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Podcast: Isegoria: The Way Citizens’ Juries Deliver It, How Elections Destroy It (Nicholas Gruen: CEO of Lateral Economics)

https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode?id=586814

Hi and welcome to the Designing Open Democracy Podcast. We are an Australian based forum keeping track of democracy innovations in Australia and around the world.

For this episode recorded on the 3rd of March 2020, I visited a prominent Australian economist named Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics.

As frequent commentator on economic reform as well as innovation, he will be joining us for this episode to explore the concept of Citizens' Juries and how it could be implemented in Australia and other countries.

The summary and analysis below were drafted by Claude Code from the episode's automated transcript, to bring this older post up to the standard of the newer ones. The original episode notes and referenced links are preserved at the foot of the post. Quotes are reconstructed from an auto-generated transcript — verify against the recording before citing.

Two words from Athens

Gruen's argument starts with a gap in our political vocabulary. Ancient Athens had two concepts for democratic speech. Parrhesia — usually translated "freedom of speech," though Gruen says it more precisely means the duty to speak truth to power. And isegoria — equality of speech — for which we have no real equivalent, and, he argues, because we have no word for it, we don't think about it.

Why don't we have equality of speech? Because elections systematically reward a particular kind of person — articulate, university-educated, with money or moneyed friends. Around 95% of MPs are university-educated, which means political discourse is conducted in a register that leaves a large share of the population feeling the conversation is happening in a language that isn't theirs.

Athens delivered isegoria through two institutions, neither of which used elections: the Ecclesia (a monthly assembly — direct democracy, which Gruen does not advocate) and the Boule — 500 citizens chosen by lot, rotated every year, who set the assembly's agenda and ran the city. Gruen is careful to note what Athens excluded — slaves, women, resident foreigners — and that this is emphatically not a model to copy in that respect. The point he draws is narrower: selection by lot produced equality of speech in a way elections cannot.

The jury as a democratic instrument

The modern institution that still works this way, Gruen argues, is the jury. We accept a jury's verdict as the community's verdict — not because we elected the jurors, but because they were randomly sampled, given time, shown the evidence, and allowed to deliberate to a consensus. A 10–2 verdict carries weight; a 7–5 split does not.

This gives us a second way to represent the public, distinct from elections:

"One way is having elections... but we purchase that legitimacy at the expense of equality of speech. There is a certain kind of person who overwhelmingly wins that contest. The alternative we have in our courts of law." — Nicholas Gruen

His proposal: a standing Citizens' Assembly — a third chamber whose members are chosen by lot to be reflective of the community, through which legislation and motions would pass. It won't be written into the Constitution any time soon — but, crucially, it doesn't need anyone's permission to exist. It can be crowdfunded or philanthropically funded and run as a form of activism. While Parliament tells us what the parties and their backers want, and opinion polls tell us the raw opinion of the people, a standing assembly would show us the considered opinion of the people.

Opinion vs considered opinion

The distinction between opinion and considered opinion is the spine of the talk. Gruen's example: when a government campaigns to abolish a policy like carbon pricing, a radio interview gives it ninety seconds — enough to land a soundbite, not enough to test whether the replacement policy makes any sense. A jury, with time and access to experts, would have scrutinised it properly.

This is why he's sceptical of direct democracy as a fix. Scare campaigns work because they influence our votes — so a direct vote on a contested issue invites exactly the same manipulation:

"We're every bit as much of the problem of politics as the politicians are. A lot of people saying they're going to fix democracy are suckers for a view that we're the good guys and the politicians are the bad guys. They act the way they do because we reward them for acting that way." — Nicholas Gruen

The road-rage effect

Gruen's most vivid argument for why deliberation changes behaviour is what he calls the road-rage effect: people who will lean on the horn and rage at a stranger become instantly civil when they realise the other driver is their next-door neighbour. Elections and media run on the anonymous, road-rage register. Citizen juries put people face to face.

He describes the documented arc: jurors get a letter, feel a flicker of excitement, then dread ("oh god, this is politics, people will yell at me"), then walk into the room and find ordinary people much like themselves — and get deeply into the work. Around 90–95% report the experience as good; about half describe it as life-changing. He invokes Aristotle: democracy is a system in which people take turns governing and being governed — which, he notes, is not the system we have.

Where he parts company with Flux, MiVote and direct democracy

Gruen was asked to compare his approach with the other models DOD tracks. He wishes them well but is sceptical:

  • Flux must campaign as a party to get candidates elected — which draws it into the "fast-foodification" of politics: eight-second explanations, emotive simplification. Not because its people are bad, but because the system exerts those forces on anyone seeking votes. (See the DOD Flux podcast.)
  • MiVote he respects for diagnosing similar problems, but he dislikes "packaging up" issues into a few alternatives, and is less optimistic that an app is the answer. His instinct: he wants a political system he can trust to work things out — like a jury — rather than one he has to instruct toward a conclusion. (See the DOD MiVote catch-up.)

A subtle but important point he makes on accountability: a juror is not accountable by reporting back and justifying their vote — "the accountability of a jury is being of the people, not reporting back to the people." The legitimacy comes from the random sample being genuinely representative, not from a justification mechanism that, like transparency, can be gamed.

Where it's already happening

Gruen surveys the real record. Roughly 14 citizens' juries in Australia, most successful; the South Australian nuclear-waste jury didn't give the government the answer it wanted but did surface the considered opinion of the people. Governments tend to commission them only on "tame" issues they can safely implement — which is exactly why he wants an independent standing assembly that can take on the contagious ones. Abroad: Oregon's Citizens' Initiative Review (24 randomly selected jurors, four days, 300 words for and against printed on the ballot); a permanent randomly selected citizens' council in the German-speaking community of Belgium, functioning rather like the Athenian Boule; Madrid; and the large national climate assemblies in France and the UK.

On Brexit: the question, not the answer

Gruen's Brexit verdict is a clean illustration of his thesis. The failure, he argues, wasn't the yes/no vote — it was the question: it pitted a completely non-specific "leave" against a fully concrete "remain." He contrasts it with the 1999 Australian republic referendum, where John Howard insisted on putting a specific republican model to the vote. "Take back control" and the £350m red bus were fast-food politics. Had the considered opinion of the people been sought, he suspects the result — and certainly its legitimacy — would have been different.

  • Considered Opinion Of The People
  • Citizens' Juries Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_jury
  • For this quote in this talk: "How we build online tools that amp down the aggro and qualify good contribution" it is in reference to this article "The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0" that was posted on July 30, 2014 by Nicholas Gruen found from this link http://clubtroppo.com.au/2014/07/30/from-knowledge-to-wisdom-or-at-least-knowledge-2-0/
  • Gruen: detox democracy through representation by random selection: https://www.themandarin.com.au/75323-nicholas-gruen-detoxing-democracy/
  • Nicholas Gruen Organisation Lateral Economics: https://www.lateraleconomics.com.au/
  • Nicholas Gruen's Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Gruen
  • Isegoria - (Noun) Equality of all in freedom of speech: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/isegoria
  • To reach out to Nicholas Gruen his email is: ngruen@gmail.com

Other Organisations Referenced In This Talk:

  • Flux Party
  • MiVote
  • Proportional Representation Society of Australia

See also