Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Straight from the Heart

Feature-world crisis

Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Steven Kull

Part-7

The Process of Collective Deliberation

Standard polls are not always adequate for giving the public a voice through. On some issues the public does not enough information or has not had enough time to really sit down and deliberate about tradeoffs. In this case it may be necessary to do in-depth polls where people are given information and presented pro and con arguments. They in key also need to wrestle with trade-offs.

In some cases it is necessary to go yet another step and to have representative samples get together in person to deliberate on the issues together before coming to conclusions. All around the world there exciting new experiments being conducted along these lines. These include the “citizens’ juries,’ ‘deliberative polls,’ ‘Consensus Councils’ or ‘civic lotteries.’

Here again these ideas are popular with publics around the world. Respondents were asked about the possibility of having a large group of randomly selected citizens meet to consider a current issue facing their national legislature; after hearing the full range of arguments they would discuss the issue with others and finally send their collective conclusion to the legislature. In nearly every country large majorities approved of this idea-on average 68%. Interestingly, in most countries, majorities said they would have more confidence in the conclusions of such a group than the conclusion of their own legislature.

Creating a New Function of Government

Of course, it is not enough to simply give the larger society voice. It is also essential for the government to actually listen to the people. To ensure this will happen it is probably necessary to make the process of listening to the people an established function of the government. Once again, this is something that people around the world would like to do needy survey country polled, majorities have said that they would be then government to establish an agency to study the public’s views on the issues the government facing. Ethan Leib has made the case that the function of giving voice to the citizenry should become a kind of ‘fourth branch’ of government.

For the government to commit to giving the citizenry a voice would create the possibility to truly go to scale. Rather than just having an occasional poll or citizen jury, there could be a large ongoing representative sample ready to give input to the government, a Citizen Advisory Panel. All panel members would be linked by the Internet and would be briefed on current issues facing the government and asked for their views. In some cases, it would also make sense to get panel members together in groups to deliberate on the issues together with other panel members. The conclusions would be reported to legislative representatives as well as being released to the general public and the media. To make sure the process is conducted in a fair and unbiased fashion, a board representing different political parties, different sectors of society, and also a small representative sample of citizens would oversee the entire process.

To be continued…

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