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.