By some metrics, American democracy is in great shape. Despite a pandemic, and a switch to mass mail-in voting, the 2020 presidential election witnessed the highest voter turnout in U.S. history with 158 million people casting ballots. That’s about 66% of the voting-eligible population, the highest percentage since 1900 when 74% voted. Of course, many factors may have contributed to this voting bump. It is too early to predict that it signals a permanent uptick in political engagement, but it is good news, for sure.
The voting numbers may also reflect a broader turn to politics in American life, which might be seen as a mixed blessing. In the past few years alone, social media has become more political, family conversations seem to inevitably verge into politics, and political viewpoints can even influence who we want to be friends with or to date. To be sure, some of these trends can have problematic consequences for society. But they also suggest that people are more invested in politics. They are not as politically apathetic as once described but instead, it seems, have opinions they want to share.
Voting once every few years, often for distant legislators, is vitally important, of course. But it does not amount to a high level of engagement. We should be looking for additional ways to integrate the diverse opinions of citizens into democratic and policymaking processes — for a form of democratic engagement that lies somewhere between the tweet and the vote. That is where the idea of Citizens’ Juries comes in. As Reeves and Isabel Sawhill argued in the New Contract with the Middle Class, “Citizens’ Juries should be seen as an important part of the standard policymaking process.”
As a vehicle for influencing policy, Citizens’ Juries have been gaining traction in many parts of the world including Australia, Iceland, France, and Canada — to varying degrees of success and with various permutations. Here in the United States, the idea for Citizens’ Juries was pioneered by Ned Crosby and advanced by the Center for New Democratic Processes which has been using deliberative processes to support policy development on a wide range of topics since its inception.
WHY A CITIZENS’ JURY?
As the name suggests, Citizens’ Juries are comprised of small groups which, while too small to be truly “representative” of the appropriate population, are convened to serve as a microcosm of the public. They are one expression of what the political theorist Helene Landemore, among others, call “mini publics,” which are intended to bring a more diverse range of opinions and styles of thought to the table — including for the making and shaping of policy. As Landemore argues, if the dialogue is limited to politicians with law degrees and policy experts with PhDs, we miss out on a “diversity of perspectives, diversity of interpretations, diversity of heuristics, and diversity of predictive models,” all of which could help us arrive at better policy solutions.
There is a powerful intuition lying behind Citizens’ Juries, which is that a small group of people can work together constructively on tangible problems. The jurors need not be experts in the field, but when given the opportunity to engage with policy questions and to cooperate with their peers, they are able to produce good results. To take an example from another field, a recent study found that the combined ratings of 10 laypeople asked to fact-check a news article were as accurate as the rating of an individual professional fact-checker.
The key point here is that different kinds of knowledge are valuable and should be brought together in a constructive fashion. Technical expertise is not superior to lived experience — or vice versa. The goal here is greater epistemic equality. Citizens’ Juries bring diverse kinds of knowledge together — both the technocratic knowledge of policy experts and the lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ people — resulting in rich, well-informed deliberation. Citizens’ Juries allow the voices of the public to carry real weight with recommendations informed by the relevant experts in the field. Citizen engagement and cooperation of this kind can play a key role in creating a stronger, more vibrant democracy that works for all.
HOW DO CITIZENS’ JURIES WORK?
In general, Citizens’ Juries work by recruiting and empaneling a randomly selected, stratified group of 12-24 members of the public who meet for extended deliberations (typically between 3-8 days). Depending on the topic, the jury could include people from the population as a whole, or specific groups based on relevant factors to the policy issue at hand like age, gender, or race. For example, a youth citizen’s jury could be convened to study student loans. Due to the significant time commitment, selected participants are compensated for their time and costs such as childcare, and travel costs are provided when applicable. This approach reduces barriers that would otherwise preclude some individuals from participating in jury events and helps ensure a broad range of experiences are represented. As one of us (Reeves) argues in the Contract, payments and employment protections currently provided by states for legal jury service should be extended to Citizens’ Juries too.
Once assembled, the jurors are presented with a policy issue, dilemma, or decision to deliberate on for a prespecified amount of time, usually multiple days (sometimes in multiple sessions spread over weeks). Skilled facilitators or moderators oversee the jury and work to keep the deliberative space within the bounds of reasonable and respectful conduct while encouraging open exchange of views and perspectives. Expert witnesses are called in to testify to the technical body of a policy proposal and present relevant facts, statistics, or trends. These witnesses can be tasked with providing unbiased technical information and/or with presenting evidence in favor of one policy outcome over another. Either way, the jury is presented with a wealth of information and given the proper resources to deliberate amongst themselves.
This process is similar to the more familiar use of juries in the criminal justice system. In a courtroom, legal matters are put into the hands of twelve randomly-selected members of the public after they hear arguments f
rom lawyers and factual, well-researched evidence from expert witnesses. There is a judge that oversees and moderates the process, and the jury is given the opportunity to listen, deliberate, and decide. Even though legal jury duty is a civic requirement and Citizens’ Juries operate on a volunteer-basis, it nonetheless serves as a model for a formalized deliberation process. If this model works for legal questions, why not for policy questions?