Page 51 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

Why use a Civic Lottery? This remains the most common question we get from political leaders. Can’t we do the process with people drawn from interest groups (who are making noise and need to be mollified)? No. A stratified (matched to basic population characteristics like age, gender, town) random selection of citizens remains the best way we have found to get genuinely representative groups of people together. A key problem with a great deal of engagement and advocacy is that the noisiest voices dominate. Announce a new regulation for an industry and you will hear from those who are the most incensed by the decision and those with the most to lose: there is unequal power in all our societies and the government engagement process makes this worse. You should still make sure you listen to these voices! But we recommend adding a counterbalancing voice of a representative sample of the community. Today, those advocates – often with completely opposing positions – come to your door, and they are very hard to make happy. Offering them the chance to make their case to a group of everyday citizens gives all a fair hearing and gives you the chance to hear a mediated view of where the community finds a fair trade-off between these advocated positions. This is both good policy and good politics. 49