How are citizen assemblies perceived and received?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the first time since Athenian democracy, political authorities allocated decisive policy-making power to the people. Recently in British Columbia, the Netherlands, and Ontario, a group of randomly selected citizens was asked to design the next electoral system. Instead of simply voting, sanctioning or being consulted, they had the chance to develop a new political institution. These three citizen assemblies were organized similarly: each unfolded over an almost year-long process were participants learned about electoral systems, consulted the public, deliberated, debated and decided. The three assemblies came up with three different solutions. However, none has yet resulted in electoral reform. The two Canadian proposals were rejected by the public in referenda, while the Dutch recommendation was submitted to cabinet and mostly ignored. This paper analyzes reactions to the unprecedented and exceptional democratic experiments. It deals with how the assemblies and their proposals were received by political actors (governments, political parties, interest groups, media, and citizens). Empirically, it draws on media content analyses and public opinion surveys. First, a content analysis of the quantity and tone of newspaper coverage was conducted in British Columbia and Ontario throughout the assembly proceedings and the referendum campaign. Second, a rolling cross-sectional survey captured the opinions of a random sample of the population of each province during the campaign. We use this evidence to document the views of both elites and masses toward the assemblies and the electoral systems they proposed, and to explain the failure of all three citizen assemblies to get reform implemented.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".