Our faith in democracy is at an all-time low. Can citizen assemblies help? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on January 15, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Citizen assemblies involve ordinary people participating in crafting policy solutions to community problems and have been around for over fifty years. Is this potentially a solution to restoring faith in our democratic institutions and reinvigorating healthy debate? Linn Davis, a program director at Healthy Democracy, a non-profit organization that promotes this innovative method of public engagement, joins The Excerpt to share recent learnings about how we can keep the public's engagement in our government both robust and accountable.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, January 15th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Citizens Assemblies have been around for over 50 years. Their purpose is essentially to tap the wisdom of the civilian crowd in crafting solutions to some of society's most stubborn problems. The recent project in Oregon to tackle the problem of youth homelessness is a case in point. Are their synergies to be realized when communities are asked to step up and play a role in creating policy-based solutions to issues in their region? Here to help us understand the structure and impacts of Citizens Assemblies is Linn Davis, a Program Director at Healthy Democracy, a nonprofit that facilitates this way of engaging the public. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Linn.
Linn Davis:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Your organization was centrally involved in a recent Citizen Assembly experiment in Oregon regarding homeless youth. Tell me about that project, what your role was and what the learnings were. How did it go?
Linn Davis:
Yeah, so this project happened over a few months this fall, a couple of meetings, sometimes they're much longer. But in this one, there was a group of around 30 people that addressed this issue across Deschutes County in Central Oregon in cooperation with a number of non-profits and local governments, and a group of local currently or formerly unhoused youth, to address this issue from a broad basis, from a number of different angles. And they heard from a bunch of different people in the community, experts, stakeholders, and came up with a number of different solutions. 22 super majority-supported solutions across the assembly that ranged from specific policies for the school districts, for example, to more broad, longer-term solutions to this issue.
Dana Taylor:
And what did you learn there?
Linn Davis:
Well, I think we learned, as we do in every one of these, that everyday people from all walks of life can do in-depth policymaking. I think we often think that we, the people are good for putting other people in office or doing some last-minute decision-making around policy issues. When in fact, we have the ability to actually do the work of policymaking ourselves. I think that's what these processes prove. Even folks who are just off the street, randomly selected. But if we trust folks to make decisions at criminal trials, then we should also trust folks to be part of the deep parts of policymaking all throughout our system.
Dana Taylor:
This hasn't been the first project your team worked on in Oregon. You worked on a project in the state 13 years earlier about voter information. Tell me about that one.
Linn Davis:
Yeah, exactly. It's called the Citizens Initiative Review. And there was a series of projects across five different states and a couple of other countries to specifically use what we call Civic Assemblies, or Citizen Assemblies, policy juries, they go by a number of different names, to review ballot measures, so initiatives or referenda, and provide better quality voter information. So this was in response to the fact that voter information around ballot measures can be very confusing, lots of myths and disinformation, lots of money in these systems. But that ballot measures are really potentially powerful.
It is one of the only opportunities that we have as everyday folks, as voters to actually be part of a decision-making process around policy. And what if we could give more of that system back to voters, do voter information by voters for voters? In this case a representative sample of voters from across the public, a sort of state in one room, that is listening to experts, it's listening to the pro and con campaigns, and then is producing high quality information. Which they did for quite a number of years on a wide variety of issues. Even very technical issues like corporate sales, taxes, that kind of thing. And also very controversial and emotional issues like quick recreational marijuana.
Dana Taylor:
Linn, not all government workers or stakeholders regarding specific political issues. What changes have you noticed when the people who come together to solve a particular issue have skin in the game, so to speak?
Linn Davis:
Yeah, I think it's really important that we all feel a sense of ownership over public policy. And I think right now, we have a situation where we don't, and that's causing a very understandable, I think the ambivalence and dissatisfaction with our governmental system. That's a problem for democracy in the long run. We need to feel like we all, not on every issue, we're a big country, even in a city of 50,000 people, it's impossible for everyone to be involved in every issue, but some of us need to be involved on some issue some of the time. And we need to know that other people just like us are also involved in deep way on other issues when we're not. That's the way that we get back in the game of politics, all of us, that's not just yelling at each other, but is actually working together to find common ground solutions, problem solve. Which folks who are just everyday folks, who don't have constituencies to appeal to, who don't have a lot of money, can do better than anyone.
Dana Taylor:
It sounds reasonable. Is it difficult to get people to buy in? How do you build that team cohesion that's so important in affecting policy change?
Linn Davis:
There's no substitute for time. A constraint that we're often faced with, sometimes even more than money, is desire to rush these things or to outsource them, to delegate them to other people. I think many of us, even though we believe in ourselves, believe that we can't do it as well and say, "Hey, we should just bring in the experts and we should elect somebody else to do everything." There is place for both of those things. It's very important, in fact, the outside advocates and experts in these processes are essential for the public to tap into. But for those folks to not necessarily be on top in the room doing the final decision-making. Just like in a jury trial, you wouldn't have the witnesses or the lawyers making the most difficult decisions themselves. You'd bring in a group of everyday folks, a jury of one's peers to do that. That's the same idea here. And it's really a surprise to me, I think, that it hasn't been done more in the past, because it seems so obvious to the way that we think about our system of government.
Dana Taylor:
Beyond civic engagement, are there other benefits that arise from these collective discussions, perhaps by creating the opportunity to build greater faith and trust in government and other public institutions?
Linn Davis:
There is never any issue with folks on the assembly buying in. In fact, there's usually a very low rate of drop-off during these programs. Once folks are in the room, they see that this is a different kind of politics. They see that they're building a community with folks. They're seeing what the work is, and that their voices are going to be listened to in a different way as well. And that they have an unusual level of credibility in the eyes of the public, because they're this representative random group of people that does the work for it.
I should say, they also come with a high level of design. It's not, in some ways like a jury trial, in that the jury doesn't go off and do its own thing in absence of process. There is a huge amount of development of public process that goes into the inside of the assembly in order to make sure that everybody from all walks of life feels universally able to participate as well as they can, to get the most out of everyone. And to make people feel comfortable and to make sure that groups are functioning as fairly as possible.
Dana Taylor:
In Europe, these kinds of Citizens Assemblies to advise on government affairs are quite common. Why do you think leaders in Europe have been more active in creating these assemblies? And what's been the result there?
Linn Davis:
Yeah, I think there's a number of factors. I think that to some extent, our belief in our own system of government, which is wonderful, sometimes trips us up and makes us not apply that American innovative spirit to the way that we make decisions. Which is odd, because that underlies so many of the other things that we care about across all sectors of our society. But I think sometimes we get locked into the way that we've done things before. I mean, so does Europe for that matter. But I think there there's been a little bit more activity both from a grassroots perspective and from academia, and from civil society, and from government that takes a little bit of everyone that's moved in the direction of innovation on democratic processes of everyday people involved in the meat of democracy just a little bit faster. But I don't think there's anything particular to any part of the world about this. It's just people dealing with decisions that affect them.
Dana Taylor:
There's an upcoming project this spring in Fort Collins, Colorado about land use. What's that one about? And what are you hoping to solve here?
Linn Davis:
Yeah, so this Deschutes County project was unique in that was all privately funded, and it was about a very broad-based topic. This one in Fort Collins that we're running with a number of partners, including the city there, is much more specific on a particular piece of land that the city owns and what exactly should happen with that in the future. And there's been, as in many of these cases, a lot of background. There's been a ballot measure there already that specifies some kind of park related use. But there's a lot of questions open around what exactly that means and what a great opportunity for the community or a representative slice of the community to come together and help make that decision.
So that'll happen in April and May this spring. And yeah, as I said, a little bit more of a traditional specific topic for an assembly to dig into, but the same level of depth and the dozens of different external inputs of information and viewpoints that will come into it. And then a whole lot of different processes that folks will go through in order to work on a wide variety of potential issues that could come up in that decision.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, Linn, do you envision any national infrastructure so that these projects can be better sourced and supported in the future? What would need to happen for this to be the reality?
Linn Davis:
Yeah, I think this is the real key. And as with many things in many parts of our society, funding from philanthropy and from government could go a long way in making these innovations happen faster. Yes, they're happening by small organizations and forward-thinking public servants all across the country, but a national fund for internal democratic innovation within the United States could really go a long way. And we have funding for that. There is a National Endowment for Democracy that's funded by the American people for projects abroad, but we don't have that in the United States. And there also, I think is understandably a desire on the part of foundations to fund strengthening of existing institutions, which is great. But we also need to think forward and we need to think at what the next thing is, and how these institutions may not in their current forms be serving, we, the people as best they can.
So I think there's that funding side. There's also just research and development and supporting the complex design and specific skills that make these the best they can be, both academia and in the private sector. And I think there are any number of systemic solutions that can be put into place at the local and the state level that can make these happen more often. There's one proposal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, to include a requirement in the city charter that the council must convene one assembly on one topic every year. And something like, that that's fairly loose and open-ended could go a long way towards sort of propagating these and creating a demand that creates an ecosystem that makes them happen a lot more often.
Likewise, we've worked for a while on an idea to go beyond the initiative review, to have another reform for the initiative system, where everyday folks through a series of assemblies are writing ballot measures from the get-go. And really utilizing that system for what it was meant to be in the first place, which is a way for everyday people to work on things that the legislature hasn't gotten to, or has a conflict of interest around or that kind of thing. But unfortunately, those systems are really taken over by folks with a lot of money, or they require a lot of money these days. So these kinds of reforms can be used to bring them back to the democratic place they started from. So those are a number of different systemic and funding ways that these can become more common.
Dana Taylor:
It's fascinating. Thank you so much for being on The Excerpt, Linn.
Linn Davis:
Thanks so much. Pleasure.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.