Common Sense California And Citizens’ Assemblies

• The Problem
• Toward A Solution: Citizens' Assemblies
• Companion Strategies: Communication and the Common Sense Network
• Communication Strategy
• Common Sense Network
• Conclusion

The Problem

Michael Parks, former editor of the Los Angeles Times and now Director of the School of Journalism at USC, has identified the central challenge to California's future:¹

"We do not have an effective way of solving problems or imagining the future and what it would take to get there…We have a deep, and deepening, erosion of the ability of our system of representative democracy to solve the most important issues of our present and of our future."

Of the many critical problems facing California, the one that prevents progress on all the others is the profound disconnection between citizens and their policy leaders. Citizens² no longer believe that government belongs to or is responsive to them. They no longer "own" government in the sense that high school civics textbooks promise. Regular Californians perceive that they have been pushed out of the driver’s seat of state government by those who command major lobbying groups, big-money donors, ideologues and political managers skilled in evoking anger rather than thought. Their elected representatives offer polarizing ideological extremes rather than the more pragmatic, centrist approaches favored by most citizens.

California's institutions of representative democracy will not secure the future of our state until trust is restored between citizens and government. And that goal will not be achieved until Californians see the public voice heard loud and clear in the State Capitol. The voice that is needed to rebuild trust is one that reflects dialogue and compromise among Democrats, Republicans and Independents, not the voice of petty partisanship. The voice that is needed is one of deliberation and reason, the common-sense voice of California's people.

Toward A Solution: Citizens' Assemblies

An effective response to the crisis of representative government in California must affect: (1) The laws that govern how representatives are elected and the conditions under which they serve; where tax revenues come from and how they are spent; and how effectively the state government is managed and (2) The state’s political culture, the set of ideas that Californians share widely about who should govern, for what ends, and by what means. Simply stated, political culture is the powerful mold that shapes what laws can accomplish. In our view, citizen distrust of government finds expression in law, and especially the initiative and recall processes, but it can be healed only if we see it as a pathology rooted in the political culture.

How does one create change in the political culture? We recognize that such changes are very difficult, are often unpredictable, and require long periods of time. We certainly have no comprehensive blueprint to accomplish such an ambitious goal. We know that political beliefs, and hence culture, change with citizens' real-world experience--- both with government and politics. We see meaningful citizen engagement with important issues and difficult trade-offs as one place to begin to change political culture in California. For that reason, we advocate citizens' assemblies to both reengage Californians in a highly visible way, and also as a forum for developing pragmatic solutions for public problems.

The citizens' assembly, as pioneered in British Columbia and now in its early stages in the Province of Ontario, is a powerful tool that can help reinvigorate democratic participation in our republican form of government, reflect public values, incubate new ideas, and build confidence that the public voice is being heard in the exercise of government power.³ It can be an effective instrument to achieve needed political reforms. But we believe that it will prove to have constructive uses with respect to matters of substantive policy at both statewide and local levels.

The key elements of the citizens' assembly are (1) selection of a valid representative sample of eligible or registered voters; (2) providing members of the assembly with balanced information about a contentious public policy issue; (3) bringing the assembly together to work together face-to-face with skilled facilitation; (4) driving the deliberation process to agreement on practical solutions and (5) bringing the results of the assembly into the political decision-making process.

In the British Columbia case, the citizens' assembly succeeded in arriving at a substantial overhaul of the way that voters express their preferences for members of the Legislature. Of great importance, through wide and supportive coverage in the provincial media, more than a million British Columbians came to understand and support the work of approximately 160 fellow citizens who could legitimately represent themselves as a valid cross-section of the provincial population. A million citizens did not need to go through the long study and deliberation process given that the work of 160 fellow citizens won their trust and, as a result, accomplished a significant shift in the political culture of British Columbia.

The utility of all forms of deliberative democracy is in doubt unless the good work of citizens in such deliberations has some likelihood of actually changing public policy. In the British Columbia example, the provincial government decided that the recommendations of the citizens' assembly would be placed directly on the ballot for approval in a popular vote.⁴

Assembly Constitutional Amendment (ACA 28) was introduced into the California Legislature in January 2006 to create a Citizens' Assembly on electoral reform and to authorize its recommendations to be placed on a ballot for voter approval. However, in the current political culture, that bi-partisan legislation will not be given a hearing, much less adopted. There are two reasons why this prediction can be made with confidence: (1) The overwhelming majority of the legislature will not dilute their own powers unless compelled by the voters and (2) There has been no opportunity to explain the merits of the citizens' assembly idea to the California public and, hence, there is no constituency for it at this moment.

Our goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness and popularity of the citizens' assembly under non-governmental, bipartisan sponsorship and, thus, create pressure for government to establish citizens' assemblies at both the regional and state levels in the future.⁵

Careful selection of initial topics for citizens' assemblies is critical to its success. Our preference is to organize a first series of citizens' assemblies around issues of electoral and political reform. However, a final decision as to topic should await the results of a planning phase that looks to the following criteria for topic selection: (a) high level of public interest, (b) likely to achieve substantial media interest, (c) reasonable prospect of governmental action on the results of the citizens' assembly process, and (d) availability of funding necessary to carry out the strategy outlined below.

An effort to develop citizens' assemblies in California must include a well-designed and implemented strategy to make it very difficult for elected officials to ignore the results of such experiments in deliberative democracy. Otherwise, we court the very real possibility of deepening public cynicism about representative government rather than reducing it. Hence, a three-part strategy of convening citizens' assemblies, mounting a communication effort and building a network of support among civic leaders is essential.

Companion Strategies: Communication and the Common Sense Network

From the experience of the California Constitution Revision Commission and the California Performance Review (both sponsored by government) on the one hand, to the Commission on the California Budget and the Citizens Commission on Higher Education (both sponsored by foundations) on the other, we learn a critical lesson: worthwhile proposals to reform political process and improve public policy in California, even if espoused by prominent citizens, will achieve little unless they are part of a comprehensive effort to compel action by our elected representatives. Citizens' assemblies must be accompanied by:

1. A comprehensive communication strategy that galvanizes understanding and support from the majority of Californians
2. A well-developed and diverse network of citizen supporters from every region of California (the Common Sense Network) whose long-term commitment is to bipartisan cooperation and problem-solving

These are not merely activities complementary to one another. They constitute an interlocking mechanism much as an automotive engine is connected to a drive train that moves a car forward. Each enables the other to do its job and each depends on the other for effectiveness: the citizens assemblies provide the ideas and proposals that motivate members of the Network and fuel the media coverage, first regionally and then statewide; media coverage provides a strong incentive for citizens to participate in assemblies and the Network and insures broad public visibility for the results; and the Common Sense Network provides regional sponsorship of citizens' assemblies and potent advocacy for the results with local civic leaders, elected officials and local media.

Communication Strategy

In a state of 38 million people it is not possible to have an impact without extensive coverage in print, the electronic mass media and the Internet. The goal of our communication work would be to help the public see that citizens' assemblies are one useful and potent way to respond to their surging frustrations with government.

Sporadic and indifferent news coverage alone will not suffice. Our efforts must extend to media serving immigrant and foreign-language communities and engage columnists, bloggers, editorial writers and a variety of websites. Importantly, at least some key media must be convinced that they can, and should, serve as catalysts for achieving public focus through special series focused on the issues being addressed by citizens' assemblies, in-depth analysis, polling, and editorial campaigns similar to the work of the San Francisco Chronicle on privacy legislation and foster care. As was the case when the Progressive movement transformed California politics a century ago, we believe that media leadership can be successfully summoned to the task of putting California on the track to a better future.

Common Sense Network

Common Sense California is a statewide, bipartisan⁶ citizens' organization that began in early 2005. Our board and organizing committee are composed of Californians who come from different professional and organizational perspectives. We bring to bear the lessons learned from a wide variety of previous and current bipartisan reform efforts including the California Constitution Revision Commission and the Campaign for College Opportunity. Over the past 18 months we have met personally with hundreds of Californians who share our concerns, read extensively about the issues that confront us, and inquired widely about useful experience elsewhere that might be brought to bear on our problems. Our meetings throughout the state provide strong evidence that a Common Sense Network, beginning with a core of 100 respected citizens from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, can be organized.

Each volunteer member of the Common Sense Network will:

• Help motivate prospective members of the citizens' assemblies to participate
• Rally support for the recommendations of the Assemblies by enlisting the active support of at least 10 other leading citizens
• Speak on behalf of Common Sense California to local media, elected officials and community organizations whose missions embrace community discussion and the promotion of informed public opinion
• Participate in-person and via the Internet in regional and statewide Network conferences that increase collaborative, bipartisan effort across the state and that serve to inform the decisions of Common Sense's Board
• Recruit and encourage like-minded community members to become civically active
• Constitute the bedrock for individual fund-raising that will ultimately supply the bulk of the funding for Common Sense California.

Conclusion

We recognize that the ideas of deliberative democracy are unfamiliar in California and the United States. These ideas merit propagation, discussion and development. A number of experiments in deliberative democracy should be tried in California at local, regional and statewide levels. Citizens' assemblies can be used to solve specific public policy problems but, more important, to reignite a belief among Californians that it is worth searching for working definitions of the "public interest" and that government action can be influenced by that search.

A constituency must be built to understand and support deliberative democracy if it is to join both representative democracy and direct democracy in the tool kit for California. This will be a slow process and one that will not yield fast action on specific changes in law. This is a long-term investment that, although not without risks, must be undertaken.

Members of the Board (participating as individual citizens not as organizational representatives):

David Davenport, Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Former President of Pepperdine University

Steve Weiner, co-founder, Campaign for College Opportunity, former Provost and Dean of Faculty, Mills College; former President of the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges; former Associate Dean, Graduate School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Lande Ajose, former Senior Program Officer at the James Irvine Foundation; Research Associate, MDRC

Parker Blackman, Managing Partner, San Francisco Office, Fenton Communications

Roberto Haro, former Executive Director of the Cesar Chavez Institute, San Francisco State University

Bill Hauck, President of the California Business Roundtable, former Chair of the California Constitution Revision Commission

Dan Schnur, National Director of Communications for the McCain for President campaign (2000), former Press Secretary and Director of Communications for Governor Pete Wilson, founding Principal of Command Focus

David Wolf, co-founder, Campaign for College Opportunity, Member of the Sonoma County Board of Education, former President of West, Metropolitan and Pierce Colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District; former Provost of the California Maritime Academy