There Are Hundreds of Examples In Europe, Public Democracy LA Wants To Bring It Here

It’s no secret that democracy is under threat around the world. But it’s much less known that there’s a powerful potential answer — a wave of democratic innovation, based on the model of ancient Athens, which has a remarkable track record of bringing people together across fault lines to solve challenging, polarizing problems. Bringing legalized abortion to deeply Catholic Ireland in 2017/18 was a particularly eye-catching example.

Known as civic or citizen’s assemblies, they use sortition — jury-like selection by lot — to convene a representative sample of a city, state or nation to engage in factually-based deliberation to achieve consensus on a path of action. So far, the vast majority are advisory only, but governments that employ them have regularly taken their advice. They’ve grown increasingly popular in Europe after the Irish abortion example, particularly in addressing climate change. There’ve been over 700 of them worldwide, but they’re almost unknown in the U.S.

Public Democracy LA aims to change that.

Its mission is “To stand up an officially-sponsored civic assembly for Angelenos on a topic of broad public concern by 2026,” and the main barrier to doing that seems to be simply ignorance of the possibility and potential.

“These aren’t really new ideas,” PDLA co-founder Wayne Liebman told Random Lengths. “They’re old ideas that have been forgotten, but to most people, they’re strange and new and different, even though we have the jury system.” And the effectiveness of the jury system was just demonstrated by Trump’s election interference conviction. “That was a complicated case. And the jury came to a unanimous verdict on all counts. And that was a jury of randomly selected people,” Liebman said. “Imagine for a moment that that jury had been elected. Imagine for a moment that that jury was Congress. Right? What would have happened? Well, you know, we know what would have happened. The same thing happened in Congress when they had the impeachment trials, right? Nothing would have happened.”

This underscores an important point: It’s precisely where things are gridlocked, with polarized positions, that citizen assemblies can really shine. In Europe, this is increasingly recognized.

Seventy percent of the people in Belgium want to have a citizen assembly as a permanent part of the government,” Liebman noted. “If 7 % of the people in the U.S. had even heard of this process, oh my God, I will die happy.”

If PDLA succeeds, he will almost certainly get his wish, because here in the U.S., it takes a high-profile example like Los Angeles to grab public attention. Both Texas, in 1998, and Oregon, starting in 2011, have used it successfully, with scant follow-up notice. Texas went from last to first in wind energy generation due to the results of a multi-pronged sortition-based deliberative process, and Oregon uses it to generate language describing initiatives on its statewide ballot.

More recently, in 2022, Petaluma successfully used a citizens’ assembly to develop a future land-use plan for its historic 55-acre fairgrounds site, after nearly two decades of previous failed attempts. But when Santa Monica city staff cited Petaluma as an example last fall, strongly recommending a citizens’ assembly to develop a land-use plan for the city airport (due to close in 2028), the city council rejected the proposal by single vote, citing fears of decreased public participation that flew in the face of both Petaluma and Santa Monica’s past experience.

“This democratic process seemed like the missing piece we had been waiting for to make participation in local government more inclusive and worthwhile,” Petaluma city manager Peggy Flynn said in a New America interview last year. “The city can implement the most robust engagement plan, but in most cases, we’re hearing from the most privileged people who have the experience, the loudest voices, and the time to show up. We weren’t hearing from the moderate viewpoints or the people who couldn’t make the meetings because they were working three jobs,” she said. “Many people thought they didn’t have any power to influence ‘city issues’—but it is their city. I work for them. I can’t make decisions without them. It is critical to have our residents at the table.”

PDLA’s three co-founders — all volunteers — have an even stronger sense of the disconnect Flynn is pointing to.

“We’re motivated because it’s pretty clear that things aren’t working at City Hall,” Liebman said. “There’s all these scandals and troubles and people going to jail and the ethics reform kind of fell through. It’s pretty clear that wider input is necessary, kind of at all levels in all ways,” he said.

“We began, it was really right after the revelation of the infamous audio tapes, and we thought that’s a good time, because all these grassroots groups in LA were really up in arms about the changes we need to make. But they didn’t know really much about sortition deliberation. And so we thought this is a good opportunity to tell people about it, so that it becomes an arrow in the quiver. And so that’s what we do.”

PDLA Co-founder Leonora Camner contrasts today’s disconnect with democracy’s birthplace in Athens. They had multiple different deliberative bodies chosen by lot, with complementary functions — the agenda-setting Council of 500, the law-passing People’s Assembly, which could be overruled by a People’s Court, and further refinements after 402 BCE, when single-issue legislative panels were introduced.

“In ancient Athens,” Camner said, “citizens had a strong and deep familiarity with all kinds of governments to the point like they could be rotated in and out at random into different government positions and like, totally get it.” In fact, she stressed, “It was such a deep part of culture and people’s values that we know that people took their token, their lottery tokens to their graves, because it was like, such an important possession to them.

“I think about that all the time, what a difference it is to our culture today, where people just feel so detached from government and policy and society. People don’t feel they have a role in it, really,” she concluded. “And I don’t think that’s the problem of people. I think it’s a problem with our system.”

On top of that, “We don’t have any experience in the U.S. with having processes involving authentic dialogue with different points of view,” she said. “Everything is sort of battled out in social media or on TV, like in a performative way.”

Before co-founding PDLA, Micheal Draskovic co-founded another organization, the Democratic Policy Network, dedicated to “deepening democracy … extending more power to more people in more ways,” which is how he became interested in citizen assemblies. “It was really reading about the experiences of the participants who went through the process for everyday people who had little to no political experience come out of those experiences as feeling emboldened, confident, connected to the political process and wanting to do more,” he said. “You just saw this total transformation. And in a lot of ways, it wasn’t just a civic transformation, it was personal. So you see people they may otherwise judge, or seen as totally different from them, as potential collaborators, as people to work with.”

Spreading The Word And Exploring Possibilities
So how does PDLA intend to achieve its goal of a civic assembly in LA by 2026? Liebman described their organizing process like this: “What we do is we cook a giant vat of spaghetti, a really huge thing of spaghetti. And then we pick up gobs of spaghetti, and we throw it at the wall. And we see what sticks. And if it sticks, that’s where we go.”

For the most part, right now it means spreading the word — introducing the concept, explaining how it works, its success stories, its potentials, to anyone who will listen: activists, civic organizations, government officials and staff. “There’s no champion right now. We don’t have a champion in LA. And of course we’re looking for that,” Liebman said. “We’re presenting the case to different offices in city council and we’re looking for people that say, ‘You know this is a really good idea, I’m going to get behind this.’”

They’re also exploring potential applications. Participatory budgeting is one possibility. “There’s a lot happening in New York and Brooklyn,” Liebman noted. “But most participatory budgeting, to this point, has not been selected at random.”

Another possibility is charter reform. In January, PDLA, along with 10 co-signatories, including the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, sent a letter to LA’s chief legislative analyst, Sharon Tso, urging her to “research how a ‘citizens’ assembly’ could be implemented to encourage public engagement, representative participation, and trust in the charter review process.” It cited the National Civic League’s 2011 Guide for Charter Commissions, which states that “a process of actively and effectively engaging citizens should be at the heart of any charter creation or revision,” and that, “The charter process functions best when it is rooted in citizen involvement rather than one influenced (intentionally or unintentionally) by political officials directly serving as members.”

While the process approved by city council in early June seemingly ignores this advice, Liebman notes that a citizens assembly could still be involved as a supplemental advisory body.

Housing and homelessness are another major policy area the civic assembly approach could help. “The types of public conversations we’ve had about housing have been very toxic and broken and dysfunctional,” Camner said, speaking from experience as past executive director of Abundant Housing LA. It’s also the case that renters’ voices — 63% of all Angelinos — are routinely under-represented. Housing policy involves decision-making at every level, from the White House to neighborhood councils, and Camner cited one level most folks aren’t even aware of — the Southern California Association of Governments, which deals with policies in four counties in the region, including land use, housing and much more.

Almost everyone involved with SCAG is a homeowner, Camner noted, so, “I think that just goes to show you what a big difference it would be to have an assembly with like regular people who are dealing with these issues,” meaning high rents, housing security, etc. “I think honestly that disconnect explains a lot about what’s dysfunctional in LA.” she concluded.

Similar, though less extreme problems have plagued neighborhood councils as well. While they’ve made city government more democratic in theory, renters have very little voice, and divisive polarized debates frequently break out. PDLA has had some outreach to activists involved in neighborhood councils who are looking for ways to really fulfill their initial promise.

“I’m familiar with the civic assembly idea. BBC ran a program last week on the subject,” Doug Epperhart, President of Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council said. “In the early days of neighborhood councils, we tried to operate on a town hall model, but the increasing restrictions placed on us by the city eventually made it impossible,” he explained. “I think the only way to prove the concept in Los Angeles is to actually try it. When it comes to democracy, the more the merrier.”

In addition to exploring different potential subjects for civic assemblies, another piece of spaghetti on the wall is giving people the experience of what it would be like by convening mock assemblies.

“A mock assembly is simply when we just take a small group or medium -sized group of people that are interested in learning more about it, and then we pick a problem and then we develop a design process for them, as if they had been picked at random and then we facilitate a meeting” where they go through the deliberative process themselves, Liebman explained. “So that they get what the process is and how powerful it is when it’s appropriately designed.”

Another piece of spaghetti is reaching out to different communities that have been traditionally excluded, under-represented at best, and certainly not consulted when it comes to agenda-setting. Melina Perez is the newest addition to PDLA’s steering committee, and she combines the experience of growing up in LA as the daughter of immigrants with international public policy experience, including graduate school in Europe, where citizens assemblies are much more common and well-developed. Growing up, “I myself come from an environment of community that just doesn’t vote, does not specifically engage, doesn’t care, is very apathetic,” because they don’t see the possibility of change. She now understands both why that’s rational in a broken system and what can be done to fix it. Her combined background gives her a wealth of insights into otherwise overlooked possibilities. She both strengthens PDLA in terms of strategic planning, and understanding major challenges from her own lived experience.

“From my perspective, to really start this in LA, just as a beginning piece, I think it might be helpful to choose something like land-use, resource allocation,” Perez said. “Coming from a community that is grossly under-resourced, that was a huge concern for me when I was growing up, living in a food desert, living in an area where it’s not safe to walk at night at all.”

At the same time, she’s also focused on understanding the challenges and developing the resources PDLA needs to achieve its goals.

The first big challenge she mentions is “shaping or changing or working within this culture we currently have, as far as what governance looks like, what policymaking looks like, what authority and how we relate to that looks like.” That’s important because “Initiatives like this really do challenge that status quo in that way, in the sense that it’s hard to build buy-in, not only from policymakers who can actually utilize this as a tool, but also just general people, and how they just don’t maybe see the value of it,” she said.

Perez sees “a cultural barrier around actually believing that something like this could work, and not feeling that it’s antagonistic to an existing system on behalf of these more settled policymakers and the public administrators. So I think that’s kind of a big divide in that sense, where people just can’t grasp how this could be a real tool, and it doesn’t have to, like you know, the us-versus-them. It could be a co-creative process.”

There are also more material challenges: securing funding, forging partnerships, being able to hire paid staff. That’s a big challenge in the short run, both for PDLA and the wider movement it’s part of. But in the long run, civic assemblies have a proven record in resolving policy logjams that have thwarted action and wasted resources for years, if not decades. So they’re well worth the investment in terms of the pay-off they can provide.

But more importantly, they’re a much needed way of restoring faith in democracy by providing a much more meaningful way for everyday people to engage. “I’m interested in the empowerment dimension. How do you empower people to — at the individual and community level — to help shape their reality,” Perez said. “I see a civic assembly as not only having the capacity to to bring people together, but it’s to me very symbolic as well. It’s a symbolic kind of act and exercise in this reality that we are stronger together, we can reach consensus over things that are important to us, and we certainly can shape our world. And the power is in our hands.”