 Hi, I'm Aaron Hammond. I'm here with the Center for Election Science and today we are excited to have Dr. Kelina Kamanova and Dr. Nicole Goodman here with us in order to talk about citizen juries. Going first to Dr. Kelina Kamanova, Kelina is a research associate with the Health Law Institute and the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. In 2012 to 2013 she held a postdoctoral appointment as the inaugural research director of the newly established Center of Public Involvement at the University of Alberta. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include deliberative democracy and respiratory governance, public engagement with science and technology, and science communication. Dr. Nicole Goodman is a research fellow at the Innovation Policy Lab in the Monk School of Global Affairs and an assistant professor of political science at McMaster University. Her research focuses on political participation. She is particularly interested in the impact of digital and mobile technologies on participation. She served as an advisor and expert witness for the Edmonton Citizens Juries on Internet voting and wrote the issues guide that formed that jury participants. Kelina and Nicole, thank you both for joining us here. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. So, Kelina, what is a citizen's jury and who sits on it? Citizens' juries are an innovative, deliberative method of political participation, which promotes direct involvement of citizens in policy development, strategic planning, or technology assessment. The major assumption of this approach is that laypeople can make well-reasoned decisions on complex problems, particularly when they participate in focused deliberative processes. Usually, juries include a small group of citizens and the major assumption behind this approach is that it relies on the participatory representatives of a small group of citizens rather than statistical representatives achieved through more traditional consultation approaches, such as polling a large group of people. Juries are usually composed of 12 to 24 members who are randomly selected from the general public. In most cases, the goal is to achieve a demographically diverse group, a mini-public, which is representative of the larger population. In some cases, the method which is utilized to select jury members is stratified random sampling, which means that the organizers of the process make effort to include citizens from underrepresented groups, particularly minorities, and they conduct not just random recruitment, but they also target those particular groups. In many cases, some additional editudinal screening of the members is conducted to ensure that the jury is reflective of a broad range of societal views. So you're saying that they identify certain demographics that they deem as being important and that they make sure that there's demographics are represented on the jury itself? Yes, because traditionally, certain groups in societies are underrepresented in decision making, so the jury approach is more inclusive because it targets members of these groups. For example, minorities, they have not been, many of the minority groups have not been part of the political process, and when you do stratified random sampling, you can target these particular groups and have representatives on a citizen's jury. So it's one way to reach those people who usually remain underrepresented in political decision making. Now, maybe both you and Nicole can help me on this one. So what are the benefits of using a citizen jury? I mean, we have legislators, we have parliaments. What does this offer that a parliament or a legislature doesn't? Most democratic systems are systems of representative democracy, whereby we elect representatives to make decisions for us. And sometimes it's more difficult for those representatives to make choices that reflect the wishes of the population and the interests of the population because they're seeking to aggregate those interests. So it's really nice once in a while to try and bring the public voice into policy making and decision making because that may offer a different perspective and embody a different set of values than those of elected representatives. That's one of the main advantages. Another benefit of this approach is that public involvement in many cases is being done by using just pro forma techniques. For example, members of the public are simply informed about what the government intends to do or they're just consulting. And using an approach such as a citizen's jury allows members of the public to be involved in a more meaningful way because it's a process which involves learning and it's a process which also empowers citizens by placing decision making in the hands of those citizens that participate in the process. Yes, it can add value to systems of representative government and decision making that can often be deficient and ineffective. And it can also demonstrate the competency and capability of lay citizens to participate in these types of processes and learn about and weigh in on complex policy issues. Now, Nicole, how do we know about the competence of the people that are on the juries? How do we make sure that they're prepared because some of the matters that these juries may be discussing or things that may be complex, how can we be sure that they're well suited? I think typically the issues are complex or controversial because I think the issues that are selected for these types of forms are typically issues that elected representatives don't want to weigh in on themselves either because they're political hot potatoes or because they may have a particular a stake or vested interest in the outcome of the issue themselves. Presumably what we want to represent in these decisions and policies is the will of the people and who better to represent the will of the people than a group that is chosen demographically from the population and some citizens juries like the Edmonton citizens jury have also done representation attitudinally as well. I think the question that Nicole raised about the jury being representative of the larger community was really good because the expectation during the deliberative process is that when jurors hear evidence from expert witnesses and when they question these witnesses and when they critically review and evaluate the information and finally engage in sustained discussions and deliberation, the verdict that they will achieve on the issue or question under consideration will be reflective of the wisdom of the entire community. So it's this powerful idea about bringing the voice of the public into decision making and what gives confidence to elected representatives when they conduct the decision jury process is that the verdict achieved by the jurors will be the same as if the entire community has deliberated. I think you have to think about what does a qualified person mean, what characteristics do they have to embody and can we say that elected representatives are particularly qualified. The people that enter into the jury process, they hear from expert testimony, they engage in extensive deliberation, and it's carried out over a longer time frame than typically occurs in traditional legislative policy development and decision making. So they really have a lot more information to be able to base their decisions on. In addition, they are often as you mentioned demographically representative of the population and sometimes as in the case of the Edmonton citizen's jury, attitudinally representative of the population and who better to make a decision based on the public will than a group that is a mini-public essentially demographically and attitudinally of the larger populace. And Collina, maybe you can speak to a little bit more as far as what exactly the citizen's jury is going to be taking in. So they're going to be getting a lot of information. How are they getting that information? Is it going to be expert testimony? Are they going to have to read a bunch of books? What exactly are they doing? Well, usually the process starts by bringing, selecting experts to participate in the deliberative process and then bringing those experts to give testimony and present on the issues and their consideration. And you also provide an opportunity for the citizens participating in the jury process to question these experts. And also jurors are provided with learning materials in advance which was the strategy that we used during the Edmonton citizen's jury on internet voting. Nicole developed this study guide which summarized major concerns and issues concerning internet voting and jurors were presenting with the guy. They were provided with learning materials in advance. So they had an opportunity to study the subject matter, do their own research, and then meet with leading experts in the field and question those experts. So by the end of the jury process, the 17 citizens that were involved in it, they became experts on internet voting. We were surprised that they learned so much and they could make such a good informed decision on the policy question, on the charge question that was developed for them. We're talking about some complex issues here. It sounds like they're able to get a lot of information, but how much time do they have to do this? Is it a matter of months that they're looking at this? How long does this take? The different formats are used, so there is no one specific time frame that works in each case. So usually my citizens' jurors adopt a shorter time frame compared to other deliberative forms. So the citizens' jury on the internet voting in Edmonton took place over one weekend. So practically it started on Friday afternoon and the verdict was delivered by the citizens on Sunday. In the late afternoon on Sunday. So it took about two days and a half of intense learning and deliberations and also the jurors heard presentations, short presentations from experts. They had time to question these experts and raise concerns about some of the issues. So different formats are used around the world. It really depends on how you design the deliberative process and what type of question or policy concern is addressed by the jury. If it's something that requires a more extensive learning process, then it would make sense for the jury process to take place over several weeks. If it's a very narrow particular policy question, the duration could be several days. So it really depends on the design and the type of concern that is being addressed by citizens. Now, Kleena, when this is over with and the jury has its recommendation. So is that binding? Is this just a recommendation for the legislature to follow? What's going on here? Citizens' juries are still considered to be an experimental approach. So in most of the jurisdiction where citizens' juries were convened, the decision was not legally binding, which is probably one of the deficiencies of this approach because policy makers and elected officials can choose to ignore the recommendations of a citizen's jury, which is what happened in Edmonton. The only place where citizens' juries are legally binding is Oregon, which recently adopted about two years ago, the Citizens' Review Initiative, which institutionalized the citizen jury process to review ballot measures. This is a really, really important issue about how we make a jury verdict or recommendations legally binding because if we want to have a more efficient process, we should better make these delivery forums legally binding. But unfortunately, it has only happened in Oregon and in other places. It is really up to elective representatives and policy makers to decide whether they will act on the jury recommendations. So Kalinda just said that not always are the citizen's juries binding and sometimes they're just giving recommendations. So after they go through this process, they've taken all this information and they give a non-binding recommendation, does that still have value even though it's not binding? I think it depends. In the case of the Edmonton Citizens' Jury, if we can talk about it in terms of a specific case study, the City Council actually ended up rejecting the jury verdict. So perhaps I should give you a little bit of background to contextualize. The Edmonton Citizens' Jury was composed to weigh in on the topic of introducing internet voting in local elections in the city of Edmonton. They ended up deliberating and unanimously decided after some further deliberation that they wanted to see internet voting. They thought it was a good idea to be used in elections moving forward at the local level. Well, when City Council ended up voting on it, they ended up actually rejecting the internet voting proposal. So this situation truly speaks to the question of should verdicts be binding because the city invested all of this money to bring people on, design the process, then train these people, the people were brought in and this was seen to enhance their faith and legitimacy and responsiveness in government and then they went ahead and rejected it. So what does that mean? Well, they also put forward some recommendations and the city did promise to take those recommendations forward and consider them in future policy development. This particular instance is very interesting because although the Citizens' Jury was a large component of the process, there were other special interest groups that also participated in the process as well and I think some of them felt like their voices were not heard through the jury process so they went to other channels. So this is kind of a unique mix of political participation where you saw a group of citizens that were demographically and attitudinally representative of the population coming together and deliberating on a very important and complex policy issue and experts of course came but then some people who wanted their voices heard and they didn't feel that this was inclusive enough or representative enough and so they sort of went in the back door channels and it ended up being, well we don't know for certain but I think that those voices did have an impact on the verdict. So more generally, can these recommendations have an impact? I think they can have an impact. They can have an impact if the policy changes were visited in the future. That could be something that government could look back upon at that point and say these were the recommendations that the Citizens' Jury put forward at that time and maybe we should take these into consideration as we're moving forward with policy development particularly if they decide not to engage in a deliberative method again. Also, other governments maybe considering this policy change who maybe don't have the funds to pursue a Citizens' Jury can benefit from the wisdom of those recommendations if they're made public. Sure. When you speak to the recommendations being made public is it just we make this recommendation like a short little bit about that recommendation or is it more elaborate in going into the deliberative process as far as how they came to that recommendation? No, I think it's more basic. So they have a very short time to sort of write up the report in terms of what I would think to write a report. So it's written in very clear plain language and just sort of essentially gets to the essence of the action or inaction that they're suggesting. Here you mentioned in Edmonton internet voting so what other types of issues might be discussed in the Citizens' Juries? Yes. When I was thinking about this question I was thinking about it in terms of Citizens' Juries and Citizens' Assemblies. Citizens' Assemblies are another type of deliberative forum where citizens can be brought into the decision making process and be educated through expert testimony and deliberation to decide on a particular policy issue. So I sort of think that the types of issues that are addressed by these forums can be grouped into three categories. One, I think we see controversial issues being addressed and a really good example of that is electoral reform that was examined by Citizens' Assemblies in Canada, in British Columbia and in Ontario. Electoral reform is always a very contentious issue especially for politicians who essentially are put into those positions and have their livelihood depending on the electoral system putting them in power. So because they have a vested interest in this system selection they're maybe not the best ones to be making the decision. Internet voting is also seen as a topic that's very controversial as well as I'm sure you can imagine there are certain groups who are ardent defenders of it and they say it really promotes accessibility and convenience and makes the electoral process a lot easier for people to participate and also encourages engagement and then there's another camp who argues very strongly about security, threats and issues so very very controversial. The second type I would say is something that has been difficult to resolve so maybe an issue that has been persistent in the policy arena for some time maybe the government has tried something already and it hasn't really worked out that well so they go and they seek out the public and see if they can take out any wisdom or knowledge or ideas from the public that they couldn't come up with themselves going through these traditional processes. A good example of that is a citizen's assembly that recently took place in Prince Edward County in Ontario to debate over the size of council review. This is a problem that they weren't able to solve and it generated a lot of local debate. And then the third area I think is some of the problems or issues. So something that maybe it hasn't necessarily been a pressing issue but it's very unique. And in South Australia right now they're currently completing a citizen's jury process which aims to make certain communities' nightlife safer and more vibrant. So not your typical policy issue and maybe not controversial problem but I think that's definitely a unique policy issue. I think certainly we can see the benefit of having a citizen's jury especially for something like electoral issues where there's a clear conflict of interest from the legislature. Now Kelina, the idea of citizen's jury, is this something that's new or is this something that's been around for a while? What is this before? It's still considered an innovative delivery method because mainly because the process has not been institutionalized like with the exceptions of the Oregon citizens review initiative but it's not a new concept. The citizen's jury method originated in the early 1970s with the development of a method of deliberation called planning sale and this was developed by Professor Peter Dino at the Research Institute for citizen participation and planning procedures at the University of Wuppertau in Germany so independently, so in Germany they experimented with citizen's jury particularly on a range like of urban planning issues also like for social policy development. So it turned out to be a very effective approach and the planning sales are very similar to the citizen's jury because they use a small group of people like up to 25, 30 and they engage them like in the deliberation and in a learning process on the issues and their consideration. independently of the Germans a similar process, a citizen's jury process was modeled in the mid 1970s under the name of citizen's committee by Ned Crosby at the Jefferson Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and in the late 1980s Crosby adopted the term citizen's jury so this is like a little bit of a history about the process. Crosby also registered the trademark and the term citizen's jury in the United States so now every time when you design such a process in the US you have to acknowledge that the trademark that the Jefferson Center has it. So it's been around for a while and citizen's jurors have been used like in a number of countries around the world they have been popular in the UK in Europe also in Germany, Italy and France in Australia there have been a number of citizen's jurors convened on a whole range of like urban planning technology development technology assessment and policy development issues in Canada is a relatively new approach and the citizen's jury on internet voting in Edmonton was basically the first ever citizen's jury in Canada where citizens presented their recommendations directly to a body of elected representatives in this case City Council, Edmonton City Council Nicole, you had mentioned you were talking before about binding versus non-binding recommendations from the citizen's jury and now what kind of role do you think the media is going to play into that as far as having the public become more aware and perhaps pressuring the legislature to go in a certain direction? I think the media is extremely important and first I'm going to answer your question and then I'll provide an interesting example that shows this in the Canadian context I think the media is really important to hold the government's feet to the fire and hold them to account in the case of the Edmonton citizens' jury the city did invest quite a bit of money into this process and then when the citizen's jury verdict was not followed upon, followed through with by council, you have to think what are the implications of this? If in other situations this is occurring and these verdicts are non-binding then it's the public's job to hold the government's feet to the fire and how do they find out about this well through the media and it's also the media's job as sort of the democratic arbiter to be reporting on this and providing the public with this information so that they can act accordingly I think the media has an interesting role in this process generally and I think an excellent example of that is the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly by May, the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly was very controversial it's introduction for electoral reform British Columbia went through a series of wrong winner scenarios where the wrong government was elected and the liberals ended up when they were on the other side of the fence when they were not in power they said you know when we get into power we promise we're going to revisit this and then when they were actually in power they were much more reluctant to revisit electoral reform but because of public pressure they did they went through the Citizens' Assembly process they invested a lot of money the whole process went from January to December 2004 just for the deliberation, learning and recommendation so you can imagine this was an extremely lengthy and cost intensive process at the end of the process the recommendation of the Citizens' Assembly was put to a public referendum and it was the government's job to provide funding to sort of advertise this or the media was supposed to report on it as well but the government invested a fraction, a small fraction of the money on advertising and it didn't pick up as much in the media as it maybe should have and as a consequence it narrowly failed just very narrowly and afterwards when people were interviewed they said they were just not aware of it and one of the main reasons that was cited for this was because of lack of media attention and the irony of how so much money went into the development of this process and the deliberation but not into the public dissemination of the findings and now here you're talking about the referendum for single transferable vote in British Columbia so you're talking about? That's correct, yes. So I just think it's interesting not only should the media play an important role in terms of getting the verdicts out there especially for citizens' juries that are non-binding so the public can, as I said try and hold the government to this process they've invested in the process for a reason they should trust in the chosen individuals but also in disseminating and getting the information out there more generally especially in cases such as the citizens' assembly for electoral reform when there was a referendum and then not much was said about it. But also I think media plays media can play a key role in educating citizens about this type of deliberative processes and why they are so important and how they can empower citizens like to participate in decision making because we live in mediated reality and like mediate the major source of information on the political and social issues for the general public so the more people know about this deliberative method the more inclined elected representatives will be like to support the use of such method. So when implementing the citizens' jury and this is the lesson that we learned like in Edmonton because we designed a really good process and then we engaged the municipal government and we convinced them to finance the process then present and participate in it and present the verdict to city council but we did not work closely with the media and what happened at the end that I think this to a certain extended influence like the outcome of the process when city council voted against the internet voting proposal I think councilors like used media as the major source of information and the voices of those stakeholders groups that did not participate in the jury process were really heard while you know councilors did not know about the jury process given the fact that you know it was not really you know there wasn't a lot about it in the media like media obviously covered the verdict of the citizens' jury but the coverage did not include information about the process itself how participants were recruited why this was such an important event and this affected at the end you know the outcome of the entire process so media it is very important to work with the media when implementing citizens' jury process in any jurisdiction because media has like a great impact on how people think about politics in general and you can imagine that being especially the case with British Columbia and looking at the alternative voting method you recently in Canada had an election where a conservative faction had less than 40% of the vote and yet they got more than 50% of the seats and you're pushing in that particular citizen's jury and the referendum was looking at proportional method which if the media perhaps had been more on their game would be able to show that proportional methods do a much better job at creating a buffer against these what are called false majorities when you have people that have a minority of the vote get more than half the seats yes that's totally true the last time in Canada that a majority government was elected with the majority of the vote was in 1984 and that was just by a hair because I think they had 50.9% of the votes so it's a rarity in Canadian politics given our regional issues and our single member plurality electoral system that we see majority government selected with the majority of the vote typically it's the plurality of the vote and usually not a large plurality now we've been talking about citizen's juries and I think something that is going to be in some people's minds is what's the price tag on this what's this going to cost the people yes so in terms of the price tag I don't think there's any hard fast rules about how much something like this costs I think the cost is really built into the design and the length of time that the process is carried out so some citizen's juries take place longer than others the Edmonton citizen's jury and deliberated over a weekend in the case of the South Australian citizen's jury getting six times over a number of months so that would be much more costly so I think the nature of the cost really depends on the design the unique features that you put into the planning of the process you mentioned Edmonton that it was a shorter time frame so like what was the cost in Edmonton I think Kalina could comment to that directly so at the time I was the research director of the public involvement which was the organization which designed and implemented the process and we were commissioned by the city of Edmonton to develop the entire public involvement campaign around the internet voting proposal so the money that we received from them and this is not a secret because it was like because the center for public involvement was an affiliated academic center so the money where like it was practically a research grant so we received about 70,000 but this 70,000 Canadian dollars but this included like a number of different components not just the citizen's jury itself so this included like the development of an online survey stakeholder consultation meetings and this is the jury process so the jury process was just the third component of this entire public involvement campaign and I would say given the amount of money we received it was a very cost-effective approach I would say about one third of the of the money that we received was used like to design the process and we one of the one of the interesting issues is about payment so there's like, there's a huge controversy surrounding the issue of whether participants in citizen's jury should be paid like whether they should receive monetary awards and we decided to pay the jurors for their time and they were paid like a really small amount which compensated them for spending three days in deliberation and attending in person so we paid them about 400 dollars per person so it's a very practically a symbolic honorarium that is being paid to them so it was when you take this into account and we also provided like expert witnesses with like some compensation for their expenses those of them would travel to Edmonton and we also provided them with a small honorarium and of course there was some money involved in like booking a venue and we'll just go through it so I would say like it's a really cost effective approach so say a city hears about this and they become really interested like what kind of steps do they need to do or say as they're going along is there anything that you would recommend that a city keep in mind as they're starting this up and pushing for citizen's jury and you need people with expertise who will be able to design the entire process what a lot of health in the case of Edmonton was that the Center for Public Involvement at the University of Alberta had established an institutional partnership with the city of Edmonton so the center itself is partially funded by the city so because of this this facilitated like the process like obviously citizen's jury is like a very innovative approach and usually the idea comes from academics particularly people who specialize in delivery of democracy and participatory governance but in order to implement this idea you need like the collaboration of government you need the collaboration of public participation of practitioners so the Center for Public Involvement had all these components so we had established like institutional partnership with the city we also worked with international association of the public participation of practitioners so we could draw on their resources to select moderators, facilitators of the citizen's jury process which is a very important aspect of the process so this helped so in the case of other cities I guess like first of all you need some like enthusiasm and like people who propose this idea to the municipal government because like it's unlikely that bureaucrats would come up with this idea maybe some progressive bureaucrats but in the case of like in the case of the city of Edmonton we just met with the project with the election with the internet boarding project team and we proposed the use of this deliberative method to explain what it involves so they were really fascinated they liked the approach they thought that it was like very innovative so you just found some receptive people some receptive policy makers within the city yeah that's one good strategy like finding receptive senior administrators at different levels or elected representatives people who would like to be supportive of the use of this approach so this is one way to go and then also of course convince them to invest funding into organizing because it's a jury so that's what happened in Edmonton there and I think the fact that internet voting was a very controversial issue also was a contributing factor because the city project team wanted to avoid the controversy they wanted to hear from the public what the public thinks on this issue and whether they will be receptive to the introduction of internet voting because an alternative method in municipal elections well Kleena, Nicole do you have anything to add I guess there is one thing that I would add and that's the question that we raised earlier we were sort of discussing before the interview about the difference between a citizens jury and a citizens assembly because the way that the literature defines it as Kleena sort of points it out at the beginning of the call is that a citizens jury is typically composed of 12 to 24 members it's smaller group much like a jury and citizens assemblies the way that we've seen them are the way that they emerged in Canada for the first time in 2004 in British Columbia and then in 2006 in Ontario they were much larger 160 members in BC and 103 members or participants in the case of Ontario but then this past summer we saw a citizens assembly take place in Prince Edward County and that was composed of 24 members and it took place only over three sessions so a much shorter time frame excuse me and then we look at the South Australian citizens jury which has 43 members but is taking place over several months and meet six times so I think an interesting question to raise thinking about future research and ideas is what are the main differences between these different deliberative tools are they very similar how are they different and those sorts of things because it seems that the two can overlap at least so you think it's more of just like the goal is the same but perhaps one the meeting times or the frequency of the meetings may be different in the number of people involved may be different but overall the goal on the end is the same yes I mean my initial perception the main difference between them was that citizens assemblies were a larger undertaking they took place over a larger period of time but I've been proven wrong now based on the Prince Edward County citizens assembly and the South Australia citizens jury because they sort of illustrate the opposite okay so it sounds like an interesting question to raise for thinking and future research okay I also want to add something and it's about it's about the cooperation between like academia and government because like citizens jury and citizens assemblies and all these like innovative deliberative approaches like this is not something that you know well those are those are still considered experimental approaches and like an important aspect of the process is to research the process and not just to design it for the policy makers but also to research like and like evaluate the entire process because like sometimes like there are certain shortcomings let's say you know criticisms about how the issues are being for example how the issues are being framed when a citizen's jury is conducted how this you know impacts like specific out or leads to specific outcomes so integrating like research into the practice of public participation is very important and it's one way to like improve the citizens jury process and convince policy makers that it is very efficient like and it's a good process it's a meaningful way to engage citizens so what we try to do like in Edmonton so parallel to the actual citizens jury process we conduct it like observations and we also we also like ask citizens jurors citizens who participated in the jury process to complete surveys and evaluate like their opinion change over time so how people's perceptions are being changed a result as a result of learning which is involved in the process so it's very important that you know you integrate research and practice like in public public participation in the design of any public participation event Sounds like good advice Well Kleena and Nicole thank you again for joining us it's been a pleasure having you and I'm sure everyone is excited now that they've learned more about citizens juries maybe in some circles citizens assemblies and I am Aaron Hamlin with the citizen with the Center for Election Science and we look forward to hearing from you next time thank you Thank you for having us, thank you Yes, thank you very much Erin, thank you