The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy

"Like van Reybrouk’s, this is a very easy book to read. Both men are activists and very idealistic. They both run sortition associations. Brett Hennig’s book came about five years later, so it’s a little bit more rounded. It’s pretty radical. Van Reybrouck’s book tends to leave it for people to make up their own minds. Hennig seeks to do without politicians altogether, which is a red line for some in the pro-sortition community. My father certainly was similarly minded, over a long time scale. He doesn’t say it’s going to happen straight away. He says, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly, with everything being done by sortition. In their hearts, that’s what many people in the sortition community would like to see. But they know that there are compromises that have to be made to win over existing establishments. Also, who knows what mix of sortition and elections will work best? We’ve only just started experimenting. Even in ancient Greece the strategoi , the generals of the army, were elected. You didn’t just randomly select your generals to lead you into war. But the negotiations and diplomacy and everything else was done by sortition. Once you get the bug, it’s hard to shake off. Sortition is making a big comeback, at least compared to where it was 10 or 20 years ago. The number of citizen assemblies has grown logarithmically since the first one in 2003, and several hundred have now been convened around the world. It’s considered to work well when you have people from a whole community properly empowered to decide on ‘wicked problems’ which politicians don’t really want to touch, but which society needs solving. So yes, in Ireland it was first same-sex marriages, then abortion. It’s been used for more than 10 major climate assemblies, which is something else that politicians find very difficult to deal with. I was lucky enough to be an official observer at the French assembly on end of life. France bans assisted dying, and in the end 184 citizens answered the government’s summons to discuss if that should change. This was the gold standard of a citizens’ assembly with full state backing, called into existence by the President, addressed by the Prime Minister and the head of the National Assembly. They said, ‘Please find out what we should do. We will listen to you and anything that you say we should do. If we don’t do it, we will explain to you why we haven’t.’ So it was handing quite a lot of deciding power to this assembly. These citizens had never met each other before, but even the first weekend they met they already felt that they reflected the diversity of France. It was an extraordinary feeling to be standing in a room with people who were from all over France and its outre-mer departments, and from all social classes and all levels of education. There was an accidental discussion at one point with the president of the National Assembly about whether politicians or the assembly represented the people, and she replied sharply: ‘the one thing you’ve got to realize is that random selection will never take over government.’ And the whole room went silent as it sank in that she had vocalized something which no one had even thought of, maybe suddenly thinking, ‘Oh! It might one day be like that.’ We’re very far from that at present. But that citizens’ assembly, which recommended lifting the ban on assisted dying under strict conditions, proved a very good way of finding out what ordinary people, given full information, would do at this moment in time. A typical citizens’ assembly goes through four stages. First of all, you choose people randomly by letters of invitation or in the French case, by random phone calls, explaining citizens’ assemblies and the issue to be discussed. Sometimes people do this weird old polling thing, where you go to a street corner, go to the third street on the left and then take the third house on the left (say). There are all kinds of systems for doing it, it’s wonderful. Once you have answers from people – who have filled out forms with information about their location, education level, age, sex, ethnicity and employment – there’s a second round of random selection to make sure that those selected represent the community or population as a whole. The citizens’ assembly then convenes. People get to know each other. The main fuel of this decision-making process is mutual trust. When you’re randomly selected, you just represent yourself. Nobody has to feel that they’re there because they’re a woman or they’re of a particular ethnicity or educational level. You’re there because you’re you. It’s completely by chance that you’re there. No one is up, no one is down. Your view is theoretically equal. The citizens then hear from experts. In the French case, there were 60 people who came to formally talk to them, and possibly another 60 people were informally advising them. The main impression one got as an observer was, ‘My goodness, these experts all have very different opinions about what should be done!’ That was an eye-opener. After reading specially prepared materials and listening to all the experts, the citizens very soon came up to speed and far exceeded my limited understanding of assisted dying because they really studied hard. They really felt empowered. It’s what the sortition experts call best behavior. People feel they’re doing their civic duty and so they really commit. It’s one of the reasons why any one citizens’ assembly is unlikely to work if made permanent. Then it would become a job. People would lose that magical pixie dust that floats in the air when people work together with goodwill to find solutions. “Citizens’ assemblies are a really interesting way to draw the sting of anger, polarization and frustration” Then you have deliberation guided by facilitators. It’s important that facilitators are good, remember what’s been said, make sure that the shy people come forward, and that the loud and aggressive and antisocial ones are kept within normal bounds. In the French end-of-life convention they did superbly. They even had graphic facilitators, drawing cartoons of what everyone was saying in real time. Sometimes they were just brilliant. One dreamed up a ‘decision tree’, helping the citizens to see a framework for how their eventual report would need to be structured. It was complicated to take care of all the eventualities that face the 600,000 French people who die every year, and with an aging population, it will soon be 700,000. The citizens proved equal to the task. A 75% majority emerged that said France should lift its ban on assisted dying and 25% said they were against assisted dying—for various reasons: religious, moral, practical, etc., there were different currents. But everybody who was part of the assembly signed the final document. Even those who opposed assisted dying went on national French television to defend the decision to recommend assisted die saying, ‘I agree with this report, because I could see that most people thought differently, but they took my reservations into account and they are reflected in the report.’ It was remarkable to watch that happen. And I think most people who have taken part in a citizens’ assembly have had the same magic moment of thinking, ‘I can do this.’ It was a real downer when they didn’t have that anymore. In fact, some have to have psychological advice going back to normal life because being engaged felt so good. It was so inspiring to see how human beings are very reasonable if they can trust each other. Of course, it’s early days. This is only the second national citizens’ assembly that France has done. It was done differently from the first one, on climate change adaptation. And I’m sure the third one will have different characteristics as well. There’s a lot of experimentation going on. Citizens’ assemblies still have a lot to prove. I don’t think anybody’s found the perfect format or way of doing it. One of the things that people have the biggest trouble with is how less than 200 randomly chosen people can represent a country. The idea of the sample being representative is very difficult. My father spends a lot of time trying to prove that it is and to show why the time has now come to accept it. We do now have the science to show that sampling works, as well as the fact that randomness can be good. Which is a very post-enlightenment way of thinking. University College London actually did a citizens’ assembly on Brexit in 2017, after the vote. It was along the lines of, ‘OK we’ve saddled ourselves with the feeling that we have to do this Brexit thing now. How do we set about it?’ People got to grips with the material and came to conceptual good sense conclusions. The assembly was completely ignored, unfortunately, because the government wasn’t behind it. There has to be some level of government buy-in. The sortition movement can’t be too anti-politician because the politicians are still in charge. And the population, of course, still wants the politicians to be in charge. There are other exciting things going on in the UK. The Sortition Foundation is trying to latch on to the demands for reform of the House of Lords to see if that could be replaced with a formula that includes a randomly selected body or bodies. Change will come slowly and will have to be managed carefully. You have to have the population going along with you. It has to be properly designed. That is a huge challenge, to convince people that it’s working properly. If it doesn’t work, then people will lose faith in random selection for generations."