Assoc. Prof. Matheson Russell explores different models for democracy in action during an era of unprecedented polarisation. His focus? Sortition. A highlight of Raising the Bar Home Edition.

Academic Matheson Russell explores different models for democracy in action. His focus? Sortition. (A highlight from Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Edition)

Listen to the talk

https://youtu.be/IXkOJZTRlqI

From the discussion

Innovations like Oregon's systems review, the Irish Citizens' Assembly and the Icelandic constitutional redrafting project really show how narrow our imagination of democracy can be. It has inspired political scientists and theorists to think again about what democracy should look like and whether the existing models of democracy are really fit for purpose.

The Yale political scientist Helene Landemore writes in her recent book Open Democracy that "the Icelandic example emboldened me to conclude that the limits of our current systems, as well as the changes brought about by globalisation and the digital revolution, call for a radically different approach to the question of the best regime, one that interrogates the very institutional principles of democracy as we practice it today"

So, let's reflect upon these examples. We need to think about them critically. What do we learn from these experiments in citizen-led policy development?

The first thing is that ordinary people are perfectly competent to make complex decisions if they're given the opportunity, the context and the resources to do it. There's now quite a large body of empirical evidence that when participants are presented with information, with arguments on all sides, and they have the to discuss this with each other, they're perfectly capable of making competent decisions on very complex issues.

And in fact, there has been some scholarly analysis of the arguments made in some of these mini-publics, and they often contain more depth and nuance than you typically find in parliament or even parliamentary committees.

People are able to judge trade-offs, weighing up competing goals. On some issues where there are quite polarised views, you find actually quite strong bipartisan consensus. The longer that people have a chance to think and learn together, the stronger that consensus can become.

And another observation made by the scholars of these experiments is that often the values of participants overlap more than you might think.

So that's the first thing that we learned, that ordinary citizens like you and me are perfectly competent to make complex political decisions…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details