There is an uncomfortable fact for those who oppose moves to a fairer voting system: all the chaos we have seen in Westminster over the past few years has been under the ‘strong and stable’ voting system of First Past the Post.

All the chaos we have seen in Westminster over the past few years has been under the ‘strong and stable’ voting system of First Past the Post. Click To Tweet

Meanwhile, government in Wales and Scotland has seemed like a paradigm of stability in contrast. Both parliaments there are elected under proportional voting systems – where cooperation and dialogue are not dirty words, but ingrained in a more ‘consensual’ political culture.

There is a strong likelihood the next General Election will result in a hung parliament, according to analysis by Electoral Calculus. While parties will go into the election talking about ruling alone and securing whopping mandates for their terms – treating ‘working together’ as anathema as in the 2015 election – the result may well be very different.

It is no wonder. The party system is fragmented, with voters shopping around more than ever. They want wider representation, based on issues rather than class divisions. First Past the Post simply can’t handle it.

And yet, parties remain locked in a ‘majoritarian’ mindset – pretending to govern alone. That’s arguably why, despite failing to win a clear majority in 2017, it took Theresa May two years to reach out across the political divide.

For many party activists, the talks came out of the blue – as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to ‘look busy’ while the vultures circle, rather than a genuine attempt at meaningful discussion and compromise.

Yet, when you look at the evidence, the public is clearly much less tribal than activists and politicians. Away from the cries of ‘betrayal’ in Westminster, voters want politicians to find positive solutions together.

Away from the cries of ‘betrayal’ in Westminster, voters want politicians to find positive solutions together Click To Tweet

BMG research polling for the ERS’ new report Westminster Beyond Brexit: Ending the Politics of Division shows that 64% of people think that our political system should encourage cooperation between political parties. Yet only 19% believe that it currently does so. (Interestingly, voters in Scotland are the most supportive of political cooperation – having seen it first hand through power-sharing governments).

In fact, 49% of voters think political parties in Parliament should try to work together to find a solution to problems, even if this requires parties to break promises made at the previous election (some way more than the 31% who think the opposite).

Public antipathy to ‘yah boo’ Parliamentary politics is nothing new. But with political trust at rock bottom, we now need to see a move towards a more consensus-based political model. That respects reaching out across divides, rather than repudiating it.

A constitutional convention – involving the public – to look at our political set-up and how it must be reformed is one way forward. Alongside that, we need to move to a voting system where working together is expected. At present, we have the worst of all words: coalition-making is ruled out before elections and then becomes a necessity when the parliamentary numbers don’t stack up. As such, crucial political deals are made entirely behind closed doors, rather than in the open as in many European countries.

We should harmonise political relations between the nations and regions too, with a fairly-elected chamber representing the different parts of the UK.

And we should use ‘citizens’ assemblies’ at the local level, in a systematic and embedded manner to deal with complex and contested issues.

The fissures in the main political parties increase the urgency of the need for real political reform. The party system is fragmenting but the structures of Westminster remain stubbornly locked in the 19th century.

The party system is fragmenting but the structures of Westminster remain stubbornly locked in the 19th century Click To Tweet

The need for an overhaul of the centralised, adversarial politics we witness in Westminster is becoming more urgent by the day.

The public wants a fairer, more honest, more cooperative politics. It’s time to change the system to help make it happen.

Read our new report

Brexit might be dominating the news, but the rolling constitutional crisis that we call Westminster is still up to its usual tricks. We’ve spent the last month getting press attention for some of our biggest campaigns.

House of Lords reform was a top story of Scottish Labour Conference this year, as Baroness Bryan launched official Labour calls for an overhaul of the House of Lords at our ERS Scotland fringe. It was picked up by the Herald too, while fresh polling by us showed the scale of support for a fairly-elected second chamber. We’ve also written up why we see Lords reform as the gateway to further constitutional reform in the UK.

ERS Scotland also wrote to the Herald on Sunday outlining why Westminster’s broken voting system has contributed to our current political crisis.

Money in Politics

The Times has been digging into the dangers of ‘dark money’ this month – unregulated cash flowing into our politics. Following our publication of Reining in the Political ‘Wild West’: Campaign Rules for the 21st Century in February, we were at the forefront of calls to bring our campaign rules and finance into the 21^st century – with full transparency for voters.

Key among these calls was for changes to the currently dangerous Overseas Electors Bill, which would lift the limit on how long Brits are able to donate to parties while living abroad. The Scotsman, The Times and The Guardian all covered our warnings.

House of Lords

A letter from a key Commons committee this month was scathing about the government’s inaction when it comes to reforming the second chamber. We argued in The Times it’s time for ministers to listen and overhaul this taxpayer-funded private members’ club.

We also drew attention – with the help of The Mirror – to a new hereditary peer who has joined the Lords. It’s a scandal hereditary Lords are still guaranteed representation in our Parliament and make up roughly ten per cent of the House of Lords. A percentage set to increase if plans to reduce the overall numbers of peers don’t include the hereditaries.

We were featured in PoliticsHome for our efforts to back a democratic revising chamber.

Politics for the Many

Politics for the Many – the trade union campaign for political reform – continue to push the case for an overhaul of the second chamber, writing with passion in Red Pepper magazine; Corbyn’s former union adviser, Nancy Platts, says even peers are now rising up for reform.

However, a handful of hereditary peers are stymieing attempts to end the farce of hereditary peer by-elections, as we revealed in PoliticsHome. The Scotsman’s Lesley Riddoch was scathing at unelected aristocrats using their privileges to protect their position.

Improving local democracy

ERS Scotland continues their tour of councils to build support for genuinely ‘local’ government. With reforms coming up, the team in Scotland have been looking at how more deliberative structures can be put in place.

In England, Darren Hughes wrote in the Local Government Chronicle about ministers’ worrying move to cut back its citizens’ assembly programme for local councils – which would have been a real innovation in local problem-solving on a wide range of difficult issues.

Fighting the voter ban

Sadly efforts to legally challenge dangerous mandatory voter ID plans did not succeed. But, this month we highlighted new figures from the Electoral Commission in The Mirror, showing zero evidence of widespread fraud last year – further undermining the government’s attempts to impose mandatory voter ID.

Finally we’ve also had broadcast interviews, with our Chief Executive Darren Hughes on Sky News talking about campaign regulation and TalkRadio.

Last summer, ministers announced genuinely exciting plans for piloting ‘deliberative democracy’ across the UK. The plan was to use a series of citizens’ assemblies to engage people with politics, to tackle complex and contested topics, and to break through local political deadlock.

Councils leapt at the opportunity to do democracy differently, with seventy local authorities expressing an interest. Eight experiments were given the green light, with local authorities given £60,000 each to run them: Waltham Forest sought to involve residents in seeking solutions around hate crime, Barking and Dagenham Council proposed an assembly to look at regulating the use of bailiffs in the borough, while Greater Manchester Combined Authority planned to use an assembly to look at the development of transport priorities across the city.

Drawn from long-standing ideas about the power of selection by lot, combined with more institutions such as juries, citizens’ assemblies offer a deliberative and participative form of democracy. They’re popular all over the world – in Ireland, a Convention on the Constitution and Citizens’ Assembly led to the referendums agreeing to legalisation of same-sex marriage and access to abortion.

It all shows that even on the seemingly most-divisive issues, voters can come together and unite around key principles.

Panellists are selected to be broadly representative of the wider population, taking into account of demographic characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity and social class. The goal is for the members to engage in serious and informed reflection on the topic at hand discussing and deliberating the issue before making recommendations.

At a time of overwhelming distrust in politics and an apparent breakdown in the machinery of democracy, the local initiatives – backed by central government – sent a powerful message. That there’s another way let voters work through this.

So it was dispiriting to learn in the Times this week that the government plans to shelve all but three of the proposed local citizens’ assemblies agreed last year – keeping only the least controversial projects on the table. That sort of defeats the power of a citizens’ assembly.

[bctt tweet=”The government plans to shelve all but three of the proposed local citizens’ assemblies agreed last year – keeping only the least controversial projects on the table” username=”electoralreform”]

The apparent motivation for scrapping the schemes is revealing: one government source put the change of position down to “deep-seated fears about giving the public a greater democratic voice”

Put simply, the government is running scared.

Today we find ourselves in a ‘constitutional crisis’ over Brexit – with MPs with opposing views seemingly unable to come together and find a way forward in the national interest. Day in, day out, voters see politicians arguing across the aisle and failing to find consensus on many of the big issues of the day.

We need to be innovative in finding solutions to the problems we face – from education funding to social care, council cuts, to climate change. Citizens’ assemblies provide a way to bring people together – to discuss and debate to find solutions. They offer a less adversarial forum than existing political spaces where people work together to explore the common beliefs, not line up to argue for their differences. And unlike the vitriol of elections, these properly-facilitated, informed debates ensure respectful conversations and learning.

Recent polling shows over two-thirds of people do not feel represented by politicians. When faith in politics is so low, it’s surely time to look at new ways of breaking the deadlock.

At the ERS, we have called for a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit to encourage in-depth discussions and understanding on the UK’s future relationship with Europe. Indeed, we’ve seen a glimpse of how it might work: a 2017 trial Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit which we co-ran showed that passionate Leavers and Remainers can work together. Who knows what would have happened if it had official government backing?

The 50-strong Assembly was endorsed by a range of high-profile figures from across the Brexit divide, including MPs Sir Bernard Jenkin, Nicky Morgan and Chuka Umunna, demonstrating real buy-in from across the Brexit spectrum.

And now, as we edge nearer to the 29 March exit, using a citizens’ assembly to break the Brexit logjam has been supported by MPs Lisa Nandy and Stella Creasy, while former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has argued for the need to ‘talk to the people’ through a series of nationwide consultations on what Brexit should look like.

From the local level to the national, we know that citizens’ assemblies work. Yet at the very time our centralised system is being exposed as inadequate, the government is bringing the hammer down on a positive alternative to broken Westminster politics.

[bctt tweet=”At the very time our centralised system is being exposed as inadequate, the government is bringing the hammer down on a positive alternative to broken Westminster politics.” username=”electoralreform”]

Rather than cancelling the local citizens’ assembly plans, the government should be expanding them and letting truly deliberative democracy flourish.

This article was originally published on the Local Government Chronical

Citizens’ Assemblies are often in the news, from the assemblies that led to the referendums on equal marriage and abortion in Ireland, to the Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland and local council climate assemblies.

While the Electoral Reform Society has helped run two citizens’ assemblies, and political scientists have been studying them for years, for most of us the phrase ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ means little.

Isn’t Parliament a Citizens’ Assembly?

Firstly, Parliament is not a citizens’ assembly. Rather than elections, the members of a citizens’ assembly are typically put together like a jury, where we all have an equal chance of joining. It is still up to elected politicians whether or not to follow the assembly’s recommendations.

The aim is to secure a group of people who are broadly representative of the electorate across characteristics such as their gender, ethnicity, social class and the area where they live.  The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit that the ERS helped run also selected participants on the basis of whether they voted to leave or to remain in the EU referendum.

Citizens’ Assemblies can come in any size, but the larger they are the more representative of the electorate they will be.

Are Citizens’ Assemblies just focus groups or consultations?

These aren’t just focus groups or consultations though. The goal isn’t to just hear what people already think – but for the members to engage in serious, informed reflection on important policy matters with people they may never normally meet.

Assemblies are generally set a clear task. The Irish Convention on the Constitution of 2012–14, for example, was asked to deliberate on a set list of eight constitutional proposals, including allowing same-sex marriage and removing the offence of blasphemy from the constitution. In British Columbia, the mandate of the Citizens’ Assembly was to “assess models for electing Members of the [province’s] Legislative Assembly”.

Participants will typically have a set time to complete this. They may meet for one weekend a month for a year, or every weekend for a few months – or just a few times. The Irish Convention on the Constitution met for 10 weekends from December 2012 to March 2014. The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit ran for two weekends in late 2017.

In order to ensure that people from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible can attend (e.g. those with dependent children or relatives, or just people who wouldn’t usually get involved can attend), participants are typically paid for their time.

What happens at a Citizens’ Assembly

A citizens’ assembly will typically go through three phases: learning; consultation; deliberation and discussion.

Firstly, a learning phase where participants get to know each other and how the assembly works and what its aims are. In this phase, relevant facts about the issue at hand are presented to the participants, who get to ask questions of experts and access background and contextual information.

Secondly, during the consultation phase, campaigners from each side get to present their arguments, and be questioned on them. Sometimes, the assembly might run a public consultation during this phase to understand what the broader public thinks about an issue.

Thirdly, the participants deliberate amongst themselves – discussing which arguments they found convincing and which they saw straight through. Generally, assembly members will make recommendations at the end of this phase.

Deliberative processes emphasise the importance of reflection and informed discussion in decision-making. This allows people to adopt more nuanced positions on the issues at hand, with a better understanding of the trade-offs inherent in a given decision.

It is essential for a Citizens’ Assembly to be balanced in terms of the information presented to participants.

Generally, the organisers will build an Advisory Board comprising of independent experts and campaigners from both sides of the issue to vet the information given to the participants. The assembly’s speakers will be carefully chosen to give equal representation to all sides of the debates. Participants will be carefully seated to ensure a balance of views and perspectives on each table. The table discussions will also be facilitated to ensure that everyone’s views are heard, but the facilitators are barred from discussing the issues raised.

What is the point of Citizens’ Assemblies?

One of the problems with popular self-government, is that we are all far too busy leading our lives to also govern. The only way the ancient Athenians managed it was by excluding all the women and the massive slave population from the process. While the men informed themselves on the issues of the day, the women and slaves did all the work.

We could have rule by direct democracy with regular referendums, but only a small percentage of the population can or want to spend all their spare time learning about fishing quotas one month, then social security rules the next.

Representative democracy is a way around this problem. We vote for a small group of people to work full time on getting themselves informed on important issues, and then let them get on with it – throwing them out if they do anything too wrong. But, this can lead to the formation of a political class with interests of their own.

Citizens’ Assemblies are a way around this problem. By assembling a representative group and giving them the tools and time, you can create a proxy for what it would be like if everyone had the tools and time to discuss and debate the important issues.

Around the world, people are innovating with new forms of democracy. Drawing from traditional juries and modern institutions such as citizens’ juries, more deliberative and participatory forms of democracy are taking shape. With our long democratic heritage, it is an area where Britain can take the lead.

Follow @UKassemblies for updates on Citizens’ Assemblies

Deliberative forms of democracy are certainly coming into fashion. From the Irish Citizens’ Assembly that led to the historic repeal of their constitutional ban of abortion, to that which informed the Health and Social Care Committee’s recent report on future funding options, the government is looking to citizens to solve otherwise intractable issues.

The Department of Digital, Culture Media and Sport has also now decided to pilot participatory democratic approaches in local authorities around England. Scotland and Wales are having their own discussions.

As with many innovations, the devil will be in the detail.

They will need to be representative of the area they are discussing. If half the residents are over 50, half the jury members should be too. They mustn’t be self-selecting:  they can’t be yet another platform for the already engaged.

Both the Democracy Matters assembly on city regions and the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit paid participants a token amount to reach ordinary citizens who wouldn’t normally volunteer.

In order for them to be Citizens’ Juries in more than just name, they need to have three equally important phases.

The first phase is learning about the options and how the process will work. Participants are guided through the current state of affairs and presented with the options for change.

Traditionally this has meant impartial experts preparing papers and delivering short lectures, which Ed Hammond correctly points out can get quite expensive. To combat this, we ran an experimental deliberative programme in the run-up to the EU referendum with recorded videos from academics from the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe project.

Following their briefing, participants then hear from campaigners, presenting their case for why the assembly should side with them. Members can question them armed with the knowledge they gained in the previous phase, and – if the assemblies I’ve attended are any measure – will rigorously scrutinise them.

The last phase is the deliberation itself. Breaking up into small groups and facilitated to ensure no one person dominates, they discuss amongst themselves everything they’ve heard, feeding back into the full assembly and eventually voting.

Citizens’ Juries are nothing like the fractious social media debate that tends to pass for political discussion today. All sides have a common pool of knowledge to draw from, and by discussing issues face-to-face, are far more likely to compromise.

They are also, in many ways, at the opposite end from the local councils they will be advising. Due to the voting system, local government in England is not representative of local political opinions, let alone local demographics.

It would be a shame if Citizens’ Juries became just another institution bolted on to deal with the unrepresentative nature of our local electoral system, rather than deal with the problem at the source.

It would be a shame if Citizens’ Juries became just another institution bolted on to deal with the unrepresentative nature of our local electoral system, rather than deal with the problem at the source. Click To Tweet

But together with following Scotland and Northern Ireland in reforming our local electoral system – and dedicated action to improve engagement such as weekend voting, a unified electoral register and scrapping the ID plans – they could become an integral part of a revived local democracy.

This is a guest blog by Professor Matthew Flinders. The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Electoral Reform Society. 

Life, it would often appear, seems dominated by a series of ‘gaps’. The ‘gaps’ between the young and the old, between rich and the poor, between North and the South, between educated and uneducated and – most importantly – between the governors and the governed that are said to exist leave me worried about the state of society and the public realm in the twenty-first century. This sense of anxiety has now been heightened by the forthcoming referendum and the chance that the longstanding ‘gap’ between the UK and the European Union (the former always ‘an awkward partner’ in a team project) may suddenly become something of a chasm if the British public vote for Brexit on the 23 June.

And yet my argument is very different to those promoted by the ‘leave’ or ‘stay’ campaigns in the sense that my focus is on informed public engagement leading up to the referendum and not so much on the subsequent decision itself. This is a critical point.

So far the referendum debate has been dismal [1]. Dismal in the sense that is has rarely moved beyond over-simplistic economic debates that claim to know the price of everything but the value of nothing; dismal in the sense that both sides of the argument have focused on promoting a politics of pessimism rather than a positive vision for the future; and dismal in the sense that the debate has attempted to divide communities rather than bringing them together around a shared challenge.

The paradox, however, is that the millions of little crosses that will be etched into one of just two simple boxes on the 23rd June will inevitably have a transformative impact – possibly good, possibly bad – on every person, every family and on future generations. The pencil on the end of that shabby looking piece of string wields real power in the voter’s hand. Moreover, as the Scottish referendum on independence demonstrated, the public will undoubtedly turn out to vote in large numbers when they feel they are being offered a real and very clear choice—and there is no doubt that in relation to the EU they are being offered a very real and clear choice.

But making this choice in an increasingly uncertain world surely demands a slightly more creative and supported approach to public engagement and the provision of information than has so far been apparent. Recent research suggests that there is a real public appetite and need for more information about the EU referendum and its possible implications.

Put slightly differently, there’s a need for more public deliberation, more public discussion, more public disagreement and new ways of ‘doing politics’ that are not top-down elite-dictated but that actually allow local communities and groups to access the information and skills through which to run their own events. As the recent citizens’ assemblies on English regional devolution demonstrated, the public are less ‘anti-political’ and more ‘pro-politics’ but ‘pro-doing-politics-differently’ which is exactly why the online tool to build a ‘Better Referendum’ debate – featuring contributions from the official campaigns and leading EU experts – is being launched this week.

This initiative dovetails with a broader public shift towards forms of ‘pop up’, ‘DIY’ or ‘flat pack’ democracy whereby members of the public self-organise in order to take control or empower themselves through information gathering. The great value of a citizens’ assembly, even on a fairly small scale, is that, through the simple act of bringing people together in a flexible manner, learning will inevitably take place, viewpoints will alter, and friends will be made.

The idea has been to create an online citizens’ assembly that builds bridges in the sense of allowing the latest academic research to underpin public discussions, and that uses technology in order to bolster both digital democracy and old-fashioned face-to-face democracy. The message is therefore clear: assemble, learn, listen and most of all …vote.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics and Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.