The Promise and Limits of Citizens' Assemblies: Deliberation, Institutions and the Law of Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent experiments with deliberative democracy in British Columbia and Ontario have brought new life to the debate over electoral reform in Canada and have called into question the roles of the judiciary and the legislature on electoral law. In both provinces, Citizens' Assemblies composed of randomly selected members were tasked with deliberating on electoral reform and bringing their recommendations to the electorate in a subsequent referendum. These Assemblies were lauded as innovative alternatives to the conventional legislative decision-making process. The author examines the potential and the limitations of the Assemblies, by situating the Citizens' Assembly model within broader discussions about the law of democracy. Specifically, the article explores how well the Assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario insulated electoral reform from manipulation by elected representatives. Although he concludes that those Assemblies were less successful at keeping politics out of the process than many have suggested, he argues that the model nevertheless makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate between structural theory and rights theory regarding election law and the right to vote. In light of the fact that both sides of the debate are dissatisfied with the Supreme Court of Canada's section 3 jurisprudence, there are good reasons for both structural theorists and rights theorists to support the continued use of Citizens' Assemblies on issues of electoral reform. The author concludes by offering recommendations for improving the Citizens' Assembly process in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".