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What is a citizens’ assembly?
A Citizens' Assembly is a body of everyday citizens who deliberate on an issue or issues of local or national importance. The membership of a Citizens' Assembly is randomly selected by civic lottery, as in other forms of sortition. The purpose is to employ a cross-section of the public to study the options available to the population on certain questions, and to propose answers to these questions through rational and reasoned discussion and the use of various methods of inquiry such as directly questioning experts. Citizens' Assemblies aim to reinstall trust in the political process by giving everyday people direct ownership of decision-making. To that end, Citizens' Assemblies intend to remedy the divergence of interests that arises between elected representatives and the electorate, as well as a lack of deliberation in legislatures.
Why use a civic lottery?
Randomly selecting participants ensures demographic diversity and brings a wide array of voices to the table. It also decreases pandering since participants are not bound to electoral constituencies.
Are there precedents?
Both “WWViews” and “We, the Internet” have attempted participatory consultations at the global level. Citizens’ Assemblies have been conducted successfully at the national level in Ireland, UK, France. Numerous local-level assemblies have been conducted all over the world.
Why a global democratic government?
There is a lack of global governance. The UN is controlled by big super powers. Global economy is a free-riding competition where every state or consortium of states try to favor their own corporations. None of these logics are democratic.
Why use deliberative democracy at the global level?
Since the mid-20th century, scholars have noted the exponential growth of organizations that address diplomacy and aid on global or transnational issues. Although IGOs have successfully mediated global diplomacy and peace in the past, there are rising concerns today about the increasing lack of impact, relevance, and accountability of global cooperation schemes. While a precise diagnosis remains particular to each body, practitioners and scholars identify underpinning flaws shared among highly funded & high profile initiatives like the UN and G20. Largely composed of appointed representatives as opposed to everyday citizens, IGOs are skewed by a democratic deficit. Moreover, the representative format of negotiation in which participants advocate for national agendas discourage deliberation towards the global good. In part symptomatic of these two issues, there is growing non-compliance with agreements and policy recommendations of IGOs.
Despite the decaying credibility of “global institutions,” especially in the developing world, global cooperation issues are only increasing as globalization surges on. From mass pandemics, climate change, poverty, mass migration, to overpopulation, cooperation issues are cyclically increasing with little to address them at the global level. And even now, more issues, such as public health (Covid-19), take the limelight as new global cooperation issues.
Given this reality, the WCA project proposes that the injection of deliberative ideals are best suited to address the following problems.
+ Decrease "free-riding"
One of the most rampant fallbacks of global cooperation schemes today is “free-riding”, the “serving of one’s immediate interests at the expense of the global interest” (Vlerick, 2020). Not only are certain nations structurally given more power to strongarm proposals to their interests, global cooperation today is operated by nation-state representatives who negotiate for the incentives of their own nations rather than the collective good, causing natural divergence of interests among nations. Ultimately, “free-riding” degrades the quality of proposals and the ability for representatives to reach a consensus.
> While reforms that preserve the parliamentary format seek to improve the negotiation process between disparate agendas, deliberative democracy is based on shared learning and common-ground agreements. Not only is it more compatible with a pool of citizen participants (who, largely free from state incentives, will approach discussion without pre-existing agendas), empathy-driven policy making generally prioritizes the collective good. By combining the random sortition with a method of deliberation, we galvanize (1) public (2) reason rather than (1) national (2) agendas.
+ Fill democratic deficit
The non-representative format of the WCA distances national agendas from global governance. By sortitioning participants on region rather than nation-states and choosing everyday citizens unbound to electoral constituencies, the WCA ensures that participants bring their own lived experience rather than the interests of their national agendas to the table.
> Although there are global democratization initiatives such as the Popularly Elected Global Assembly (PEGA) that preserve elected representatives, the WCA opts for random sortition to get a more representative sample rather than an elite body.
+ Battle non-compliance
Even in cases that proposals are agreed upon by nations, there is often noncompliance with agreements, largely by countries who hold the most power (Mulvaney, 2019). For instance, although United Nations Climate COPs have had issues in the past generating meaningful policies, it’s also true that there is a treaty “congestion” on environmental issues: there are over 500 internationally recognized agreements in the past 50 years and only 40 out of 90 most critical show “some progress” (Vidal, 2012). Countries that often facilitate the most noncompliance are developed nations, i.e. US and Russia (Mulvaney, 2019).
> While legitimacy does not always lead to enforceability, experts agree that observable democratic legitimacy in the WCA can incentivize higher levels of compliance, even among power-heavy countries (Dryzek, Bowman, et.al., 2019). As Dryzek theorizes, the power of deliberative assemblies lies in its communicative power, wherein the participatory body and methods of policymaking is democratized (input), and the proposals (output) reflects the collective good of the body. The coupling of a good design and good proposals results in increased enforceability and defensibility, generally “provoking less resistance and being more likely to be implemented than decisions produced by power-politics and strategizing” (Dryzek, Bowman, et.al., 2019).