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

在北爱尔兰经历了几十年的暴力冲突之后，“和平进程”促成了具有历史意义的1998年耶稣受难日/贝尔法斯特协议，并建立了权力分享机构。然而，对这一过程和由此产生的权力分享治理的一个主要批评涉及到确保精英（政党领导人）之间妥协的重点，这在某种程度上是以牺牲普通公民为代价的。公民参与受到权力分享制度的两个特征的制约。首先，所有当选为议会议员的政治家都必须宣布自己是“联合主义者”或“民族主义者”（或“其他”），这意味着与民族主义者-联合主义者分裂有关的民族-国家问题主导了政治，而其他问题领域——可能与社会和经济问题有关——的重要性被淡化了。其次，所有政党都被纳入权力分享政府的事实意味着选民不可能“推翻”政府并以另一个政府取而代之。因此，尽管权力分享肯定巩固了和平与稳定，但仍有许多工作要做，以确保一个所有公民都参与的政治制度- -在代表和对决策作出贡献方面。我们提出一项切实可行的干预措施，以帮助实现这种接触。我们建议修改目前的政治制度，增加一个新的议会机构——由随机选出的普通公民组成的“上院”/“下院”。随机选择公民的一个优点是，正如统计理论所证明的那样，一群这样的公民看起来与整个社会非常相似。它将包括同等数量的男性和女性，并将包括来自低收入背景和少数民族的人，与社会中低收入背景和少数民族的人数成正比。它将包含存在于整个社会的各种观点。因此，如果整个北爱尔兰人口中有10%是新教徒工人阶级，他们认为公共建筑上应该全年飘扬国旗，那么（几乎准确地）随机选择的人群中就会有10%的人持这种观点。随机选出的议会上院将是整个社会的镜像。在历史上，随机选择政治决策者实际上已经被广泛使用——在古代雅典（通常被视为民主的发源地）和中世纪的佛罗伦萨和威尼斯——随机性也是在法律审判中使用陪审团的选择机制。此外，国际上也有一些当代实验，使用随机选择的公民提出政策建议（例如，在不列颠哥伦比亚省和爱尔兰宪法会议）。然而，目前还没有正式将随机决策纳入严重分裂地区的政治制度，以增强包容性，并为普通公民的“抗议”声音提供合法的民主空间。我们项目的目的是提出一个好的、经过精心设计的建议，如何最好地将一个随机选择的决策机构纳入现有的北爱尔兰政治体系。首先，我们将国际学术专家聚集在一起，制定一系列可行的方法。其次，我们询问普通北爱尔兰公民对我们的建议有何看法。第三，我们采访了北爱尔兰一半的民选政治家，并确定他们对随机选择的公民可能扮演的角色的主要反对意见。考虑到这些来自公众意见和政治家意见的证据，我们最终提出了关于如何最好地修改现有制度以建立随机选择的公民决策者角色的建议。最后，我们在一个现实世界的小试验中说明了公民决策的行动。

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.