7. The Citizen Panels Proposal
[In] a neighborhood where the quiet kids are being bullied by a few big kids, … there are all kinds of rules parents and teachers can adopt to try to restrain the big kids, but if the neighborhood is a fairly free and open place, these are going to have limited success. Bullies are very inventive in how to get their way when the only thing to restrain them is a set of rules enforced by parents and teachers…. The key lies in getting the quiet kids to flnd a way to band together and take care of themselves.Ned Crosby, "Citizens Election Forum: A Proposal for Electoral Reform"
A successful reform of the U.S. political system must deal with the "bullies" in Crosby's analogy. Citizens need a mechanism that ensures relatively quick and decisive electoral action against unrepresentative officials. Chapter 4 explained why current reform proposals for American politics would not meet that need. Radical changes in the voting system might better incorporate minority publics, but they would not facilitate better overall representation. Public flnancing and term limits might make elections more competitive, but they would not improve voters' candidate evaluations. Regulations on the messages candidates send to voters are either unenforceable or unconstitutional, and efforts to provide voters with neutral guides have not gone far enough to change fundamentally how citizens vote.
This chapter proposes an electoral innovation that effectively helps "the quiet kids" to take care of themselves on election day. But, following Crosby's metaphor, the electorate first needs a way to band together. So long as the public's voice is barely a whisper, both public officials and citizens themselves will have difficulty acting upon it.[1]Chapter 5 showed that conventional forms of public expression do not create a democratic public voice, but the experiments in public deliberation reviewed in chapter 6 suggest how one might develop. Between
The reforms I propose would also meet another challenge—the low motivation of the electorate. Many advocates of deliberation envision a deliberative process that requires considerable effort and drive. In one view, intensive, ongoing deliberation should take place in small groups and organizations that are part of larger social movements, which will develop citizens' abilities, self-awareness, and sense of responsibility.[2] Others imagine enlivened communities and neighborhoods in which people regularly talk about politics and public problems in local institutions, grassroots civic associations, and informal interactions.[3] Technophiles envision a virtual community in which Internet surfers— better known for treading water in virtual hobby shops and idly swimming through the sea of sites—would dutifully step into electronic political discussions to deliberate upon complex issues and current candidates.[4] In the long run, each of these efforts might slowly change the abilities and attitudes of the larger public, just as the civic education and community deliberation programs discussed in chapter 5 inspire and empower their participants. In the meantime, however, I propose a political reform that can bring all of the "the quiet kids" together, even if they remain quiet for the foreseeable future.[5]
Another way in which the general public remains quiet is in its increasing social isolation, and effective political reforms must take this fact into account. Chapter 3 documented the decline in party loyalty among the electorate, but that is part of a larger decline in group-based political participation. Robert Putnam, who brought this decline to the attention of the larger scholarly community, blames eroding public life on the influence of electronic media, particularly television, which moved people from their porches to their parlors.[6] In a critique of Putnam, Lance Bennett suggests that group politics simply does not flt the modern U.S. economy, in which two-income families lacking economic and geographic stability act as individuals more than community members. He also sees the emergence of "lifestyle politics" as a force toward more individualized political action.[7] This trend toward individualistic politics undermines the effectiveness of reforms centered on strengthening political parties and other ongoing associations. By contrast, the reforms I propose would deliver information to individual voters, only
Drawing upon the random sample forums described in chapter 6 and the voting guides reviewed in chapter 4, my basic recommendation is that voters should have access to the results of representative citizen deliberation on the candidates and issues that appear on their ballots. Using random samples of the general public, government institutions could sponsor deliberative citizen panels on past legislative actions, individual candidates, and ballot measures.[8] Panel participants could summarize the results of their deliberations, and federal election officials, secretaries of state, and county clerks could communicate those results to voters through elaborate Internet sites, printed voter guides, and simple information printed on the ballots themselves. Average voters would spend no more time researching candidates than they do today, but they would have the chance to check their impressions against those of a deliberative body of their peers. If the citizen panels proved influential in elections, public officials might also use them as a legible signpost pointing toward the public's policy interests.[9]
The remainder of this chapter outlines the forms that deliberative election panels might take, and chapter 8 reviews the potential beneflts and limitations of this approach to electoral reform. Deliberative citizen panels can take many shapes and still realize the same basic purpose. I propose five different forms of citizen panels: priority panels could identify key legislation to aid voters in comparing candidate voting records; legislative panels could rate legislators' performance; advisory panels could weigh in prior to important legislative decisions; candidate-selection panels could evaluate candidates for executive, judicial, and administrative offices; and referenda panels could review ballot referenda, initiatives, and propositions.
PRIORITY PANELS
I have chosen a priority panel for U.S. House and Senate elections as an illustration because Congress is the most powerful legislative body in the United States and discussion of political reform largely focuses on congressional elections. As shown in box 5, the basic purpose of such a priority panel would be to identify the ten most important pieces of legislation introduced in Congress over the past two years. The results of these panels would permit voters across the country to see how
|
Before describing priority panels in detail, however, I wish to address two aspects of their implementation. First, the following description assumes that the priority panel process would be written into federal law by Congress itself, and at this point I ask the reader to postpone questions about the likelihood of such action until the next chapter. My present purpose is to describe how the panels would work, not the process by which they might become law. In chapter 8, I return to this question and suggest how citizen panels might develop in the United States.
Second, fldgety taxpayers and deflcit hawks might insist upon examining the cost of citizen panels before anything else. Cost is a real
RANDOM SELECTION OF PANELISTS
The first step in convening a priority panel would be selecting a national random sample of four hundred citizen panelists.[11] The federal government would not do the sampling itself, but instead contract with a professional nonproflt organization, such as an academic research institute at a public university. The recruiters would use quotas and flnancial incentives to ensure a relatively random sample of the nation's population. Demographic quotas would use census data on the entire adult population, including those not registered to vote, so that the panelists would represent the nation as a whole.[12]
Once demographic quotas and random sampling identify potential panelists, recruiters would contact citizens in person or, when possible, by phone or mail. Excepting those citizens unable to deliberate for medical reasons, or due to incarceration, recruiters would seek as high a participation rate as possible and only pursue new citizen panelists when unable to persuade initial recruits to participate. Some citizens would no doubt gladly seize the opportunity to talk politics with a small group of their peers, but others might only participate with the right incentives. The simplest positive incentive would be payment, which might be free travel and accommodation plus a $600 honorarium.[13] In the same way that jury duty laws protect employees, the law that enacts the priority panels could prohibit employers from pressuring employees to decline to participate. Some might take the jury example a step farther and compel participation on the panels, but I prefer permitting citizens to make their own decision. So long as adequate incentives are provided to potential panelists, self-selection should
Even if one accepts that it would be possible to recruit a representative sample, one might object to the very idea of using a national sample to judge senators and representatives elected in geographic districts. Why should conservative voters in Utah or liberal voters in Massachusetts care what a national sample views as legislative priorities? Is not the point of the Senate to represent the genuinely distinct interests of different states, just as the individual House districts within those states represent the varied interests within them? These questions reflect long-held beliefs about the district system of election popular in the United States, and I am sympathetic to critics who embrace the idea of priority panels but want to convene a state or district panel instead of a national one. Nevertheless, I wish to make an argument for using national sampling to create a single priority panel for Congress (or, for that matter, one statewide panel per state legislature).
As I argue in chapter 2, the point of deliberation is to bring together conflicting views to seek out points of agreement, if not full unanimity, on pressing public policy problems. The job of congressional representatives is not only to represent their respective districts but also to create policies that serve the best interests of the nation as a whole. Joseph Bessette, in The Mild Voice of Reason (1994), used a careful study of legislative history to demonstrate that some members of Congress do act in this manner and have considerable influence over their peers. Even Bessette, however, sees an ominous trend in federal policymaking: "The demise of so many Congressional constraints on mere self-seeking suggests that the Congress as a whole has become a less deliberative institution in recent decades. Less and less do the members of the House and Senate seem willing to sacriflce their private advantage for the sake of responsible lawmaking.[14]
Similar concerns about the chaos that comes with individual districts has led some critics of Congress to propose a unifled national election system, such as the "universal representation" scheme outlined in chapter 4. In a way, the priority panel takes the middle course by leaving voters with district elections but giving them a shared set of policy priorities that they can use to evaluate their unique sets of candidates.
IDENTIFYING A PRELIMINARY SET OF LEGISLATION
Since the priority panels would be held only during election years, two years of legislation would be eligible for consideration.[15] Legislation would include any bill or amendment introduced in either the House or Senate, including those that never came to a vote on the floor or in a committee. I include amendments because those sometimes have more powerful implications than the bills themselves, and individual amendments often have a clearer focus. Citizen panelists may often choose amendments because larger bills have too many conflicting, unrelated provisions to permit straightforward evaluation. The more cumbersome bills, however, may also make the citizens' list of key legislation because of their overall impact. To avoid the phrase "bills and amendments," however, I shall refer to all legislation simply as "bills" for the remainder of this chapter.
Using legislative votes as the basis for evaluating representatives is problematic but useful. Every two years, the Almanac of American Politics compiles its own list of noteworthy votes, and it concedes that listing key votes "grossly oversimplifles the legislative system where months of debate, amendment, pressure, persuasion, and compromise go into a final floor vote. However, the voting record remains the best indication of a member's general ideologies and position on speciflc issues."[16] The 1998 Almanac lists twelve votes in the Senate and House, but the priority panels would produce one set of legislation—some of which only one chamber will have voted upon—to avoid splitting into separate panels for the House and Senate.
Each political party with a representative serving in the House or Senate would have the opportunity to present pieces of legislation for review by the priority panel.[17] To keep their task manageable, the panelists would consider no more than roughly thirty bills. Each party would be permitted to introduce for consideration an equal fraction of the total. (Independent legislators would, for this purpose, constitute one "party.") In other words, a party with only one seat in Congress would suggest just as many bills as one of the major parties. This system, which I repeat elsewhere, defles the logic of even proportional representation, but I believe it serves the pursuit of full deliberation. In a deliberative body, the goal is to give each perspective equal and adequate opportunities for expression. If one hundred people in a room represent five viewpoints, and there are only flfty minutes for discussion,
DISCUSSION AND VOTING
Once all the panelists have been selected and all proposed bills identifled, panelists would receive summaries of each bill and statements from their authors about the bills' signiflcance. After a period of weeks to consider these statements on their own, panelists would come to Washington, D.C., to deliberate jointly upon the bills. Each bill would have an author (or author-appointed stand-in) who would argue for its signiflcance for flfteen minutes, and panelists would have the chance to ask questions of the witness for an additional flfteen minutes. In two days, citizens would have had the chance to review all of the bills before them, and they would then begin to deliberate on the bills in roughly twenty small groups, with twenty panelists in each one.
Just as jurors and the participants in random sample forums have a clear purpose or "charge" for their deliberations, so would the priority panelists. Their goal would be to select ten pieces of legislation using these three criteria: breadth, clarity, and signiflcance. The citizens would seek to assemble a set of ten bills that addressed different policy issues so that voters could later learn about the views of their representatives (and other candidates) on a range of important national issues. The panel would also choose clearer bills over others to permit straightforward interpretation of votes on issues. This criterion might exclude some bills that include too many unrelated provisions, and it would lead citizens to choose bills voted upon by both the House and Senate over earlier versions so that voters can look at the official votes of both representatives and senators. Finally, the signiflcance criterion would recommend the inclusion of complicated but powerful bills, and it might lead panelists to include multiple influential bills on a single issue that happened to receive sustained attention during a particular session of Congress.[19]
Working with these criteria, the priority panel would deliberate for two days on the different pieces of legislation. Small group deliberations would take place in a room spacious enough to accommodate a large group seated at desks in a circle only one row deep, like a discussion circle in a typical college classroom. That arrangement is important because
When the citizen panelists moved from discussion to voting, the four hundred citizens would come together to vote in three phases. First, to simplify matters, citizens would go through the bills and quickly decide, one bill at a time, whether each bill was a candidate for further consideration. Any bill receiving less than a one-third vote would be rejected. (If fewer than flfteen bills received one-third of the votes, the flfteen with the most votes would remain under consideration. If more than twenty bills remained, those with the fewest votes would be dismissed.) Second, a panelist could identify any pair or cluster of remaining bills that he or she thought addressed the same issue. If a majority agreed to select one bill from the cluster, then each panelist would name his or her preferred bill and the top vote-winner would remain for consideration. Third, after reducing some bills through this process, the citizen panelists would individually rank the ten bills they found most important, and the ten with the highest average ranking would be used in subsequent deliberations.[21] Though somewhat complicated, this process makes the final rankings more meaningful by removing clutter and redundancy before requiring final ratings. If it was found to be too cumbersome or confusing to citizen panelists, they could simply rank the bills after their deliberations without any preliminary votes.[22]
These votes, as well as all other votes taken by citizen panels, would be conducted using secret ballots. Deliberations themselves would need to be public, lest they appear secretive and undemocratic. Keeping the votes secret, however, would take some pressure off of citizens shy of taking public stands, and it would reduce the potential for lobbyist influence. Even if citizens were somewhat sequestered during their deliberations, any creative lobbyist or special-interest organization would be able to reach citizens before or during their deliberations. Such groups might manage to influence what some citizens think about issues, and that is a natural part of the larger process of political debate. If votes are taken in public, those same groups might be able to tie votes to tangible rewards; secret votes make it impossible for a group to know whether any particular panelist voted in its favor (except in the case of unanimous votes against the group's position).
In any case, at the end of their deliberation period, the citizen panelists would break into ten groups of forty. Each of these groups would have one bill assigned to it, and the groups would write brief summaries
IMPLICATIONS FOR ELECTIONS
If the priority panels stopped at this point, they would provide some insight into the national public's general policy priorities, although the panelists would indicate only that they thought bills were important— not whether they thought they were good. The point of their deliberation, however, would be to identify a limited range of concrete issues that voters could then use to compare candidates. To make those comparisons, voters would need to know where candidates stood on the issues chosen by the priority panels.
For that reason, it would be necessary to obtain the official and unofficial votes of congressional candidates. Once the priority panel named the ten key bills, the FEC would ask every registered candidate to provide their unofficial votes, accompanied by brief rationales. Incumbent senators and representatives would need to provide unofficial votes as well, because they probably would not already have voted on some of the pieces of legislation. Elected representatives would not have the opportunity to vote unofficially after failing to make an official vote without cause; this would provide representatives with one more reason to vote on controversial but important bills, rather than dodging the vote to avoid offending voters or interest groups.
Some candidates would have difficulty making these unofficial voting decisions, and challengers with limited political experience would spend some of their time examining the set of ten key bills before voting and providing rationales. No matter how busy or indifferent a candidate might feel, there would be a clear incentive for voting on the ten bills: failure to do so would make a candidate appear undecided on what the public considered a critical issue.
Once it had compiled the voting data, the FEC would pass the information to secretaries of state, who would deliver it to the households of registered voters through printed and on-line voter guides. The online guides could include the full text of all thirty bills initially considered, the priority panel's votes, and the candidates' votes and statements on the ten bills. An official Internet site could describe the citizen deliberations in detail, including video records of witness testimony and
Of the citizen panels I discuss, the priority panel is the tamest. It asks citizen panelists only to identify key bills for further discussion and scrutiny. By showing voters candidates' positions on ten speciflc issues, the panels help the electorate compare candidates using objective criteria with direct relevance to voters' policy interests. That is a signiflcant improvement over the status quo, but I believe that citizen panel deliberation should go one step farther by asking panelists to deliberate and vote upon legislation and candidates.
LEGISLATIVE PANELS
In effect, the priority panels set the agenda for legislative panels (box 6). To move this hypothetical example from the national level to the state level, let us say, for example, that the Ohio secretary of state has already convened priority panels on the state legislature. The secretary of state would then use a nonproflt polling flrm to select a new set of ten representative legislative panels, each of which would consist of flfty citizens.
― 148 ― |
Although a large sample would be more representative, it would also prove quite costly, and I think an argument can be made for smaller groups. (Those who cannot stomach this idea should read on and simply substitute larger samples as necessary.) The point in convening flfty citizens is to ensure that the sample includes the full range, if not the exact distribution, of viewpoints in the larger population. Panels with just flfty participants cannot perfectly represent a large population in the statistical sense, but quotas can make the sample sufficiently representative. By combining demographic quotas (for age, ethnicity, etc.) and possibly attitudinal quotas (for party affiliation, basic opinions, etc.), each panel of flfty citizens can be made a microcosm of the larger state population.[23]
DELIBERATION ON LEGISLATION
The ten legislative panels would come together to Columbus, Ohio, but they would deliberate and vote independently. Each panel would be assigned to a single bill, and the panels could either deliberate simultaneously (but separately) or in sequence. The latter might prove less chaotic, and it could permit serial media coverage of the bills during the election season.[24]
Prior to arrival in Columbus, citizens would receive information about the bill assigned to them. To promote continuity in judgments over time, panelists would also receive copies of the judgments of past panels who deliberated upon related legislation. Undoubtedly, many of these citizens would discuss their bills with friends and family beforehand, and such discussion could only beneflt the overall process. Indirectly, it would involve many more people in the process, and it would have a positive average effect on citizens' knowledge and the quality of
To ensure that citizen panelists do share a common knowledge base, however, the first day of deliberation would consist of testimony from witnesses chosen by the highest-ranking members of the legislature in favor of and opposed to the bill that each panel considers. The structure for such testimony, cross-examination, and question-and-answer could take many possible forms, drawing on the examples set by the random sample forums described in chapter 6. At the National Issues Convention, pro and con experts each made statements and then took turns answering questions from the audience. At the New Mexico Citizen Conferences, each of five or six expert witnesses made a brief statement, then citizens asked questions, which experts answered in a free-for-all format. Citizen juries have used many discussion methods, including a straightforward succession of witnesses, each of whom devotes half of his or her time to presentation and half to a question-and-answer session. A new approach taken in a recent citizen forum used a panel of witnesses in which one speaker would make a presentation, then the others would give balanced critiques of the speaker's arguments.[25]
This process of cross-examination is important because it exposes witnesses to professional scrutiny. Those testifying before the legislative citizen panel will be more reluctant to make false statements if they see it as a high-risk strategy. At a minimum, witnesses risk the erosion of their credibility if cross-examination reveals that they have used fabricated survey data, lied about their prior knowledge, or otherwise sought to deceive the citizen panel. Following the courtroom analogy, one might even want make these witnesses "subject to penalties for perjury"[26] I if cross-examination "reveals that a witness made false statements.would stop short of placing a judge in the panel room, but witnesses guilty of perjury might be subject to civil lawsuit after the fact.
Whatever particular format is used, it is important that the number of witnesses remain manageable, that the citizens be able to guide the direction of the discussion, and that either a paid moderator or a citizen-chair maintain decorum and keep the panel on schedule. My own preference is for a paid, professional moderator to manage the meetings under the direction of the citizen panelists. Following the example of the citizen juries, the moderator would be responsible for establishing and
After the first day of testimony, citizens would have a day to deliberate on their bill. The course of the deliberation itself is impossible to predict, but it could be structured to ensure full participation and conformity to the preset schedule. A trained moderator could have the responsibility of periodically reminding a panel how much time it had and what it needed to do. The moderator could also intervene if verbal conflict moved toward physical confrontation, which, incidentally, has been a rarity at random sample forums conducted in the past. The moderator would also call for three or four "round-robins" at roughly preset intervals. In a round-robin, each participant has a chance to speak for a minute, and speaking turns move from left to right without interruption. Its purpose is to draw out quieter participants, and it can cause an otherwise silent voice to shift the emphasis or direction of deliberation.
After deliberating through most of the second day, the citizen panelists would write what they considered to be the strongest arguments for and against the bill. This set of arguments would be as inclusive as possible, and it would provide a succinct written record of the facts, ideas, and considerations influencing in their deliberation. Aside from this listing of arguments, the panel would not take anything resembling a preliminary vote or straw poll on the issue.[28]
On the third day, expert witnesses would return and have the opportunity to respond to the arguments of citizens for and against the bill. Again, this process could follow many formats, but during this stage, it would be important that the lead witnesses be able to direct discussion toward their most pressing concerns. This day would be their last chance to bolster arguments, correct factual errors, and remove confusion or misunderstandings.
As citizens undertake their final deliberations on the fourth and flfth days, the debate they have heard on the previous day should give the panelists more confldence in their final votes. Citizens will have had a chance to be second-guessed by outside observers prior to reaching their final decision. By the end of the fourth day, the moderator will require the panelists to take their first formal vote by secret ballot.[29] If twothirds or more of the panelists agree on the issue (with abstentions counting as "no" votes), they will then divide into pro and con subgroups to write one-paragraph rationales for and against the bill. If there is not a two-thirds majority for or against the bill, deliberation will continue until the middle of the flfth and final day, with the moderator calling for periodic votes. If still deadlocked, the citizens will divide into pro and con groups to write rationales, but their verdict would be recorded as "undecided.[30]
Just as a priority panel would have guidelines for its deliberation on the legislative agenda, so legislative panels would have preset goals. Their task would be to reach agreement (two-thirds majority or greater) on the bill before them. Also, they would be asked—but not required— not to take a solid "yea or nay" position on the bill until their vote on the fourth day of deliberation. In the case of a statewide legislative panel, citizens would also be encouraged to try to base their vote upon their final judgment of what is in the interest of the state as a whole. Prior to arriving at that point, however, participants would be invited to contribute their own unique perspectives and experiences. Ultimately, citizen panelists would manage to combine genuine self-expression with the pursuit of a larger public judgment, but as Lynn Sanders points out, it is also important "to ensure that those who are usually left out of public discussions learn to speak whether their perspectives are common or not."[31] Most civil and criminal jurors manage to take on the role of the "neutral judge" briefly, and most past participants in past random sample forums have taken their jobs very seriously.[32] So might the participants in a legislative panel.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ELECTIONS
Because they involve substantive judgments about speciflc bills, the legislative panels could have far more powerful electoral implications than the priority panels. When secretaries of state present these panel results to voters, they would show candidates' votes on key legislation, but they would also permit voters to compare each candidate's vote with a
Some might wish to stop at this point, having provided interested voters with detailed printed and on-line information about candidates for the Ohio state legislature and the views of a deliberative sample of the state's population. I suggest going one step farther by providing a very simple piece of information that reduces the detail of the voter guide to a single numeric symbol—the percentage of agreement between the votes of each candidate and those of the legislative panels. The rationale behind this number is that past voting research has found that the typical voter prefers to choose candidates using only simple bits of information, as explained in chapter 3. Voters "tend to make use only of information that is incidental" or available information "for[33] which there is virtually no cost, such as names and parties on ballots. Even when voters lack reliable clues that permit confldent deduction of which candidate would best represent them, they can flnd highly suggestive "cues" that tell them how to vote.[34]
| Bill imposed a five-year limit on welfare beneflts and a required welfare recipients to flnd work within two years. | |||
| Republican | Democrat | Libertarian | |
| Citizen Panel For (25–5 vote) | John Dorshuck For (official vote) | Rhonda Schulman Against | Orlando Morales For |
| Citizen Panel Argument For: Many people need welfare at times in their lives, but five years is long enough. Also, people who receive welfare should be able to flnd jobs. Pushing people out of the welfare system will hurt some, but most will fend for themselves once they are forced to flnd work. | |||
― 153 ― | |||
| Citizen Panel Argument Against: This bill was too severe. It provided no safety net for the poorest of the poor. It also forces single parents to work instead of caring for their own children. | |||
| Dorshuck Argument For: The government cannot afford to pay for our overburdened welfare system. This bill will force people to fend for themselves after years on welfare, and it provides some child care beneflts for working mothers. | |||
| Schulman Argument Against: Republicans stereotype welfare recipients as lazy cheaters, but that's just not true. Nobody wants welfare, and recipients take jobs when those jobs are available. Turning our backs on the neediest is cruel, and we should offer job training and assistance to those who need it. | |||
| Morales Argument For: The only legitimate purpose of government is national defense and policing our streets. This bill did not go far enough, but it was a step in the right direction. We should eliminate all government handouts to both the rich and poor. | |||
In candidate selection, as in most mental activities, people are cognitive misers. Considering the likelihood of one vote deciding an election, plus the finite difference between a typical pair of candidates, citizens attribute little value to making a correct voting choice. Consequently, voters give low priority to candidate selection relative to the more immediate concerns they must attend to in their daily lives. This may be truer of less sophisticated voters, but when cues such as a candidate's party affiliation are present, even more involved voters can overlook complex candidate characteristics and make decisions solely on the basis of simple heuristics.[35]
In low-visibility elections, where the average voter has heard little about the candidates, many voters lack solid data upon which to base their choice, so they make their decision using simple facts, such as the candidate's party and sex.[36] When voters know nothing about candidates prior to entering the voting booth, they must either make random choices or respond to the scant information that appears on the ballot itself. Assuming even the slightest sense of responsibility, voters are likely to take the latter course by voting based upon at least some information, no matter how mundane. Sometimes this means voting based on party, although that cue is often unavailable. Other times, voters choose candidates because their first name sounds male or female or their last name suggests a particular ethnic background.[37]
The political scientist Arthur Lupia considered this problem in a study of insurance reform elections in California. As others have observed in
I suggest providing voters with a new cue—a candidate rating that shows the extent to which each candidate's unofficial and official votes correspond to those of the legislative panels (see Box 8).[39] The cue has the same virtue of other ballot cues, in that it is simple and readily available to even the least active voter. What sets it apart from all other ballot cues, except sometimes political party, is that it carries a tremendous amount of information. Particularly when one candidate has an agreement percentage (or "rating") well above the other candidates, a voter can use that cue to decide that the highest-rated candidate stands a much better chance of representing the public's interests. The cue is not flawless, but it provides uninformed, confused, or undecided voters with one simple fact to consider before marking their ballots.
| This August, a randomly-selected panel of Ohio residents voted on ten bills that came before the Ohio state legislature during the past two years. The ratings by each candidate's name show the percentage of the time that each candidate agreed with the citizen panel's votes. For example, a rating of 100% shows that a candidate agreed with the citizen panel on every issue, and a rating of 50% shows that the candidate and citizen panel voted the same on half of the issues. For more details, refer to your official Voter Guide. | ||
| Ohio House of Representatives (District 6) Choose One | ||
| John Dorshuck REPUBLICAN | [75% rating] | □ |
| Rhonda Schulman DEMOCRAT | [60% rating] | □ |
| Orlando Morales LIBERTARIAN | [30% rating] | □ |
Finally, county clerks can use the candidate ratings to order the names of candidates on the ballot. Many candidates believe that the order of names on the ballots influences the outcome of elections by a small percentage. A rigorous study of this problem found name-order effects in 48 percent of 118 Ohio elections. In races where there was an ordering effect, the candidate listed first almost always beneflted, and the average impact was 2.5 percent. Partisan races and elections in counties with higher levels of political information were less likely to demonstrate ordering effects.[40] It is discouraging to imagine that innumerable close races have been decided by the order of candidates' names on the ballot. Even if one doubted the necessity of convening citizen panels for all elections, one might still see wisdom in obtaining panel judgments in competitive races just to remove this problem. By listing candidates in descending order, with the highest-rated candidate first, clerks can assign this advantage in a manner that is less arbitrary than random ordering.
ADVISORY PANELS
Priority panels and legislative panels could be used for many elections besides congressional and state legislative races. City councils, county commissions, and school boards could use similar panels, and the more local the political unit, the cheaper these would become. (In addition, these panels could apply to candidates for executive offices, although the nonlegislative duties of executives might recommend the use of the candidate selection panels, which I describe later.) At the city and county level, however, it might be preferable to use a different form of panel that involves the public more directly in the policymaking process. This "advisory" approach shares much in common with the legislative panels, but has some important differences, which I shall now describe.
One of the greatest drawbacks of the legislative panels is that the citizens usually vote after bills have received a vote in committee or on the floor. Most of the time, this means that the panel votes will chiefly function to eliminate bad representation, and they will thus serve as a voice of the public only in the long run. A legislative panel vote might reveal some unrepresentative officials, but those officials will have already taken action on the bills they considered. Even if the officials had wanted panel guidance on those bills, the advice will come too late, for by the time the panel votes, officials will already be on record—unofficially, if not officially.
To address this limitation, the advisory panel changes the process by convening a random sample of citizens to deliberate and vote on legislation prior to official votes by governing bodies. Box 9 illustrates the advisory process using the example of a city council. The process would begin whenever a special city council vote or citizen petition delays official action on a piece of legislation, pending citizen deliberation. (Enactment of an advisory panel law would stipulate the circumstances under which the council or a petitioner could take this action.) A local courthouse would then provide the city council with flfty citizens previously selected for jury duty.[41] In a sense, this first review panel would serve as a "grand jury," examining the relevance of a bill to determine whether it merits the sustained attention of a full advisory panel of citizens. For just one day, the citizen review panel would hear arguments from city councilors (and petitioners, if applicable) on the importance of the piece of suspended legislation. The review panel would deliberate and vote, and if a majority recommended full deliberation, then the process would continue. (Otherwise, the legislation would return to the city council for a vote.)
|
After a bill passed the review panel, the local courthouse would provide the city council with a new set of flfty citizens previously selected for jury duty. This advisory panel of citizens would follow a process similar to that of the legislative panels, hearing testimony from witnesses chosen by city councilors (and petitioners, if applicable), deliberating on the matter, hearing a critique of their preliminary flndings, then reaching a final decision and writing a rationale. Because of the size of the advisory panel, a two-thirds majority would be required for a decision. If citizens were unable to reach a final decision, they would be labeled "undecided," but they would still split into subgroups to write rationales for supporting and opposing the bill in question.
After the conclusion of the advisory panel's deliberations, the city clerk would inform the council of the panel's recommendations. At the next official council meeting, the panel's vote would be read before the council members took a roll-call vote on the bill. Depending on one's viewpoint, this would provide public-spirited elected officials with a high-fidelity recording of the local community's deliberative voice, and it would put pressure upon self-interested officials, who might
The timing of the advisory panel is its most distinctive quality, and that is also its limitation. The advisory panel would prove impractical at larger levels of government because it requires the spontaneous assembly of citizen panels and witnesses. Unless a form of video-conferencing were used, it would be difficult and expensive to quickly create panels as issues arose. In addition, the advisory panels would convene several times between elections, and candidates for office not presently serving would be able to cast their unofficial votes weeks, months, or years after the panels had already voted. Newcomer candidates could simply give themselves a 100 percent rating, and nobody would know whether their adopted views were sincere. Challengers with political histories might have more difficulty squaring their 100 percent ratings with past actions, but their opponents could only question the honesty of their unofficial votes. (Because of this problem, county clerks would not use the final candidate ratings to determine candidate order on the ballot.)
CANDIDATE-SELECTION PANELS
When candidates run for nonlegislative offices, neither the legislative nor the advisory panels would be suited to consider their election. Mayoral and gubernatorial candidates might receive ratings from legislative or advisory panels, but the responsibilities of mayors and governors extend far beyond signing and vetoing bills. Those two forms of panels would also be useless as mechanisms for helping voters evaluate judicial and administrative candidates, such as those running for sheriff, corporation commissioner, or state supreme court justice.
What distinguishes these candidates from the legislative ones is that they do not have voting records per se. Judicial and administrative rulings sometimes have profound implications, but they are not the same as legislative action. Judges and administrators interpret and enforce laws, rather than drafting and enacting them. To evaluate the past and future performance of candidates for these offices requires a citizen panel that can rate the candidates only after it determines the criteria by which it evaluates candidates.
Box 10 uses the example of a state supreme court election to show the two stages in which a candidate-selection panel would deliberate. First, the panel would consider candidates' testimony on the appropriate criteria for selecting justices, deliberate on the matter, then vote on a set of speciflc criteria using a two-thirds majority voting rule. Second, in front of the selection panel, the judicial candidates would testify and cross-examine one another in relation to their satisfaction of the aforementioned evaluative criteria. Citizens would then deliberate on the candidates and reach their verdicts, using a two-thirds majority decision rule. When comparing more than two candidates, votes failing to reach a two-thirds majority would result in dropping the candidate with the fewest votes.
|
On-line and printed voter guides would present the rationales given for each candidate, and a record of the sequence of vote tallies in cases where there were multiple candidates. In these cases, however, there would be multiple ways in which one could represent the panel's votes on the ballot itself. The ballot could show candidate vote percentages from the final round of voting, but this would obscure the fact that some panelists initially voted for other candidates in some cases. The ballot could show no percentages and, instead, would simply place an "endorsement symbol" by the name of the candidate who won twothirds of the panelists' votes on the final tally, if there was a winner. Or the ballot could simply show the candidates' vote percentages from the first round of voting.
The decision about what appears on the ballot could, in turn, change the decision about what voting procedure to use on the panel. My own preference is to proceed through the stages of voting until the panel either has a two-thirds majority candidate or reaches a final, two-candidate vote, whichever comes first. Afterward, panelists would then take a final multicandidate vote with the understanding that this final vote would be their "published" verdict. The voting stages would have shown some panelists that their first-choice candidate was not viable, and they might—or might not—choose to cast their final vote for one of the front-runners. The county clerk would then publish those panel vote percentages on the ballot.
REFERENDA PANELS
Because of complexity of candidate evaluation, particularly in multicandidate races, a government could implement panels with much greater ease when their only task was evaluating a speciflc initiative or referendum. Box 11 shows how a secretary of state would convene a panel on a statewide ballot referendum. The process is analogous to the deliberation of a single legislative panel, and the voter guides and ballots would show how the panelists voted. This is more straightforward than candidate evaluation, because there is a one-to-one correspondence
|
One could extend this idea beyond statewide referenda to more local ballot items, such as municipal bonds and school levies. These measures usually ask voters to decide whether or not to spend public money on schools, flre stations, and other services and projects. Unfortunately, deliberation on these measures is rare, even in the parts of the United States with traditions of "town meetings." In Meredith, New Hampshire, for example, 400 citizens attended meetings on school, road, and library budgets, but a majority of the 4,000 who eventually voted on
For the severest critics of representative democracy, such as Simon Threlkeld, the purpose of referenda and other ballot measures is to enact "laws supported by the informed will of the citizenry … even if opposed or ignored by elected governments." Because of elections' failure to put responsible public officials in office, Threlkeld also doubts the quality of referenda elections. For that reason, he suggests using citizen panels not as a source of voter information but as decision makers. He envisions juries of 100 or more paid citizen jurors meeting for the "days, weeks, or months needed to become fully informed" about individual referenda. Like the referenda panels, the jurors would hear testimony, deliberate, then vote, but in Threlkeld's system, the jurors would act with full authority as randomly chosen representatives.[44]
The referenda panels I propose stop short of this because I believe it is important that elections give all voters the chance to have a direct say on speciflc pieces of legislation. Blending representative government with direct democracy in this way keeps all voters connected to the process of lawmaking, whereas a citizen jury with final decision-making authority would replace a direct democratic process with another form of representation.
DEVILISH DETAILS
This chapter has shown ways in which official random sample panels could extend a transmission belt from deliberation to voting, from the expression of the public's deliberative voice to its ability to reject unrepresentative public officials. Different panels would serve different purposes, but the basic structure is the same: each panel would involve drawing random samples of citizens, selecting witnesses, convening deliberative sessions among citizens, and using decision rules to record summary votes and statements of the citizens' views.
I have discussed each of these critical components, but the actual implementation of any one of these panels would require considerable reflnement