Randomly Selected "Politicians": Transforming Democracy in the Post-Conflict Context

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After decades of violent conflict in Northern Ireland, the 'peace process' led to the historic 1998 Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement and the establishment of power-sharing institutions. However, one major criticism of the process and the resulting power sharing governance relates to the focus upon securing compromise between elites (political party leaders), somewhat at the expense of ordinary citizens. Citizen engagement is constrained by two features of the power sharing system. First, the fact that all politicians elected to the Assembly have to declare themselves to be either 'unionist' or 'nationalist' (or 'other') means that ethno-national issues relating to the nationalist-unionist divide dominate politics, and other issue areas - perhaps relating to social and economic matters - are downplayed in importance. Second, the fact that all political parties are included in the power sharing government means that it is not possible for voters to 'throw out' the government and replace it with a different one. Hence, despite the fact that power sharing has certainly solidified peace and stability, there is still much to be done to ensure a political system in which all citizens are engaged - in terms of being represented and in terms of contributing to decision making. We propose a practical intervention to help achieve this engagement. We suggest amending the current political institutions by adding a new parliamentary body - an 'upper house'/'second chamber' of randomly selected ordinary citizens. A virtue of randomly selecting citizens is that, as demonstrated by statistical theory, a group of such citizens would look very much like society as a whole. It would contain equal numbers of men and women, and would contain people from low-income backgrounds and ethnic minorities in direct proportion to the numbers of people from low-income backgrounds and ethnic minorities in society. And it would contain the cross section of views that exist right across society. So, if 10 percent of the entire Northern Ireland population are Protestant working class who feel that flags should be flown on public buildings all year round, then (almost exactly) 10 percent of a randomly selected body would contain such people with such views. A randomly selected upper house of parliament would be a mirror image of society as a whole. Randomly selecting political decision makers has actually been widely used in history - in ancient Athens (often seen as the birthplace of democracy) and in medieval Florence and Venice - and randomness is also the selection mechanism underlying the use of juries in legal trials. Furthermore, there have been some contemporary experiments internationally using randomly selected citizens to make policy recommendations (for example, in British Columbia and in the Irish Constitutional Convention). However, there has not been work on formally incorporating random decision making into the political system in deeply divided places in order to enhance inclusion and allow a legitimate democratic space for 'protest' voices of ordinary citizens. The purpose of our project is to come up with a good, well worked out, suggestion as to how best to include a randomly selected decision making body into the existing Northern Ireland political system. First, we bring international academic experts together to generate a range of possible ways of doing so. Second, we ask ordinary Northern Ireland citizens what they think of our suggestions. Third, we interview half of all elected politicians in Northern Ireland and identify their main objections to a possible role for randomly selected citizens. Bearing in mind this evidence from public opinion and the opinions of politicians, we finalise our suggestions as to how best to amend existing institutions to build in a role for randomly chosen citizen decision makers. Finally, we illustrate in a small real-world trial citizen decision making in action.