Building the Deliberative Wave:
Remarks to the Innovating Local Democracy Conference

Manchester, UK
January 27, 2020 

Peter MacLeod
Principal, MASS LBP 

First of all, let me say this has been a great first day, and I want to pay my compliments to the incredible team at the RSA and at the department of local government, housing and communities, and digital, culture, media and sport. And if you'll permit me, I want to say that any history of this pivotal moment for deliberative democracy will need to credit Miriam Levin for her conviction and perseverance. She's succeeded in a herculean task that has moved government so skillfully in a direction we all believe it needs to go. 

I've been asked to provide a bit of a capstone to the day, and there a few general observations I'd like to make.

First, is the simple fact that an event like today's would have been inconceivable just five, even three years ago. And that each of us, working in our own different spheres and ways are part of *something* that seems very important right now.

We're all following the same people on Twitter, and we all see the incredible upsurge in activity. Practically every week, and certainly every month, a major new assembly is being announced. And they're coming in all shapes and sizes, in different jurisdictions and tackling different issues. Politicians are paying attention. The media is coming around.

So we see that this *something* that we're all working on is at the same time very local and also very global. Together we're bringing to life a set of radical principles that hold the promise of restoring what each of us believe can be a better expression of our faith in one another, and of our democratic commitment.

This *something* that we're working on is also collegial. We are learning and sharing with one another in a way that makes this moment immeasurably richer and likely more productive. 

It's also *something* very consequential because right now, so many impressions are being formed. Many of us are steeped in this stuff. But for most, everything we're proposing is new and it seriously challenges matters of identity, political organization and power. We, along with everyone meeting in Manchester this week, are stewards for this moment. 

To quote our friend Claudia at the OECD — who is doing such stellar work — the deliberative turn has happened and now the deliberative wave is upon us.

This is where my colleagues thought I should ask the room to actually do the wave — like at a sports event. 

I'm not going to do that. 

What I am going to do is ask whether this moment will become a rolling wave — with sustained momentum and force — or will it crest, fall back or even crash?

After all, suddenly our work is being thrust into the spotlight. It is attracting scrutiny and critics. It's the basis for local and national debates. And either we, or the headline writers, sometimes cast these efforts in exaggerated terms: 

...Power to the people

...Saving democracy

...Citizens take charge

...Fixing government

And I don't know about you but it makes me uncomfortable. I think these are unnerving, suspect tropes. 

 If good deliberation entails a measure of introspection, then I think that as we celebrate this moment we also need to ready ourselves for the inevitable push back.

This push back will come from several quarters.

…It will come from pundits wanting controversy;

…It will come from cynics;

…It will come from politicians who feel displaced; 

…It will come from a public opinion industry that wants its cut;

…It will come from interest groups that want to undermine recommendations they dislike.

But most dangerously of all, it will surely come when an illiberal government seeking to legitimize an odious policy decides that a citizens assembly can as easily give voice to the public's fears, as it can to its better judgement, and aspirations.

In any wave, there's a lot of churn, but the prospect of the co-option of this work by populists is something that I think needs to be top-of-mind for many of us. 

We might call it Orban's Assembly... a process that would be substantively the same, but whose animating spirit would be wholly different.

You see, the truth, right now, is that this work faces a thousand dangers, and the more successful it becomes, the more directly it will be tested.

So how do we meet this test?

I think the national assemblies taking place are immensely important. They raise the profile of this work and they are tackling momentous issues. They are, in a sense, at the tip of the wave. They're very prominent but this same prominence is also what makes them, and this movement, vulnerable. If they are to succeed and this moment is to be sustained, then beneath them should be the swell made up of dozens and indeed hundreds of what we might as well call everyday assemblies.

Everyday assemblies will mean carving out a greater share of the regulatory work of the state. It will mean seeing the work-a-day business of line ministries and departments as every bit as fertile a space for citizen deliberation as those assemblies getting the attention of presidents and prime ministers.  

And so for every climate assembly, we need an assembly on automotive insurance or local health priorities. For every assembly on a nation's future, we need an assembly on community safety or water standards.

The two scales are inextricably linked — with the national assemblies creating profile and performing some heavy policy lifts and the everyday assemblies normalizing the work and opening up the experience to considerably more people.

After all, I don't think any of us can be satisfied to simply put a few dozen or even a few hundred more citizens at the table. We won't reinvigorate democracy by resolving a few intractable issues, or creating a substitute for Royal Commissions, or even, as some suggest, by replacing our elected representatives with an equal number of selected ones.

This moment, if it's to have any staying power, has to find a way to bring everybody in. It has to figure out, how every citizen once, maybe twice in their lives gets the call, and gets a chance to serve, in ways both big and small. I think this is a modest goal, but to do this, we need to radically expand the opportunities for citizens to be representatives, and to feel the responsibility of using their voice as a proxy for others.  

Ultimately, I believe the promise of this work and also its best defense is scale. So often participatory democracy and deliberative democracy are juxtaposed as offering either breadth or depth. But sustaining the deliberative wave requires that we accomplish both and in this sense, we need to make the deliberative participatory. 

This requires some different thinking... Right now, the compact between progressive policy-makers, politicians, and reformers has powered this movement ahead.

…The policy-makers want more responsive, more rational, and long-term policy.

…The politicians want to delegate and resolve intractable issues.

….The reformers want to address the dysfunction of political institutions.

 But there's another group who's thinking we need as well. 

 And that's — for lack of a better term — the pedagogues, or educators, the heirs to Maria Montessori and John Dewey  — who care about the democratic fitness of the public, and who believe in the educational and edifying experience of deliberation; who because they believe this, believe that as many people as possible should, by right, have the opportunity to exercise public judgement.

At MASS, we have started to think about this project by the name D1 and D2. 

D1 has been the project of the past two hundred plus years. It's been the project of universal suffrage and it’s taken incredible efforts over these two centuries to settle what to most anyone now seems obviously just: that everyone — or at least every adult — should have the vote. 

But the D1 settlement doesn't only include a public consensus concerning the franchise. It also contains a kind of settled thinking on what the ratio between electors and elected should be. That on local councils, it might be 1:10,000, in national legislatures in might be ten times that or considerably more.

D2 concerns this flip side of the coin. It asks that we take a view of just how many people should have the opportunity to assume, however briefly or intermittently, a representative role.

It extends the idea of democratic citizenship to include both voting and the act of representing others.

The question I'm asking is, in a sense, epidemiological: How many people in a population need to have the experience of serving on a citizens assembly, jury or panel, in order for these processes to have a meaningful and lasting impact on a individual's perceived personal efficacy, public sensibilities and democratic culture? 

We can only guess at this number, but if it is on the order of just a 1/10th of a percent each year, Britain would need some 60,000 seats distributed across some 1,200 assemblies. 

That sounds incredible. And it would keep Tim and his team unbearably busy.

So what about 1/100th of a percent? Now we'd need 120 assemblies. Distributed across national and local governments, as well as the hundreds of public agencies across the broader public sector, it starts to become conceivable.

And though surely just 6,000 people amid 60 million is far too few to make much of a dent, as an aspiration, as a direction of travel, I think it's a good place to start and reminds us of the magnitude of our task.

My point isn't that assemblies should become the procedural answer to every question. But D2 thinking requires us to think differently about scale and prevalence, and exactly what will be required to create a culture of deliberation, and establish a powerful hedge against the dilution of this work and its sabotage by our opponents.  

This is why we have launched a call in Canada to spend 5% of the cost of a national election — about $10 million each year — to fund up to 80 deliberative processes annually.

Canada's Democratic Action Fund would be a matching pool created by the federal government and housed within a centre of excellence. Federal and provincial departments, as well as municipalities would be able to apply for 66 cent dollars to fund processes that satisfy broad criteria. Over 5 years, the fund would unlock some 600,000 hours of citizen deliberation and create opportunities for more than 10,000 Canadian residents to serve and represent their communities.

As a model for other jurisdictions, I think its wholly replicable and building on Miriam's good work here in the UK, we think there's a good chance it will happen. 

But even still, I worry that time is too short and even this investment is too modest. At some point soon, an effective response to illiberal politics will require something exponentially greater — of which this work can only ever be one element. The conjunction of the national security of liberal societies and this work is just ahead. 

Until then, our job is to use every means to become as commonplace as quickly as possible and to push this work into and across the fabric of society. Innovation and novelty got us here, but it won't keep us here. It started the wave, but it won't sustain it.

That part, friends, is up to you.

Thank you.

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| Download a proposal to create Canada's Democratic Action Fund

| Download slides for “Lessons from Canada: From Citizens’ Assemblies to Reference Panels”