Today I'm speaking with Professor Archon Fung. Professor Fung is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He notes that different democratic practices are better at delivering some of these than others and so we should be looking a mix of practices to complement each other and deliver all three functions. He proposes supplementing and layering innovations on top of electoral democracy to create stronger democracies.
I’d love to hear your answers to these two questions and include your perspectives in future episodes. You can send your perspectives to me by email to essence@realdemocracynow.com.au or via Twitter or Facebook.
Professor Morlino talks to us about the analytical tool he has developed to allow comparison of democracies.
Dr Roslyn Fuller (dipl. jur./erstes Staatsexamen, Goettingen; PhD, Trinity College Dublin) is a Canadian-Irish academic and columnist, specializing in public international law, and the impact of technological innovation on democracy. Her latest book Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose explores the flaws of representative democracy and how they could be addressed through the application of ancient Athenian principles of demokratia (people power). Her work has appeared, among others, in OpenDemocracy, The Nation, The Toronto Star, Salon and The Irish Times, as well as in many scholarly journals. She is currently a Research Associate at Waterford Institute of Technology and founding member of the Solonian Democracy Institute.
Welcome back to Real Democracy Now! a podcast.This is episode one of Season Two. Season Two is about representative democracy
Season Two is about representative democracy: its origins, components, how it can be evaluated, different approaches to democracy, the democratic deficit and the relationship between democracy and capitalism.
In Episode 1 of Season 2, I'm talking to Professor Paul Cartledge. Professor Cartledge was the inaugural A G Levants Professor of Greek Culture
Professor Cartledge was the inaugural A G Levants Professor of Greek Culture in the University of Cambridge and President of Clare College, Cambridge. Between 2006 - 2010 he was Hellenic Parliament Global Distinguished Professor in History and Theory of Democracy at New York University. Over the course of his career, he has written and edited numerous books on the ancient Greek world, most recently Democracy: a Life. He has served as historical consultant for the BBC television series The Greeks, and for four Channel 4 documentaries, including The Spartans.
If you would like to hear more from Professor Cartledge I've added some videos to the Real Democracy Now! YouTube Channel.
Some other material you may find interesting:
How student activism informed Paul Cartledge's new history of democracy
Ancient Greeks would not recognise our democracy
In the next episode, I'll be talking with Professor Nadia Urbinati and Roslyn Fuller about the history of democracy and design. I hope you'll join me then.
In this episode I speak to three academics who each take a critical perspective on the operation of deliberative mini-publics. Each of them takes issue with a different aspect of the impact or influence that the recommendations coming from deliberative mini-publics have on public policy.
And Roslyn Fuller provides another perspective suggesting that citizens may change how they approach decision-making within a deliberative mini-public depending on whether they believe their recommendations will be implemented or not.
This is the final episode of Season 1 looking at deliberative mini-publics. If you haven't already listened to episodes 1 - 18 I'd suggest you go back and listen to them all, starting with Professor Carson explaining what deliberative mini-publics are in episode 1.1.
Season 2 will look at the history of democracy, the dominant model of representative democracy, as well as what is working and what isn’t.
Season 2 will commence in mid-March. I hope you'll join me then.
In today's episode, I speak with Professor Graham Smith and Professor Brigitte Geißel about the evaluation frameworks they have each developed to assess the value of democratic innovations.
I ask each of them how their frameworks apply to deliberative mini-publics and they provide quite different assessments of the value and effectiveness of deliberative mini-publics as democratic innovations.
Professor Smith's framework identifies four democratic goods:
Professor Geißel's analytical framework comprises five criteria:
As you can see, there are some similarities between these frameworks. However, the conclusions each person draws about the value and effectiveness of deliberative mini-publics is quite different.
In next week's episode (the final one for Season 1) I talk to three other academics who take a critical perspective on the operation of deliberative mini-publics:
I hope you'll join me then.
In today's episode I speak with four everyday people who have been participants in deliberative mini-publics in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Each person has their own unique take on being a randomly selected participant in a deliberative mini-public, but they all agree they would recommend being part of a deliberative mini-public to family and friends.
First up is Ben McPeek who was a member of the Residents’ Reference Panel for the Davenport Community Rail Overpass project in 2015. This Reference Panel was commissioned by Metrolinx and designed and facilitated by MASS LBP. I spoke to Peter MacLeod from MASS LBP about their work on episode 6 of the podcast.
Next, I spoke with Lewis Adams who was a juror on the Infrastructure Victoria Citizens’ Jury in 2015. Infrastructure Victoria was developing a thirty-year infrastructure plan for the State of Victoria in Australia and ran a multi-faceted engagement program which included two concurrent citizens’ juries: one in the capital - Melbourne and the other in Shepparton in regional Victoria. Lewis was a juror on the regional Citizens’ Jury. The Infrastructure Victoria Citizens’ Jury process was designed by the newDemocracy Foundation and involved a range of facilitators (including some of the people who I spoke to on episode 11 of the podcast) under Nation Partners who were responsible for delivering the overall engagement process.
I also spoke with Caroline Victor who was a juror on the Cats and Dogs Citizens’ Jury in South Australia in late 2014. This citizens’ jury was established by the Dog and Cat Management Board to advise on measures to reduce the number of unwanted dogs and cats. This process was facilitated by DemocracyCo, whose co-founder Emily Jenke I spoke to on episode 10 of the podcast). Recruitment for this citizens’ jury was undertaken by the newDemocracy Foundation. I was working for newDemocracy Foundation at that time and managed the recruitment for this citizens’ jury. The Dogs and Cats Citizens’ Jury won the IAP2 Australasian Core Values Award in the environmental category in 2016.
Professor Fishkin developed the idea of deliberative polling in 1998 since then deliberative polls have been held in over 24 countries and once in 22 languages simultaneously. Professor Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy.
Deliberative polls have been designed to provide the conditions under which people can think about an issue and decision-makers can see how those people's views change as a result of this process. The conditions Professor Fishkin identifies as optimal include:
A confidential survey is administered before and after the face-to-face meeting with the same questions in both plus some evaluation questions in the post-process survey. Generally, participants' policy positions will change significantly as a result of being exposed to information and having their questions answered. Professor Fishkin and others' research suggests that people become more 'public spirited,' making decisions based on the needs of the community rather than themselves. Fishkin sees deliberative polling as providing what Mills called 'schools of public spirit.'
Professor Fishkin provides many examples of deliberative polls and their outcomes. One involved eight deliberative polls across Texas on energy futures which lead to Texas moving from the last place in 1996 to first place in 2007 in the US for the use of wind power.
In next week's episode, I will be talking to four everyday people who were randomly selected to participate in deliberative mini-publics in the UK, Canada, and Australia. I hope you'll join me then.
The G1000 arose in Belgium out of frustration with the inability of the political parties in Belgium to form a government. The G1000 began in 2011 and had three broad phases:
Unlike many of the other deliberative mini-publics we've heard about in earlier podcast episodes the G1000 was explicitly about agenda setting by citizens rather than providing advice to elected representatives on a topic those representatives have chosen.
A short overview of the G1000 process and outputs can be found on Participedia.
Didier Caluwaerts is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the VUB. His research interests include deliberative and participatory democracy, social, democratic and public sector innovation, social entrepreneurship, innovation management and cooperative governance. He recently set up a lab experiment with professor Michael MacKenzie (University of Pittsburgh) on deliberation and long-term thinking regarding environmental policy.
He was previously a post-doctoral researcher of the FWO at the VUB. His PhD (2011, VUB) dealt with deliberative democracy in divided societies. It was awarded the 2012 ECPR Jean Blondel PhD award and it was nominated for the Annual PhD Prize of the Dutch and Flemish Political Science Associations. He is also the winner of the 2010 ECPR Dirk Berg-Schlosser award, and co-organizer of the G1000 citizens' summit (2011).
In next week's episode I'll be talking to Harm van Dijk one of the people who has taken the G1000 to the Netherlands.
Each of these facilitators has over 20 years experience working with communities and all of them are award winning facilitators of deliberative mini-publics.
With the growth in popularity of deliberative mini-publics there has been a increased demand for people to facilitate these processes. In today’s episode I speak to two such people - Emily Jenke from Democracy Co in South Australia and Titus Alexander from Democracy Matters the UK.
Emily Jenke has been facilitating community engagement processes for nearly years, most recently moving into supporting deliberative processes. Emily was in the midst of facilitating one of Australia’s largest deliberative mini-publics with 350 people considering the future of nuclear fuel storage in South Australia when we did this interview.
Titus Alexander is a facilitator, educator and community capacity builder. Titus trained the other facilitators for the two Citizens’ Assemblies that Professor Graham Smith described in Episode 8. He is also the author of Practical Politics: Lessons in Power and Democracy a text book on learning practical politics, which is aimed at encouraging students and lecturers to develop political skills to create a more inclusive, empowering democracy.
Professor Graham Smith from Westminster University was part of a number of academics who designed and ran the Democracy Matters project in 2015. This project involved two Citizens' Assemblies both considering devolution of local decision-making.
In addition to being demonstration projects around engaging everyday citizens in decision-making about local governance these two process involved slightly different designs to allow the academics involved to test the impact of having elected representatives as part of the Citizens' Assembly.
Graham explains the background to these two Citizens' Assemblies as well as the preliminary findings about the impact of having politicians as members of the Citizens' Assembly South.
For more information about the Democracy Matters project visit http://citizensassembly.co.uk/home-page/about/