 As Graham said this is just a taster and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail but obviously you're very welcome to ask me later about some of the details. I also want to acknowledge a couple of colleagues of mine, Jen Roberts at Strathclyde and Oliver Escobar with me in Edinburgh. I want to go back and give you some background to this which is important context to understand why citizens do it and where do they come from and what are they trying to do. The origins really come from Robert Dahl's work, some of you may know him, political scientist in America who wrote a number of papers, but he posited this idea saying suppose an advanced democratic country, disbate what that is, were to create a mini-opopolus consisting of perhaps a thousand citizens randomly selected out of the entire Demos. Its task would be to deliberate for a year perhaps on an issue and then to announce its choices. I perhaps should have prefaced this by saying are you all happy with the democratic systems that you live within and you may understand the backdrop to this is suggesting that perhaps we need to think about different ways we run democratic societies and so this is what's led to a lot of this rethinking in political science about what the options might be. He goes on to say a mini-popolus could exist at any level of government, national, state or local. It could be attended by an advisory committee of scholars and specialists and by an administrative staff and it could hold hearings, commission research and engage in debate and discussion. I see the institution of the mini-popolus not as a substitute for legislative bodies but as a complement. Now that final point is a point which is debated quite a lot and you may have heard in the UK for example people have suggested that the House of Lords rather than electing a House of Lords which just produces the same kind of people as you've got in the Commons are actually chosen at random from the general population but I will perhaps come back to that later. So what is this about? This was very much inspired by the Athenian concept of democracy and I should straight away say of course that didn't include women, it didn't include slaves so it was quite a limited but it was the male free population in Athens at the time who were elected by lot to take the place of a governing body for a limited period. So at any point you would be used as an adult to being a governor and to be governed and you could be a governor more than once. So that's an assembly of citizens, demographically representative of the relevant population, brought together to learn, to deliberate on a topic in order to inform public opinion and decision making. So what he was doing was basically blending social science approaches with democratic principles. I don't know if you're familiar with it but there's been quite a growth of work certainly in politics in this field of what we call deliberative democracy particularly over the last 20 years. So what is deliberative democracy? Well it's based on this premise that collective decisions should be made through reasoned public discussion rather than by the sum of individual private preferences rather than people going to vote, not telling anybody what they're doing, it's a very personal thing, you may not have thought about who you're voting for or why you're voting if you do vote at all and there's not necessarily any information that's been penetrating people's minds about how they should vote. In other words the argument here is that this decision making should be talk centric rather than vote centric and you probably recognise the Habermasian idea of the ideal speech episode, flag or event. So the goal is to improve the legitimacy of democracy by making democratic institutions systematically responsive to reasons rather than just reactions, not just the weight of numbers or the power of interests. So what is deliberation? Well as Mansbridge, Jane Mansbridge has argued, communication that induces reflection on preferences values and interests in a non-coversive fashion. That is there's no force except that of the better argument. Obviously to achieve that is that ideal state is where the difficulty arises and the question is how can we achieve that. So the aim of this deliberation is to generate reasonable, well informed opinions in which participants are willing to revise their preferences in light of discussion, new information and claims made by their fellow citizens. Although consensus need not be the ultimate aim and participants expected to pursue their interests, an overarching interest in the legitimacy of outcomes, that means not affecting other people unfairly, ideally characterises deliberation. But it's unlikely to be achieved naturally so we have to create it artificially and this is what brings in the idea of the mini-populus or what we now call mini-publics. So what is a mini-public? It's basically a public conversation. But it's a deliberative forum where citizens are selected randomly and that's really important to reflect the diversity of the public that are affected by the issue, your stakeholders if you like, and convened for a period of time sufficient for participants to form considered opinions and judgments. And there are many, many types, which I will just briefly go over in a minute, and they can range from groups of just 12 people, it's probably about as small as you will see, up to maybe 500. That could be bigger. And these are the kind of examples, citizens' views, which I'm going to proceed to talk about, consensus conferences, planning cells, a liberative polls, citizens' assemblies and others. So what are the key features of this ideal process? I've just selected what I think are the main features here. So in selecting people you select them randomly or quasi-randomly. I say quasi-randomly because sometimes if you think about it realistically, if you're selecting 12 people and you're trying to reflect the diversity of the population, random selection is probably not going to achieve it. If you've got 500 you've got a much better chance. So we have to think about perhaps stratifying it, but even then to get the real diversity you may have to be a bit more selective in ensuring that the diversity of the population is there. Again, small numbers make it more difficult. You have to lower the barriers of participation, otherwise there should be no obvious reason, if possible, that people don't say, I can't, I'd like to but I can't. So providing some money to pay for their time, recognising people's time valuable, childcare costs transport to the events if it's somewhere they have to travel to and so on. This I think is one of the key elements, facilitation. In the words, to get that ideal situation working, everyone has to feel as though they have a great chance of giving their views. And sometimes they say, I can't express myself, I don't have the education, the confidence and so on, so they have to be encouraged, helped to express their views and prevent certain people dominating the discussion. We know that goes on in many groups. And so developing that, what we call dialogic communication. A learning phase when participants perhaps might call on experts, witnesses who will give not necessarily an unbiased view, in fact usually a biased view, a particular partisan view maybe about what the issues are. But being there questioned by those citizens, so they really understand the arguments and think about whether they would support them. And then a deliberative phase, this is where the participants having been informed gathered the evidence together, then start to say what they think in the light of that evidence and defend it. It's very much a public position, it's not to say, well I think this, I'm not going to tell you what I think, but you have to defend your positions. Again that needs good facilitation to enable people to do that. And then the decision making phase, reason conclusions or recommendations after considering all these judgments. Not necessarily a consensus, although sometimes it will lead to a consensus. And I'm not proposing to go through all these, but I just thought I'd highlight them, the main types of many publics we tend to think about. Citizens' Dury tends to be the smallest, often the shortest in length, maybe only two or three days but could be longer. And the task is to learn, to deliberate and try and seek some agreement. Not necessarily over the issue, should we support this or not, but I've done some research, which I'll mention briefly, where we're looking for the principles by which government should make a decision. So they don't have to agree or disagree necessarily, but how should it be done that would be acceptable to the public. The output then could be a collective set of recommendations or consensus possibly, but not necessarily. And these costs just take us notional, this is what we've estimated from looking at various studies that have been done. So we're thinking that for a Citizens' Dury somewhere around the £20,000-£30,000 mark. So they're not cheap. So Citizens' Dury, let me be more specific now. They were first established in the early 70s in the United States and now used pretty much across the world. The length of say between two and maybe six, seven days, that cost, usually between a minimum of 12 and maybe 25 at the top end of Citizens, selected to be demographically diverse, not necessarily representative, although we're aiming for representative as if possible. And they're learning, proposing recommendations and those recommendations could feed into decision making. Now, sometimes you can set up the conditions whereby if you like legislators or whoever could be committed to it, but that's very rare because they say it's such a small group. How can you represent the public? But it might be interesting for people to learn from it. It's usually used in situations where there's a controversial issue or a very complex issue. So this will be a situation where there might be competing vested interests, very high stakes in the outcome. It has a broad impact on various types of community or it might be more to do with scientific uncertainty. And it's been used in all these situations. And what we're trying to do is reduce the barriers to participation. So access should be open. It should really be available to people to participate. So recruitment has to be considered. Access to location might be day of the week that you meet and remunerate people for their time. So this is probably the easiest way to think about it conceptually. We have an information phase. So what is this process about? And usually people don't know anything about it, not expected to provide people with information so they can learn about it and also enable them to meet witnesses, experts and interrogate them. That's where the idea of a jury comes in. But they have a very specific question. It's a bit like saying to research students, what's your research question? No, that's too broad. Make it very specific so it can be answered in the time you've got. And we have to do the same in this situation. And then there may well be a reflection phase which might be away from the meeting. Where people think about it, perhaps seek more information, have questions answered which weren't answered in the first stage. And then the final stage is the deliberation phase where they work together sharing the perspectives, defending arguments and coming up with some collective recommendations. So who should be selected? And I've already mentioned this really but we usually work on the idea of a stratified random sample where possible. But the main thing is to ensure representation of all relevant groups. You want diversity in your group and you might well divide them into subgroups of interest based on gender, age group. And this is quite important. You don't want everyone to come in who've all got the same view on it, the issue you're talking about. Because what you get is an echo chamber effect. And that just reinforces people's views. Doesn't get them thinking about it and challenging it and critically looking at what they're thinking. So you need to have somehow a way of teasing people apart and saying which side are you on without perhaps giving too much away in the early stage. So you get diversity and challenge. And then you select the cases within each stratum by simple random sampling and combine them into your sample. So this is conventional statistical approach to stratified random sampling. So just to summarise then what are some of the advantages and disadvantages. The advantages I think we can argue is quite a high level of inclusion. Because you're giving voice to the people who wouldn't normally be heard. It's not just your usual suspects. I'm not sure I like that term but we hear it said a lot. They may not be well informed, may not be articulate, may not be well educated, may not be very motivated. But they are part of the public and they have a right to a voice. And we should hear that voice. But it may take some teasing out through good facilitation. And it's a method which doesn't just say what do you think for your own interests. But you've got to defend it from a citizen's perspective. So you may say oh I don't want that road built past my house because my house value will go down. Well that's very personal, very selfish in a way but it might be valid to you as an individual. But what's the benefit to the community or to other citizens of not having that road built. Well it might protect the environment. So you can think about other arguments which could be used which would be much more collective in its focus. You can also create this long period of engagement. Not just the event when you ask people to talk about it. But they might become more engaged to citizens generally. In fact the common feedback is oh I never knew that politics could be so much fun. I meet all these people and I really want to get involved in things. Now you might say that's not a good thing or it is a good thing. I tend to argue that it's a good thing. And it enables members of public to make informed decisions on quite complex issues. So that you don't have decision making dominated by experts. Who perhaps don't know your own values and the values of your community. And it also gives you this insight which I think from research point of view is fascinating. How do citizens think about these kind of issues? And it may not actually have thought much beforehand. But there's chance here that it will have done. There are some disadvantages. They don't necessarily represent the opinions of all the public. We're talking about a small group. And that scalability issue is clearly a problem with citizens' juries. It can be quite expensive. So you need a good research grant if you're going to run this kind of thing. I don't know if it's necessarily a negative. It's a qualitative research method. And some people say yeah but we need to know how many people would say this. It doesn't always lend itself to that kind of more statistical outcome. I don't think that's necessarily a problem personally. And possibly the bigger criticism is how do you make sure these recommendations get into policy. So I'm just going to show you in a minute some examples of how that might work. So the critical issues at the micro level is it's crucial to lower those barriers to participation. In selecting the participants they should be as statistically represented as possible. That's more possible with a large mini-public, say a consensus conference. If it's a very small one like a citizens' jury probably more focusing on demographic diversity. And you want this demographic and discursive or attitudinal representation. You don't want everyone thinking the same before they start. Design choices, clearly important issues. Who sets the agenda? What's this question they've got to answer? Who selects the witnesses and the contributors? Who oversees the whole process and so on? These issues are very much usually decided by what might be called a stewarding group. Who represent the different interests around that issue. And they've all got to be happy with the process, the question and how those witnesses and contributors are selected. Internal conclusion, so yes you might get people to attend but will they speak? Will they actually give their real views? And that's where facilitation is really key to enable people to have the confidence and ability to give their views. At the macro level, there is this issue. Does it fit within the institutions that we have? Typically not, but we're seeing governments, in my own case in Scottish government, they're now saying this is a really interesting method. We should learn from this. We're trying to deal with some very complex issues like realistic medicines, the current one which is on the agenda. How can we understand that from a public point of view? Making deliberative democracy viable requires overcoming this problem of scale. I think we understand that. So this offers what we might call an alternative, a division of democratic labour. But can citizens' juries function as trusted proxies? And we still don't know the answers to these questions. There's a lot of work going on, John Gastel in America's doing a lot of work on it as well. So many publics challenge the traditional views and roles of mainstream media, politicians, experts and advocates, and might require new mindsets and practices from them. Maybe we're asking too much, but it clearly is going to be a different way of doing politics. I won't have time to give you any much detail now, but if you're interested, there is a website called Partysopedia.net. It's like Wikipedia, and you can put in examples. And there are examples around the world of various citizens' juries, citizens' assemblies, various mini-publics with evaluations of them. One of the nice things is some of my undergraduate students have now written case studies which are now being uploaded to it. So it does engage people. I'm just going to give you two examples just to show you what is being done. This is a well known one in Oregon. It's called the Citizens' Initiative Review, and how it works is basically before voting, they develop a kind of resistance jury for each measure on the ballot paper. And they get a panel of 20 randomly selected and demographically diverse voters, assemble them, and then they have several days to hear from experts, witnesses and so on, campaigns for and against the measure, and also from policy experts. And then they draft a citizen's statement, as it's called, and then that's sent to all the voters. Just to say, this is what a group like you think. You don't have to take any notice of it. You could say it's rubbish. It's up to you. You're a voter. You do a private vote, but you've got some information from an informed group who've had a chance to deliberate. One which I've been more involved in with colleagues, Jen Robertson, Oliver Escobar, we were looking at onshore wind farms in Scotland, and we had these two aims to understand how deliberative processes can be used to engage citizens on complex public issues and to learn about citizens' views on shore wind farms before and after the process, before learning and deliberating and after, and how that was changing through the process. And if you want to look at the report, it's on that website, a very detailed report. NCRM, we're going to share the slides after a week, I understand. And you might be interested, Graham, again involved in getting me into this. We produced a short video of mixing methods, which I'm very keen on, so we put together citizens' juries and surveys into one approach.