John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer (with Lyn Carson, Janette HartzKarp, Ian Marsh & Luca Belgiorno-Nettis)
Aims and Background
The aim of this project is to establish and research an Australian Citizens’ Parliament, which will be one of the most ambitious exercises in democratic citizen deliberation in the world so far. The idea is to use the Citizens’ Parliament to generate some recommendations for reform of the Australian system of government. The Citizen’s Parliament will be composed of one person selected from each of Australia’s 150 federal electoral districts, constituting a diversity of citizens reflective of the broader public. These citizens will gather in a series of online and regional meetings that will culminate in a gathering of all 150 citizens over four days. Feeding into these gatherings will be several other processes, including an Expert Group that will help frame the issues for discussion, and structured opportunities for input from a broader public.
The project is innovative in the following terms.
A Bigger and Better Deliberative Process
While there exist many deliberative innovations that have tried to engage typical citizens, the multi-step process we propose is innovative and designed to overcome the limitations of existing processes. The closest existing design is the Citizens’ Assembly, used to develop proposals for electoral reform in British Columbia in 2005 (Lang 2007), since copied in Ontario and the Netherlands. The British Columbia Assembly was composed of 160 typical citizens. However, the issue to be addressed by these assemblies has been quite narrowly defined. We propose a broader remit for the Citizens Parliament, which gives some latitude to the citizens themselves to determine the kinds of shortcomings of the existing political system and reform proposals that should be addressed. But defining the issue in open-ended terms risks chaotic and inconclusive deliberation. To solve this problem, we propose an innovative multi-step process that begins with an ‘expert group’ whose job it will be to develop around three coherent packages for constitutional reform (ranging from minimal to substantial) that will then provide the starting point for citizen deliberation. A ‘World Café’ of interested people will be convened to ‘workshop’ the three packages. Citizen deliberation itself will have several stages, beginning with study groups that meet locally in capital cities and other large centres, or online or by teleconference for scattered rural participants. These local deliberations will feed into the main gathering of the Citizens’ Parliament itself.
Linking Online and In-person Deliberation
The design will involve innovative combinations of online and in-person deliberation. The online aspect will involve many of the citizens who will subsequently meet in the main Citizens’ Parliament.
Connecting Designed Citizen Deliberation to the Broader Public
Results of the proceedings culminating in the Citizens’ Parliament will be made available online, with opportunity for comment by members of the public. Most existing designs for citizen deliberation do not make this connection, insulating deliberating citizens from the broader public. A summary of online contributions will be made available to the main meeting of the Citizens’ Parliament.
Testing Citizen Capacity to Cope with Complexity
The research is designed to shed light on the degree of issue complexity that deliberating citizens can handle. The test will be direct: citizens will actually be given a complex set of issues to deliberate. Much existing research on these questions is indirect, surveying individuals outside any deliberative context and presenting them with hypothetical scenarios, or drawing conclusions from ‘deliberation’ that in fact gives citizens little time and opportunity to engage in thought and discussion.
Methodological Innovation and Development
This project will provide further opportunity for the development of methodologies for the empirical study of deliberating citizens that have been pioneered by the Deliberative Democracy research group. Dryzek and Niemeyer (2006) have argued that the goal of deliberation should generally be a ‘meta-consensus’ on the acceptable range and structure of beliefs, values, and preferences, as opposed to simple agreement on a course of action, or upon the ranking of policy options, or on the content of values. This project will provide an opportunity to both develop and apply empirical measures of meta-consensus, with a view to determining whether or not meta-consensus does actually increase as a result of deliberation.
Start Date: January 2007
End Date: 2010
