Reviewing Bills (Review Panels)

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 16.3

In the comprehensive multi-body sortition design there would be a separate Review Panel for each policy area established by the Rules Council (for example, one for transportation, one for healthcare, etc.). The process of the Review Panel would be significantly different than that of an elected legislature. The Review Panels fulfill most of the functions of traditional legislative committees, excluding agenda-setting and the the initiation of legislation. They also have no role in the final passage of legislation. The Rules Council might establish a process closer to that of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, with a learning phase, a deliberation phase, and drafting phase. They would receive the raw inputs from the Interest Panels, compare, combine, reject and amend various draft proposals to prepare a final piece of legislation to pass on to a Policy Jury for final adoption or rejection.

While the purview of each Review Panel is far wider than the single topic Interest Panels, it is far narrower than existing legislatures, or the proposed second chamber sortition models, which deal with all issues (a hybrid design in which one chamber is elected and the second chamber is selected by lot). This allows the members to develop a deeper understanding within a defined policy domain than is possible in an all-encompassing legislature. In traditional (elected) legislatures, it is typically only a small portion of the members – those who serve on a particular committee – who have any likelihood of fully understanding any given bill. Most elected legislators never read or understand the details of the bulk of the bills they vote on. They inevitably vote based on other considerations, such as vote swapping (“I’ll vote for your highway earmark, if you vote for my education subsidy amendment”), or based on some heuristic – typically following the lead of their fellow party members who serve on a bill’s committee of reference. Thus the homogeneity of the legislature as a whole is compounded by having only a small fraction of the full body even attempting to understand each bill. The Review Panel concept promotes having every member seek to understand every bill they deal with, and eliminates, or at least reduces, vote-swapping and partisan gamesmanship.

The Review Panels would be selected in the same manner as the Agenda Council – a lottery of the willing. Unlike the Interest Panels, volunteers for the Review Panel lottery would not choose the subject they would be assigned to, in order to avoid special interest distortion. In other words, those selected in the initial lottery would be asked if they would be willing to serve on some Review Panel that dealt with important public policy legislation, without specifying in what policy area.

The Review Panels would be much larger than the Interest Panels (perhaps 150 members at a state level). They would be reasonably compensated, and provided with meals, childcare, and a pleasant working environment. Members might also garner a certain amount of status or honor. Each Review Panel would also have professional staff. For reference, in the United States, the various congressional committees have a total of around 6,000 staff. However, the individual elected members of Congress each have personal staff for such things as constituent outreach, district office staff, schedulers, speech writers, et al., which total another 12,500 or so. While none of these are officially campaign related, most of them exist to enhance re-election prospects. Nearly all of these personal staff would not exist in a sortition system.

For a national design, these panels would be full-time, with overlapping terms of perhaps three years (to gain familiarity with the subject matter). For a municipal implementation, this would likely be part-time work, and it might be appropriate to have meetings on weekends or evenings so as to not interfere with normal employment. This body would be far more descriptively representative than the Interest Panels. Screening of prospective members should be avoided entirely, or be extremely minimal (perhaps the ability to read or listen to background materials) so as to not unduly distort the representativeness of the final body.

The procedures used by the Review Panel require careful design so as to maximize problem solving potential and minimize both groupthink and internal polarization Cass Sunstein warned about in his book Why Societies Need Dissent. These psychological tendencies are powerful, but can be minimized with good design according to other researchers. However, since the risk of bad results from information cascades and groupthink, etc. cannot be completely eliminated, and the fact that the Review Panels are not fully representative of the population (having a certain amount of self-selection distortion), there is no design fix that would justify allowing these bodies to make final decisions about legislation they crafted.

Sortition researchers, such as John Gastil, advocate that the micro- and macro-level elements necessary for genuinely “democratic deliberation” deserve intense study. These design elements could include developing a set of agreed upon facts as a basis for discussion. Too often members of groups simply talk past each other because each has their own separate understanding of “the facts.” Once a draft has been generated, alternating pro and con speakers for any particular amendment is preferable to a discussion style where the initial majority persuasion dominates. Psychologists have shown that people have a tendency to lean towards the apparent majority side simply due to a desire to fit in – a sort of social bonding instinct. According to Sunstein, this can also lead to polarization into subgroups that move further apart as members adhere to arguments that support their initial position, and dismiss arguments that don’t fit their view. Yet, researchers such as Asher Koriat have shown that communication between group members that includes feedback about members’ confidence levels improves decisions in many situations. As the science of group decision-making advances, the procedures of democratic institutions should be adjusted accordingly.

The next post will discuss the Policy Juries, which are the large, statically representative bodies with the authority to finally adopt new laws proposed by Review Panels.