape public policy?. Journal of political philosophy, 23(1), pp.40-63.
[4] Griffin J. & Abdel-Monem T. & Tomkins A. & Richardson A. & Jorgensen S., (2015) “Understanding Participant Representativeness in Deliberative Events: A Case Study Comparing Probability and Non-Probability Recruitment Strategies”, Journal of Public Deliberation 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.221
During three recent talks on What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life, I received interesting questions of a similar type.
In the book, I argue that human beings must come together in a whole variety of groups in order to learn what is right by discussing and acting together. I claim that this is our best way of pursuing wisdom.
The questions I received were about animals and/or the divine. Does my account presume that people are the only beings that fully count? That assumption could be cashed out as a metaphysical view–for instance, that human beings alone have free will and therefore represent the sole intrinsic goods. As such, it would conflict with many other metaphysical views–for instance, that all sentient beings have been given harmonious roles by their attentive creator.
My answer (hardly an original one) is fundamentally pragmatic. I think that discussing and acting with other human beings is the best way we have to make ourselves wise. We don’t have the option of including animals in our discussions because they can’t talk. And we don’t get direct and explicit divine instructions, unless perhaps very rarely.
This does not mean that animals don’t count or that there is no higher power. Perhaps we have very important duties toward other sentient creatures (which may require close attention to their expressed needs) and toward God or gods. But we must define and honor these duties by interacting with other human beings.
John Rawls is the most famous advocate of the idea that politics does not require metaphysics (see “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” 1985). I am saying something similar, except that my view is much more polycentric.
The main focus of Rawls’ thought is a constitutional democracy as the sovereign power in a nation. He sees a legitimate government as the mechanism for deciding what justice demands. Because its citizens have the right to hold their own religious and other fundamental views, a legitimate state must be neutral in relevant ways, which makes it “liberal” in a certain sense of that term.
I view any religious denomination as one of the venues in which people come together to decide what is right to do together and to learn from one another. It may be defined by certain metaphysical premises that all its members endorse (although that is not uniformly true of religions). Unlike Rawls, I do not see the liberal state as one uniquely legitimate umbrella organization set over the religious denominations and other groups. Rather, a society is a panoply of associations that have diverse purposes and assumptions, and the liberal state is simply the association that is charged with settling a range of issues that involve public law. The society as a whole generates wisdom (and folly, in various proportions).
Most of our associations have no need to be neutral about metaphysics. They are entitled to take strong positions about the divine, about nature, and about other philosophical questions. Still, all of them are necessarily groups of human beings, and the topic that interests me is how to design them to bring out the best in their members. That topic does not seem to require getting the metaphysics right.
Objection: When some groups of human beings gather to decide what they should do, they consult non-human sources. They pray, they study texts of revelation, or they commune with nature and try to learn from non-human animals. Must we not decide whether their beliefs are correct in order to assess their behavior? For instance, perhaps it is wise to pray to a divinity that exists but not otherwise. In that case, metaphysics must come before politics.
I would answer this objection from two different perspectives. First, as an individual, I must put myself in groups to learn from others and keep myself accountable to them. To some extent, I can choose which groups to join. Their core philosophical commitments are relevant to my decisions about membership. I should be less likely to join a group that I fundamentally disagree with, and some of those wouldn’t want me in the first place. However, core philosophical commitments represent one kind of consideration among others. Plenty of people are good members of religious communities despite doubts. In short, I can critically assess groups and join only my favorite ones, but I shouldn’t be too fastidious about these choices.
Second, as a citizen, I should be glad that there are many different groups. They reflect freedom of association and diversity. They contribute to the society-wide discussion. Not only should I fight for their First Amendment rights and tolerate their presence, but in many cases, I should actively learn from them. Even if I disagree with their metaphysics, they may have insights that would benefit me. From a different perspective: even if I am foolish in doubting their articles of faith, their divine inspiration can speak to me through their human members.
I often return to John Dewey’s formulation of “the democratic idea in its generic social sense” from The Public and Its Problems (1927). He proposes three principles. Everyone should belong to many groups, which must “interact flexibly and fully” with each other. These groups should derive the full benefit of all their members’ contributions. And people should be involved in “forming and directing the activities of the groups” to which they belong. This vision is all about human beings, but I don’t think it challenges either religious beliefs or deep concerns for nature. It is rather an idealistic account of how people–who may hold diverse fundamental views–should govern ourselves, because that is something we must do.
I have no expertise or personal experience in military affairs and a shallow knowledge of Eastern Europe, but I have been following the Ukraine war avidly on a daily basis. This summary might have some value for those who are following matters less closely than I–as long as you remember the caveats about my amateurishness.
I illustrate this timeline with maps from the Neue Zuericher Zeitung (the Swiss newspaper), because they work well graphically. The NZZ helpfully explains how and why their maps differ from some other credible ones.
Russia’s armed conflict with Ukraine begins in 2014. By February 24, 2022, Russia and its proxies occupy substantial (but disconnected) portions of Ukraine. The current war begins with strikes against military targets, denoted with the icons of explosions below.
Putin probably thinks that he is sending about 200,000 well-equipped soldiers into Ukraine under officers who have gained combat experience in Syria and elsewhere. He probably assumes that the Ukrainian government is almost a joke: unpopular, corrupt, propped up by the CIA, and led by a comedian. He orders an ambitious attack on multiple fronts and expects the conflict to conclude in days.
That multi-front offensive has culminated by mid-March, with massive Russian casualties and atrocities against civilians, especially on the route south from Belarus. It is becoming clear that the Russian force was hollow, due to corruption and falsified reporting up the line, whereas the Ukrainians are motivated and prepared. Russian occupied territory teaches its maximum extent around March 15.
March 12-15, 2022
By April, the Russian columns in the north and northeast have withdrawn in defeat, and the focus is a bloody battle to control a devastated port city of Mariupol in the southeast. The Russian offensive is now very slow, but Russia controls a continuous band of Ukraine that includes much of Ukraine’s industrial east and its seacoast and ports.
April 11-13, 2022
Mariupol falls by early May. Ukraine’s second city, Kharkhiv in the northeast, is close to the front and constantly bombarded. The next phase is a slow Russian advance in the the eastern zone, enabled by massive artillery support. Major fighting centers on the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, which have little military value, according to independent military experts. Still, Russia wants to claim that it retains offensive goals. (On April 14, Ukraine sinks the Russian battleship Moskva, an episode in the ongoing naval campaign.)
May 16-18, 2022
The map in late August looks similar, because Russian forward movement has essentially stalled. At this point, Ukraine is sending all kinds of signals that it will counterattack along the southern tier, targeting the city of Kherson on the right (western) bank of the Dnipro River. By this time, it is possible that Russia is already planning an organized retreat from Kherson, which is difficult to defend because of the wide river.
August 29-31, 2022
The southern counteroffensive was a feint. Ukraine manages a rapid surprise advance in the north and then down into the north-center, while Russia withdraws from Kherson anyway (with light losses, in one of Russia’s under-recognized successes). Ukraine regains Kherson, Izium, Lyman, and other cities and territory.
As the Ukrainian counteroffensive culminates, attention turns to the small city of Bakhmut, which both sides seem eager to award symbolic significance. For the Ukrainians, the goal may be to entice Russians into a Pyrrhic campaign for a target of little strategic importance. In any case, the map for Jan. 10, 2023 (below) looks very similar to that for late August (above). But these maps do not depict the constant strikes against Ukrainian civilian targets as far west as Lviv–or the Ukrainian attack on the Kerch Bridge, a vital Russian supply route, on Oct. 8.
Jan. 10, 2023
During this period, it is likely that Russia is focused on mobilizing, training, and equipping a new cohort of 300,000 reservists and redirecting its heavy industry for prolonged war. Putin may have no short-term offensive hopes between August and January, and you’d have to squint to see the differences between these maps.
Feb. 10-12, 2023
But acknowledging that the Russian offensive has stalled would embarrass Putin politically and could embolden Ukraine’s allies. Therefore, the Kremlin encourages irregular proxies to continue fighting, especially for Bakhmut. These proxies include the “People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” “the People’s Militia of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” Chechen forces under Ramzan Kadyrov, and especially the “Wagner Private Military Company” under billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, which recruits/pressgangs Russian prisoners as troops. Political ambitious motivate these groups to continue fighting (and quarreling amongst themselves), even when the costs are extraordinarily high. They serve the Kremlin’s propaganda needs and cause Ukrainians to die, while Russia strives to restore its regular Ministry of Defense forces. By today, Prigozhin has probably outlasted his welcome and is being marginalized. I would not be surprised to see him in jail soon.
The UK Ministry of Defense and Institute for the Study of War both believe that an attempted Russian advance–using its reconstituted, regular forces–began in mid- to late-January, 2023. This offensive was not announced, probably because of anxiety about whether it would succeed. The fog of war is thick, and conditions may change rapidly, but there is no sign of Russian success so far.
One possible outcome is no advance at all, which would be hard for Putin to conceal from domestic audiences. At that point, I think his only option would be to dig in and try to retain currently occupied Ukrainian territory long enough for Western support to wane–a bit like Germany’s decision to hold fortified lines across Belgium and France from 1916-18.
A rainy, wet season is expected that will frustrate advances by either side. Ukraine expects deliveries of Western tanks and other equipment by late spring. Thus the most likely next phase is an attempted Ukrainian counter-offensive focused wherever the Ukrainian General Staff chooses.
If that counteroffensive succeeds, I think Putin’s options will become quite unpleasant for him. Then Russian would be in a similar position to imperial Russia in 1917.
If the Ukrainian advance should falter, then the war may enter a new stalemate phase, during which the main drama will be diplomatic. Would the US and European countries continue to support Ukraine or else start pressing for an armistice, which would give Putin time to rebuild for another invasion later? And where would players like China’s President Xi stand?
