User:Rkm22/Citizens' assembly

I am a student working on the Citizens' assembly page. I plan to update information about the Washington Climate Assembly and add to the legitimacy section on min publics.

Draft:

Washington Climate Assembly

The Washington Climate Assembly is the first state-wide climate citizens' assembly to take place in America. The Assembly took place in the Winter of 2021, bringing 77 randomly selected citizens together to discuss climate change. The assembly was entirely virtual, and their fundamental question was: "How can Washington State equitably design and implement climate mitigation strategies while strengthening communities disproportionately impacted by climate change across the State?” Their recommendations were brought for consideration to the State Legislature.

Selection Method:

The organizers sought to get citizen input at all levels. In November 2020, they held a scoping meeting to determine what the Assembly's focus should be, and various concerns were brought and boiled down into three possible questions. The organizers then brought these questions to "elected officials, policy experts, tribal leaders and staff, environmental non-profits, businesses, community-based organizations, climate experts, deliberative democracy experts, and leaders of color." and their feedback created the final question. The scoping process consisted of self-selected participants.

For the actual assembly itself, citizens were selected through stratified random sampling: 6,333 potential participants were initially contacted via phone. Researchers created 10,000 possible groups of citizens, each of which accounted for participants' gender, age, congressional district, class, race, education and beliefs on climate change. They then randomly picked one possible group. Organizers of the assembly "attempted to break down barriers" to participation by providing technology (i.e laptops and microphones) as well as childcare to whoever needed them. Each participant was also paid $500 after the end of the Assembly.

Organization:

In the first two months of 2021, Assembly members attended seven public "Learning Sessions" which brought both experts and affected parties in regards to climate change. The first and last sessions were general overviews, while other sessions went into greater detail around one impact/sub-field of climate change, such as the economics relating to climate change's effects and potential solutions. There were five deliberative sessions in which the participants determined “priority principles” and then crafted recommendations that addressed these principles. The public was then allowed to comment on the Assembly’s recommendations. After public comment, the Assembly members voted on their recommendations through private votes.

The Assembly organizers emphasized their commitment to equity, stating that the Assembly had a “dual focus on climate change and equity.” The facilitator teams were designed to be diverse. They were also rated as neutral by most participants – at the start of the Assembly, 80% of the assembly members said the facilitators were neutral, and this reached 90% over the course of the deliberations.

Political Support:

The Assembly did not have legislative powers – it could only submit recommendations to the State Legislature, which had no obligation beyond consideration. However, several state representatives (Rep. Jake Fey, Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, Rep. Zack Hudgins, Rep. Steve Kirby, and Rep. Cindy Ryu) expressed their support for the assembly in an op-ed for the Herald Net, pointing to the examples of climate assemblies set in the UK and France. They wrote that the assembly was an opportunity "help us all to bring more voices to the table to understand deeply held concerns, concerns about the status quo as well as concerns about the policies proposed to fight climate change." Although all the representatives above are Democrats, support came from Republican representatives as well.

Mini-publics (RABHYA ADD-ONS)

Christina Lafont, for example, argues that the use of mini-publics would undermine deliberation. She argues that this is because mini-publics asking the public to accept the results of their deliberation is akin to an elite democracy. While she clarifies that "this variety differs from the standard elite model to the extent that it does not ask citizens to blindly defer to the deliberations of a consolidated political elite.... [it] blindly defer to the deliberations of a few selected citizens." Fishkin argues in turn that this model is not elite because it uses ordinary citizens who are representative of the population (i.e, a "mirror" of the population.) Lafont rejects the mirror characterization, arguing that people are "subjected to a filter of deliberative experience" which makes them "no longer a representative sample of the citizenry at large."

Hélène Landemore responds to Lafont by arguing that while her concerns of a secretive mini-public are valid, it is impossible to have large-scale discourse, let alone improve it. Landemore offers a solution to the question of political legitimacy by making the mini-publics "as 'open' to the larger public as possible." For example, their decisions could be authorized by citizens via a referendum.