Items19The creator’s order
- 1
Deliberative opinion pollTexas utility deliberative polls, 1996 to 1998
A rare deliberative exercise with a physical legacy you can see on the horizon. Between 1996 and 1998, electric utilities in Texas ran deliberative polls managed by James Fishkin as part of the state's resource planning, asking random samples of…0 - 2
Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (British Columbia)Still the template most assemblies copy, and the most painful near miss. In 2004, 160 British Columbians, one man and one woman from each of the 79 electoral districts plus two Aboriginal members, spent most of the year learning electoral systems before choosing BC-STV, a local form of the single…0 - 3
Deliberative opinion pollZeguo township budget polls, China, mid-to-late 2000s
Evidence that deliberative polling is not only a tool for established democracies. In the coastal township of Zeguo, James Fishkin's team selected a representative sample of residents to weigh which public works projects should be funded. The…0 - 4
Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (Ontario)British Columbia's sequel, with a starker result. Ontario drew 103 citizens at random in 2006, one from each provincial constituency, and their final report in May 2007 recommended mixed member proportional representation, a choice they made by 94 votes to 8. At the October 2007 referendum, 63…0 - 5
Citizens' Initiative ReviewA small, permanent device rather than a one-off event. Oregon created the first permanent Citizens' Initiative Review in 2010: roughly two dozen randomly selected voters spend a few days questioning advocates and experts about a ballot measure, then write a statement for the voters' pamphlet…0 - 6
2010–2013 Icelandic constitutional reformThe people's constitution that parliament never passed. In November 2010, Iceland convened a National Forum of 950 randomly selected citizens to set out what a new constitution should hold. An elected Constitutional Assembly was meant to draft it, but the Supreme Court annulled that election in…0 - 7
Constitutional Convention (Ireland)Ireland's first experiment, and a hybrid worth understanding before praising the later assemblies. The Convention on the Constitution, which ran from 2013 to 2014, seated 66 randomly selected citizens alongside 33 politicians from the Oireachtas and the Northern Ireland Assembly, under an…0 - 8
Citizens' Assembly (Ireland)The Eighth Amendment, 2016 to 2018
The assembly most often held up as proof the model works. Ninety-nine citizens and a chair, former Supreme Court judge Mary Laffoy, voted 79 to 12 that the constitutional ban on abortion should not be retained in full, and preferred to let the Oireachtas…0 - 9
GdańskCitizens' assemblies, 2016 to 2017
The strongest evidence that city assemblies can deliver. After major flooding caused millions of euros of damage, Gdańsk convened the first citizens' assemblies in Poland, groups of around 56 or 57 residents, and proposals backed by more than 80 percent of…0 - 10
Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal CommissionCitizens' jury on nuclear waste, South Australia, 2016
A jury that told a government no and was heeded. After a royal commission recommended facilities for used nuclear fuel from several countries, South Australia's government put the idea to a citizens' jury of 350 people. In November 2016,…0