KQED Youth Takeover: Deliberative Democracy Puts Dialogue and Reason at Center of Decision Making
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Playing May 2nd through June 8th. More info at berkeleyrep.org. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. You know, our political discourse, even here at the local level, has gotten pretty nasty. On the key issues in our cities, housing, homelessness, schools, public safety, the debates have gotten meaner, and yet we don't seem any closer to actually solving the deep problems of our region.

Two members of KQED's Youth Advisory Board, high school students, have a suggestion for something that might help. It's called deliberative democracy, and we're going to spend this next hour learning what it is and how to put it into practice. That's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

I know it's hard to believe in democracy right now, in large part because it feels like it's under attack at the national level and perhaps just failing us at the local one. But today we're going to look at some alternative ways of thinking about and doing democracy, including

At least one case in which it's been implemented here in the Bay Area. This show is part of our annual showcase of Bay Area high schoolers, which we call Youth Takeover. We've got two students who produced the show here with us in the studio. Ryan Hishmaty has been with us before. He's a senior at Saratoga High School. Welcome back, Ryan. Super excited to be back. Yeah.

And we've got Anaya Ertz, who is a junior at Marin Academy. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. So talk to me about why did you get interested? Why this particular topic? Are you interested in democracy in general? Are you interested in this particular form of things? Why the show?

Yeah, absolutely. So right now, as you mentioned, it feels like things are sort of falling apart. And I see that sentiment among my friends, young people, especially through things like social media and the news. We're all very connected to this and we can see what's going on. And at times, especially because a lot of us are not voting age, it feels like there's not much we can do.

So when I first learned about deliberative democracy and citizens assembly, it seemed like a way that we might be able to connect and solve some of those issues. And I can imagine applications within my school, within my friend group even. And it just became sort of a jumping off place for my imagination. And I became super interested in the topic. And I think it's something that everyone should learn about.

Like how for people who haven't heard that term before, like how do you think about it? Deliberative democracy? Yeah. So I've described it to people and they say that's the way democracy should be, which I agree with. Informed people that are representative of local populations making decisions on democracy.

Issues that actually directly affect them instead of a single person or a smaller group that is more removed from the issue and perhaps is just legislating. We have people who are coming together and speaking to each other directly.

consciously across differences to try to meet in those gaps and create solutions that work for many perspectives. And not necessarily even people who are elected. It could be chosen in other ways, right? Or just randomly select even. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Ryan, you also have some experience in this realm as well. Talk to me about how you got into this.

I think growing up in the Bay Area, I'm so appreciative of all the diversity we have. But when it comes to political diversity, there isn't necessarily that ideological balance of hearing many perspectives. So I've always cared a lot about getting out of the echo chamber and hearing from all different people and hearing a lot of different perspectives. And when I heard about deliberative democracy, I wanted to get involved.

And starting last year around February, I started helping the deliberative democracy lab at Stanford with some of their research in this realm. Like actually helping, like doing some of the work. Yeah, yeah. One of the most valuable experiences I had was I got to listen to the transcriptions of these deliberative democracy like rooms where you hear from young folks who are actually fleshing out these issues.

And, you know, hearing from folks across different parts of the aisle from different parts of the country have real conversations and really gain better understandings of each other. That's incredibly encouraging in an environment where it can feel like there's so much division and that we're so far apart from each other. Yeah. I mean, how do you see what's happening like in those recordings as being different from what you see on social media that you watch?

either are a part of as a person or kind of see playing out? I think the major distinction is that when folks are talking about these issues on social media, it's from a perspective of attacking or from a perspective like, I know my position. I just want to go after yours. But when folks are brought together in these formats, a lot of it is truly about like, I want to learn from you when you're in front of somebody and you're speaking to them. It's a lot harder to be mean to them.

And you really want to learn instead and gain a better appreciation for what life path helped them form their perspective. And perhaps it can help augment your understanding. Anand, do you have political disagreements with your friends or are you guys mostly in the same kind of political camps?

We are generally in the same political camps as I think is common in the Bay Area. But when certain issues do arise, it can get pretty heated. Myself and my friend group are very open and opinionated people. And it is very different to be texting with them versus speaking to them in person over these sort of things. And as Ryan mentioned, I think that's something that is...

is special about these deliberative democracy citizens assembly processes. And just an added layer on that on social media, you're often anonymous. So imagine what I have with my friends, these

large political disagreements that can become arguments and then magnify that. And that's what we see all the time on social media. Yeah. I think your generation is just so deeply aware that the sort of mapping of social media to real life is obviously flawed. Like it's not like there are real components of real life on social media, but it also isn't precise. It's not like a...

It's not like the real world is precisely reflected on X or on Instagram or on TikTok or whatever. How do you think these sort of deliberative democracy processes are able to capture more of sort of the real texture of life? Is it just who's in the room and that they're in a room together?

There's also the component of experts who in plenary sessions in between deliberative sessions, at least with the work that the lab is doing. And so you get to hear from these experts about questions that you have in areas where you're not sure, like, well, what does the real world look like? What does the data look like? And those clarifying plenary sessions, I think, really aid in moving the conversation forward. And because I think when folks have political conversations, they're

Often they refer to statistics that they vaguely remember, and sometimes that's not necessarily correct, and that could be informing an incorrect conclusion. And so having that, I think, guides in the correct direction. Yeah. Anything you want to add, Anay? Yeah, absolutely. I know we've been speaking a lot about social media, and I just wanted to reiterate that sort of information difference where the statistics could be skewed or if you're just seeing one side repeatedly of the same numbers or ideas.

especially on social media when the algorithm puts you in an echo chamber. Yeah, yeah. That's where I think or I see a lot of the divide coming from because people believe that they are informed when they aren't really. Yeah.

We're talking about alternative ways of doing democracy called Deliberative Democracy. This show is produced by the two high school students you're listening to. That's Anaya Ertz, who's a junior at Marin Academy, and Ryan Hashmadi, who's a senior at Saratoga High School. We'd love to hear from you. Have you ever participated in one of these alternative democratic processes? Or what's a policy decision in

you'd like to see be made using these kinds of techniques. You can give us a call. Number is 866-733-6786. You can email us, forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky, on Instagram, on the Discord, of course, we're KQED Forum. I want to bring in James Fishkin, who's a professor of international communication at Stanford University and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, actually, where Ryan has done some research. Welcome. Welcome.

So your sort of specific intervention in this world is the development of deliberative polling. Talk to me about how that is different from polling and also maybe perhaps different from deliberative democracy.

Well, I view it as a way of realizing deliberative democracy or applying it. It starts with a conventional poll, the best representative sample, stratified random sample we can get of a population. It can be an entire country. It can be a city. We've even done European wide. So we and they take a survey and we also have a control group usually that oversights

only takes the survey and then takes the survey again at the end of the process. And these people are convened for at least a weekend of deliberation and small, moderated small groups and plenary sessions, um, where their questions from the small groups get answered and an agenda where there's, um, uh,

briefing materials that provide background on the issue, usually also video versions of the briefing materials. And we've done this all over the world. We have 160 cases in developing countries, in the US, in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia. And in many countries, it's actually been used to make important decisions because the opinions...

change as people open up to each other and as they, as the students mentioned, as they escape from their social media enclaves and actually learn to listen to the other side. And the, we think that the

Consider judgments at the end represent what the people really would think that the problem if you want to repair democracy you have to think about democracy fundamentally is supposed to make a connection between the will of the people and What's actually done but who can assess the will of the people when everybody's trying to propagandize it mislead and distort

the issues or distract. And so in this sample, and we've done, we've even had a global sample of 6,500, but we've had national samples in the U.S. of up to 1,000 on, say, climate change. And we had a large sample of

of first-time voters. I think that was the project that was being referred to, drawn from the nation's 40,000 high schools, a sample who came to Washington with the Close Up Foundation and deliberated together in randomly assigned small groups. And a random sample randomly assigned will get you diversity. And the

magic elixir is moderated discussion with diverse others. And so on some issues, people have strong opinions. On some issues, people haven't thought about it at all, but they often change. The big surprise to me was that as we become more polarized, it's the more polarized issues that change the most. I think because those people are

In their filter bubbles or enclave, and they haven't heard the other side. They haven't taken it. And if you just expose them to the other side, it backfires. But if you engage them in a civil dialogue for a period of time, they begin to listen. That can work.

We're talking about deliberative democracy, trying to find success, creating policy in a time of polarization, bringing people together to effectively debate and discuss issues. This show was produced by two high school students as part of KQED's annual Youth Takeover. They are Ryan Hashmadi Sr. at Saratoga High School. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I appreciate it. And Anaya Ertz, who is a junior at Marin Academy. Thanks so much for joining us. Wonderful to be here.

Sticking with us, we've got James Fishkin, who's professor of international communication at Stanford and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about deliberative democracy process where people can get together and learn about issues, discuss, come to new agreements. This show was produced by two high school students as part of KQED's annual Youth Takeover. Ryan Hashmadi, Anaya Ertz, thanks to you. Joined by James Fishkin, professor of international communication at Stanford and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. And we're going to talk about deliberative democracy.

I wanted to ask you, James, before we bring on a couple other guests, you know, I can totally see this working on local issues. And we're going to talk about some of that. But, you know, at this moment in our political history as a country, you know, we've got a president defying orders from the courts. We've got students getting thrown into these Kafkaesque immigration situations. We've got totally undemocratic things happening online.

I mean, is the answer really to get in the room with the Trump administration and move halfway towards them? Like it feels I'm trying to figure out how this would actually be applied in this current political moment.

Well, we've applied it with collaborators in different countries and different states on complicated and difficult issues where it actually has resolved, led to policy change or even constitutional changes. But I...

This current moment is very difficult, and I'm not offering this as a prescription for our current political moment, but a long-term prescription. I've written a book that's about to come out. My new book is called Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? And it's a long-term vision that if we implemented it,

in all the ways that I've described, and we have cases for many of them in the book, but we implemented it systematically, we would change the political culture and the political habits and guardrails of democracy and strengthen it. And we would also make democracy more meaningful in the sense that when people deliberate, they actually end up voting, even as long as a year later, voting in terms of their considered judgments

Right now, one of our problems is that we just have tribalism and party loyalty as the basis for voting. But if people actually think about the issues, they will come to their own conclusions. And so deliberation can...

cure the ills of democracy by lessening extreme partisan polarization, by giving us a picture of what the people really would want if they thought about it, and by creating more deliberative voters. And over the long term, and more mutual respect and, you know,

Citizens who have a sense of efficacy, that they can have opinions that are worth listening to, and they're more likely to vote and more likely to think about how they want to vote. So we've got experiments that...

We have a series of experiments called America in One Room, which on a national basis explored these, provide the basis for those conclusions. But we've got plenty of examples in some states and other countries where

Particular issues were resolved by applying deliberative polling, deliberative democracy. And there's sort of a deliberative wave of various models. Of course, I like my model the best, but there's a lot to say for all. Well, James, let me...

Anytime you gather people together to deliberate in a civil manner, wonderful things begin to happen. I mean, this listener gets right to the heart, I guess, of this topic. A listener writes, you know, there are a lot of folks in this country, even in the Bay Area, who are fascists and believe in their superiority because they are white. How do you dialogue with them? Well, in the...

I'll give you two examples. In the 2019 America in One Room, one of the issues was immigration. And the Republicans came in. 80% of the Republicans in the initial questionnaire before they deliberated wanted to send all the undocumented immigrants home to their home countries, so-called. And they didn't support DACA, and they wanted to limit access

immigration in all kinds of ways. After deliberation, only 40%, that's a drop of 40 points, had those views. This was featured in the New York Times, which also published the pictures of all the 530 people who participated in this national conclave.

That we brought all these – a really good sample from Newark at the University of Chicago to a big hotel in Texas. So – and another example where – well, people overcame their views about deliberation because –

Some of the arguments that they were offering about immigration was that I heard in one small group a woman insisting that undocumented immigrants don't pay taxes. But then they found out in the plenary sessions that it's the...

undocumented immigrants whose taxes are keeping the social security system afloat and the sales taxes and others. And so eventually she came around to, she dropped that argument. But in any case, it wasn't that. Let me bring in a couple of other guests here. I want to bring in Ramin Sarabi, who's founder and director of American Public Trust. Welcome, Ramin.

Glad to be here. Thank you. And I would like to bring in Claudia Schwalise, who is founder and CEO of Democracy Next. Welcome, Claudia. Hello. Yeah. You know, as we're talking about these different experiments, you know, we've been hearing about from James Fishkin of, you know, how democracy can work and needs alternative configurations, more deliberative models. Claudia, you have some experience working with sort of citizens assemblies, right? Like, what are those and how do those work?

Yeah, so I guess James Fishkin was just talking about the fact that there are different models out there. So citizens' assemblies are another model that kind of convey these key principles of people being randomly selected, having time to deliberate, and then coming to some more informed recommendations. I would say the key things that define citizens' assemblies that are maybe a bit different is both in terms of the number of people involved, the amount of time people are deliberating for it,

and the fact that citizens' assemblies have really been used to inform policymaking, constitutional changes and so on. So, you know, to make that sound less abstract, in France, where I live, there have been two national level citizens' assemblies in the past few years. One of them took place on the issue of how do we reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 in a spirit of social justice? So there were 150 participants.

people that were selected by a lottery process to be broadly representative of the diversity of the French population. And they met for nine months of deliberation. So they heard from many, many different kinds of experts and proposed 149 different recommendations to the French government. And then more recently, there was another assembly that was about should we change the existing legislation on assisted dying? And if so, how?

And this was with 185 people that deliberated for 27 days, spread out over four months. And they heard from over 60 different kinds of experts, which also included like faith group leaders and people with lifelong illnesses. So experts in a very broad sense of the term.

And that group came up with 67 recommendations that they fleshed out in a 176 page report for the government. So I give a little bit of those figures to give a sense that these are these tend to be quite like deep engagement, very deep and really connected then to legislation, policymaking and so on.

Ramin, you've been involved with these types of alternative democratic efforts locally, right? One that I was reading about is in the city of Petaluma. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how that one worked or another one you like? Yeah. So Petaluma, California, town of about 70,000 in Sonoma County, our north. Beautiful Petaluma. Beautiful Petaluma. A lot of great eggs come from there. Well, agriculture country historically. And the most evasive issue in town that had

town halls with people shouting at each other was the future of the county fairgrounds. So for about, you know, 80 years, it had been on a lease for a dollar a year to some county fair board. And I think if you pulled most folks in the community, they'd say they loved the county fair.

And the land was highly underutilized. It was fenced up otherwise. Used like 10 days a year or whatever. Exactly. And so the question, though, of what to do with that 55 acres of land that's now pretty much in the center of town was a shouting match. And nothing was resolving it. In this case, the city manager was at a League of Cities and Towns event, heard about this innovation, and had the foresight and forward-thinking leadership to say, this might help us find a way through. Did it work? No.

It did. It did. For all intents and purposes, you had 36 petalumens, all walks of life, 80 hours together over the course of a number of months. And they clarified, for example, as much as housing is an issue in our community and affordable housing...

Not here, not on this piece of land. And they generated, you might say, a yes and way forward. Keep the fair. And it turns out we can still invest in other uses, bring down the fences, make it more like Golden Gate Park. That was part of the original vision of this land back in the day. Invest in a year-round farmer's market, still use it for evacuation because we're in the Bay Area and fires are a thing. And now this serves as the basis for the master planning as it's moving forward. Mm-hmm.

And how is this different from, you know, there are all kinds of, you know, citizens groups that get formed at various times as part of some advisory councils and these kinds of things. How is this different? Is it just the way that people are chosen? Like it's chosen in this sort of random, you know, sampling method or is that they actually have more power in local decision making?

It's both of those actually, you know, so who's in the room, typically, who's getting organized is just one subset of the larger conversation in the community.

And through a democratic lottery or a civic lottery, you're getting all walks of life across age, gender. You know, you actually can choose what variables. Usually race, ethnicity is one of them, education level. So you've got a mini public is what we call it in academic land. And I sometimes conceive it as a pop up think tank on behalf of the people.

Because we all can't go that deep on every issue. And juries are another metaphor here. It's like a civic jury. They're doing the work on our behalf to figure out where we the people would net out if we had the time to grapple with the tradeoffs and find a way forward. Finally, the thing in these assembly models is typically the threshold for decision making is 70% agreement or greater.

So you get much more durable, inclusive decisions instead of that slight 51% where the pendulum keeps going back and forth every election cycle. That's interesting. Let's bring in Catherine with an example here. Catherine, welcome.

Oh, hello. First time caller, long listener. Hey, welcome. Thanks for calling. Thank you. So nervous. But when I first heard the beginning of the show, I was so excited because I thought about applying it very locally, which I'm now hearing you are doing, because I'm involved in, we have conflict here about bike path versus walking path.

And it doesn't need to be voluptuous. And I would love to see city government

instituting this kind of a process first because what we really experience is the loudest voices yell and then the city decides something and either it just happens or the other voices start yelling and then nothing happens. Oh yeah. Catherine in Berkeley. Thank you so much. Great job. Call back. Thanks Catherine. Ramin, you want to talk, have you seen this applied for bike paths? I agree. This bike path is so contentious. We saw it over here on Valencia. We've seen it in Berkeley. We've seen it all over the place.

You know, so there are about a thousand cases that have been applied, commissioned by government at all levels from from local to national, as Claudia was mentioning the French examples. So I'm personally not aware of a bike path case top of mind, but I would not be surprised. And in the scheme of things, urban planning is a common topic because, as Catherine was sharing, it's very contentious, the choices that we make right in our backyards.

And more often than not, it presents as a polar either or where there are yes and ways forward that that's the best way forward. And these help you find that. Claudia, I imagine when some of the climate issues that the Citizens Assembly are talking about in France was working on must have been some bike path things are like urban planning, land use things coming up.

Yeah, I mean, I think the French Assembly at the national level was maybe a slightly different scale in terms of the types of recommendations that they were coming up with. But as Ramin was saying in the OECD data that the study that I had led when I was working there around like the largest portion of citizens assemblies have taken place on urban planning related questions. So

quite typical that these are kind of issues that also involve trade-offs. There isn't just one necessarily objective way forward. Whatever decision you're going to take around these, somebody is going to be a little bit unhappy. So I think having a process that also lends some legitimacy and finding that best way forward, um,

is really, really helpful. And the French Climate Assembly led to all sorts of other types of recommendations that did have to do with mobility as well, but maybe more on a scale of, for example, one of the biggest pieces of legislation that changed around this was there was a new law that led to the fact that if people

people were able to travel by train in two and a half hours or less, flights between those cities would no longer be allowed to take place, for example. So it did lead to quite kind of, I think, quite significant and what would have been rather controversial decisions without such a process in place. Yeah.

Is the goal that people, for you, is the goal that people become more informed or is that they kind of loosen their hold on how they feel about something? Like, are you trying to make them more comfortable changing their mind or just giving them more facts for their sort of sets of positions? Yeah.

I'm not sure it's necessarily an either or because I think, I mean, I really appreciate what James Fishkin was saying earlier about how people do change their minds and that happens a lot. But also not everyone necessarily changes their minds, but people can also come to a much more deeper understanding of an issue of,

also of their own perspective, but others. So one example that comes to my mind, for instance, that has sort of stuck with me is at the end of that other French assembly around end of life issues. Afterwards, there was one of the assembly members that was on a late night talk show in France talking about how from the very beginning and the outset, she's someone who is Catholic and for religious reasons has always believed in the fact that, you know, under no conditions should there ever be euthanasia or assisted dying that is allowed. But she was expecting

how going through this process, at the end of it, she still held that same deep personal conviction, but she was explaining why she voted in favour of the legislation to change, to liberalise those things. And it had to do with the fact that she felt like she was really listened to and wasn't judged, that she also came to a much deeper sense of the understanding of why people held other views on this.

that there were other things that she cared about that actually had to do with also investment in palliative care, for instance. So to that yes and kind of point, that really makes a difference to people too. So I think, you know, when I was listening to the wonderful high school students at the start talking about their motivation for their interest in this, it was really lovely to hear because I think it's really that, that people are so divided. We're not often in environments also where we have access to the same information. So I think

Part of the beauty is that people go through a lengthy process where they're exposed to the same information. And it's on that basis that they're then weighing the trade-offs, weighing the evidence, listening to one another and bringing in their diversity of perspectives. And I think that's what ends up being quite transformative.

I mean, Ramin, real quick before we go to a break. I mean, one of the problems seems in the U.S. that many of the people you'd want to reach have no trust in any expert in any expertise at all in the first place. I mean, this is sort of one of the major problems in the country right now is there's a voting bloc that essentially doesn't believe anything that experts tell them.

Well, so we were part of a demonstration process in Michigan on COVID-19 in October 2020. So the heat of the polarization on COVID, which had a ton of disinformation.

And the heat of the presidential election cycle. So you can imagine all that was in the room. And in spite of that, they still developed 12 positions that had 70 percent agreement or greater. Now, one of one of the off valves is the delegates themselves. Think of them as like a mini legislative body. They can call their own experts. So, yeah, making sure that you've got all perspectives being heard out is is foundational. This you're not excluding anybody. Yeah.

I want to talk more about that because I might want to draw a line at some point there. That's a common reaction, yeah. We're talking about deliberative democracy and citizens' assemblies, you know, processes that aim to change policy by bringing people together to discuss divisive issues. This show was produced by high school students Ryan Hishmaty and Anaya Ertz as part of KQED's annual youth takeover.

We are also joined by Ramin Sarabi, founder and director of the American Public Trust, and Claudia Chualis, who is founder and CEO of Democracy Next, and James Fishkin, who is professor of international communication at Stanford. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break. 24 chefs, 24 culinary showdowns for 24 hours straight. Which chef will outcook, outpace, outlast the competition?

No chef. Escapes the clock. Season premiere, 24 and 24, Last Chef Standing, Sunday, April 27th at 8. See it first on Food Network. Stream next day on Max. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together. Xfinity!

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about deliberative democracy, citizens' assemblies, both at the kind of local level, like we heard about up in Petaluma, and also even at the national level, like we've heard about in France. This show is produced by high school students Ryan Heshmaty Sr. at Saratoga High and Anaya Erta Jr. at Marin Academy. This is, of course, KQED's annual Youth Takeover. The show is brought to you by the KQED Foundation.

Got some great guests in the house. And we also want to hear from you. What's a policy decision you think might benefit from using these techniques here locally? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-7333.

That's 6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, or KQED Forum. Or you can go join our particular deliberative space, the Discord community. Let's bring in Kim in Sonoma. Welcome, Kim. Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. Oh, go ahead.

Oh, yeah. So I wanted to sound a little bit of a note of caution about deliberative democracy. I think it's a really important and promising process. But I'm a climate scientist at Lund University in Sweden, and I've studied deliberative democracy and citizens assemblies at the city level. And what we've found is that they often tend to.

focus on ineffective solutions. So it's really important to set them up following best practices, to have information available to the citizens who are deliberating, to understand, for example, in the climate context, the source of emissions and effective policies to reduce those. For example, one thing we found was that citizens tended to focus a lot on waste management and recycling, and that

tended to be only a few percentage of the total emissions of the city, where you really have to get off of burning fossil fuels and a reliance on private cars to move the needle and reduce emissions. And I heard another example of that just now. One of your guests mentioned that the Citizens Assembly in France banned short, tall flights.

But unfortunately, that's only a few percent of emissions from flights. About two-thirds of flight emissions come from long-distance international transcontinental flying. And you really won't reduce emissions substantially without addressing those. So just to note that it's really important. It's not automatic that having these deliberative processes, even though they definitely increase fairness and legitimacy, they won't necessarily convene on effective solutions unless they're set up to do so. Well, and to be fair, our...

Traditional legislatures also focus on ineffective solutions to climate change. The real problem is, right, people don't want to actually deal with the real large emissions chunks in our society. Yeah, fair enough. So, I mean, this is potentially a way to break that gridlock if you harness...

people's reason and motivation and public interest effectively, but they need the right information and the right setup, for example, enough time, which it sounds like the processes you're talking about do have. But it's just that participation will not automatically lead to effective solutions. You have to focus on the source of problems to address it effectively, and that's especially important in a climate where there might be, rather than local land use planning issues, it's important to have the full picture.

Yeah. Kim, what a great point. Kim and Sonoma, thank you so much. Claudia, do you want to talk a little bit about that? And we'll come to Ramin. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's a fair point. And it's also like, I mean, one of my previous roles before Democracy Next, I was at the OECD where I actually led the work developing the international standards of good practice for citizens, assemblies and other kinds of deliberative processes and

like all the points that were mentioned are certainly part of that. I think that I did only mention one of the 149 recommendations that I think have to be considered holistically. And I think also the other part of that consideration was these were recommendations for the French government about what's within its remits to be able to act

upon. So banning things to do with international long haul flights and so on would have been outside the scope of what this assembly would have been working on anyhow. So I think that just only gives like one aspect of the whole wider set of the recommendations that came out of that process. And I just fully emphasize the agreement with the need that they need to be following good practices to be set up. Otherwise, you're yeah, it's not enough just to be doing a process for the sake of participation, for sure. Yeah.

I mean, like, you know, in a local context here, what would that look like? What would somebody need to know to, you know, help redesign or help design a bike path route or something? You know, like, how do you decide what the scope of research available to folks or information available to folks should be?

So we're running a process in Fort Collins, Colorado right now. We had the first weekend about 10 days ago. And it's the question of what to do with 165 acres of land. So similar enough. Now, we have a process that organizes an information committee that is comprised of stakeholders on that issue. A few randomly selected citizens as well that volunteered for the role. And then some folks that come from boards and commissions that were nominated to. So anyway, that composition can change.

Then there was a survey to the public that said, hey, who should the assembly hear from to make sure we're hearing from all sides? They received that as an input and they they distilled the top 16 speakers. And that was a quarter of the first weekend.

And then in addition to that, the delegates in the weekend identified gaps in information, either specific information gaps or voices that weren't heard from all together. And those folks are invited to speak in the second meeting. So, OK, to answer it directly, you've got some technical questions for sure about the feasibility of bike lanes. But a lot of it has to do with competing stakeholder groups and visions for what to do with this project.

this piece of land or this, this urban commons. And you got to make sure that they're, they all have their time in the sun, if you will, to be heard out. So interesting. Let's bring in Alon in San Francisco. Welcome Alon.

Hi, love you, Youth Takeover. Great topic, great show. So I'm involved in, I guess, a few different local political clubs and groups where we discuss contentious topics. And I guess as some of your guests have mentioned, like,

backlash effect is real and people come in with their own information sets. And a lot of the times, disagreements come down to a specific turn of fact or so of like, "Oh, here is something that is either factually true or not."

a lot of the times there it never seems that there's a way of saying hey you know i disagree with you i think you're wrong but i don't think you're doing in a malicious way but you know if if you come say like oh let's just check what the legislation says or so um you know that can be like seen as an offense and like leads to a lot of uh in-person disagreements even though i'd say that you know

discussing this is in, in person is so much better than an anonymous online setting. But yeah, I'm curious if your guests have any thoughts or recommendations. Yeah. Like, you know, people, I think certain, uh, facts have a certain kind of virality to them, you know, like, Oh, there's more like vacant units than there are homeless people and things like that. And it can be used as kind of like, we're going to end the discussion one way or another when, with some of these particular facts. Right. Um, this is interesting. I mean, I guess I'll, I'll come to you on this. Um,

Yeah, like how do you deal with just when people end up maintaining a fundamental disagreement of fact?

Where they just say well, I don't believe that true or that's not the way that you know How do you deal with those situations? We actually don't see that play out too much in practice in the room So well, okay, first of all structurally the first phase is about learning, you know So everyone is coming in with those initial points of view, but they're also going to hear from the full spectrum on the issue So it's going to complicate the narrative that they came in with in the first place and then by the time you're getting to generating Let's say solutions recommendations

You're working collaboratively with that yardstick of 70% agreement or greater. So that filters out a lot of the, I don't know, let's just say more polarized perspectives on the issue. And you do some basics around strong and reliable information and cognitive biases. Finally, to add one more thing, there's a facilitation philosophy framed as the purge. It's as it suggests. When folks have time to fully express what they're coming in the room with,

then they can now start to listen from a new place and consider new possibilities. We usually don't have that in our public spaces. So we're just fighting to be heard. So, you know, a 40 hour process is very different than a three minute thing. Yeah, exactly. James Fishkin, how do you see this play out? I'm in particular interested in you've run all these different experiments in different countries and

Do you think there's anything that's going uniquely wrong in American democratic spaces? Well, so we have a two-party system and we have opportunities for those who feel most strongly to dominate primaries and select who runs for office. And so we have a...

legacy of many well-intentioned democratic reforms, many of which were born in California, the ballot initiatives, the primary, and

So these in the current social media environment where people can just be exposed to those viewpoints that they find congenial and where misinformation spreads virally have produced extreme polarization. And so we have very great divisions. What we find is with...

deliberation at any level when properly prepared, really the people who feel most strongly at the extremes are actually the ones who move. Our divisions are not intractable. They can be overcome by a certain kind of organized dialogue.

We've even got an automated platform that works just as well as the face-to-face where people engage in video-based small groups of 10 up to 1,000 or actually more. So we can spread this. We're spreading it in the schools. We're spreading it in universities around the country. We're online.

And we're spreading it internationally. So it seems to me that deliberation is a kind of magic elixir for dissolving some of our most extreme divisions, but also allowing people to behave in the way that traditionally we've thought citizens ought to behave. They were supposed to

think about the issues and vote accordingly. Uh, but, uh, uh, one recent, uh, influential political science, um, uh, synopsis of the situation treated that as your, uh, as, uh, as likely as a unicorn. Uh, it's, uh, voters just vote for party loyalty primarily, but they don't have to. Um,

if they really get engaged in the issues. So I think our problems are actually tractable if we apply...

deliberation not to replace elected representation but supplementing to make recommendations sometimes in highly visible ways televised or in ways that that that seem consequential particularly on the most difficult issues so on the most difficult issues

Like where the deliberative process allows policymakers to share responsibility for a solution with the public, but not the public that just volunteers itself. The public representative sample of the entire public that can, in many, many small group discussions, come to conclusions together.

Which we collect in confidential questionnaires so as to protect the conclusions from the social pressure of going along with, say, a jury verdict. Yeah. So anyway, the point is that we ought to try this. We ought to try this in the schools. We ought to try this, which we're doing. We ought to try this in schools.

before national elections. We have a scheme for deliberation day, so-called. But I think that in many... I'm going to Mongolia next week because it's required by law before they can change the constitution. And they just changed the constitution, bringing in proportional representation. And we're having a big celebration of that in Mongolia.

Ulaanbaatar. So the idea was the public in Mongolia, they have two big, two major parties and they're butting heads all the time. And the public actually wanted a constitutional change that would allow more third parties and more alternatives. And that's what they got.

So that's an example of how the process can bring the voice of the people to bear on the policy. Because the law that they followed was they do this national deliberative poll and then recommend to parliament. And then if parliament agrees by two-thirds,

they can change the constitution, which they did quite recently. You know, Claudia, one listener on Blue Sky writes and say, I was curious how these groups keep the randomized group diverse when asking for a significant amount of time. I would think this would leave out many people who can't dedicate the time. Another listener said, you know, had a similar thought, you know, thinking of those who are too sick, old, poor, hardworking, et cetera. How does that work?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And that's also why going back to, again, this idea of, well, how do you design these things to both be democratic and rigorous and why you need some standards of good practice? So we have a lot of evidence which shows us that I think contrary to what...

is I think a really reasonable reflection at first about wondering, like, isn't that a lot of time to be asking of people? But actually, you know, you imagine you receive an invitation from the president or the mayor of your city inviting you to be part of a process where you'll be deliberating for six, eight, 10, 15 days over a really important issue. And there's a commitment already upfront that

There's going to be a response and a recommendation, and we're going to take this seriously. And then in these assemblies, people are also paid for their time. Transport, childcare costs, other kind of costs that might be preventing them from participating are also paid. So there's a lot of design details that are in place to ensure that we're breaking down the barriers to participation, and we're also making this a genuinely meaningful experience that's worth

people's time, because I mean, I think we all have an innate sense of if our time is being wasted. And in these processes, it's really quite the opposite. You know that if you're going to go and be part of this, you're going to lead to really significant changes that will affect national law or the constitutional change in some cases as well. So all of those factors taken together lead to the fact that

you really do end up having a very diverse group of people who are not just the typical people who are participating because how the randomness works in practice for selecting people to be citizens assembly members is that in a very first instance there's a large number of invitations that go out completely at random so that might be around 30 000 people receiving an invitation

from the president or mayor or whoever it is with authority inviting them to be part of this. And then amongst everybody who says yes to that first invitation, of course, you still have a little bit of bias, but you've also reached a lot of people who never vote, are not politically engaged, are not already kind of going to town hall meetings and so on. And so you do end up with a much more diverse group of people than just those who are already kind of activated and in interest groups and politically active already.

And there is a fair bit of evidence. I mean, all the OECD studies really show this, that there has been also really high retention rates in terms of people showing up. And, you know, the process I mentioned about France, 185 people, 27 days of deliberation. There were 184 people that were there for all the sessions. Wow.

If it's meaningful and people are also like breaking down those barriers to enable participation, then we also see people are taking up that privilege and responsibility of decision making. Yeah.

Thank you so much. We've been talking about deliberative democracy and citizens assemblies, these processes that aim to help people make better decisions in democracies. This show is produced by Ryan Hashmadi, a senior at Saratoga High School, and Anaya Airtusa Jr. at Marin Academy. This is, of course, KQED's annual youth takeover. We

We've been joined by Claudia Schwalise, who is founder and CEO of Democracy Next. Ramin Sarabi, founder and director of American Public Trust. And James Fishkin, professor of international communication at Stanford University and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hey, it's Glenn Washington, the host of the Snap Judgment podcast. At Snap, we tell cinematic stories that let you feel what it's like inside someone else's skin. Stories that let you walk in someone else's footsteps. Storytelling like you've never heard before.

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