Hope for Democracy, by John Gastil and Katherine Knobloch, tells the story of Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). This story is well worth telling, and Gastil and Knobloch are well placed to tell it: both “have been present since the inception of the CIR itself” (p. 179) and played a meaningful role in its evolution (p. 183). But at the same time, Gastil and Knobloch sometimes confuse telling this story with other, admittedly worthy tasks—with using the CIR, for example, as a case study of how citizens can bring reason back into politics (to quote the book’s subtitle). This confusion occasionally detracts from the narrative.
The story of the CIR begins in 1971, when Ned Crosby, then a political science graduate student, came up with the idea of a Citizens Jury (now known as a “Citizens’ Jury”—Crosby “chose to leave off the apostrophe when he coined the term, though the unwelcome punctuation mark became the convention”; see p. 194). As conceived by Crosby, a Citizens Jury “would enable a [randomly selected] microcosm of the public to sort through complex policy data, while reflecting on the lives and circumstances of their fellow citizens” (p. 48). Crosby founded what would become the Jefferson Center in 1972 to develop and promote Citizens Juries, which were used to examine policy issues and evaluate political candidates. The former usage proved frustrating, because “time and again, citizens would arrive at thoughtful recommendations that would end up having negligible influence on policymakers” (p. 50). The latter usage provoked a fight with the IRS over the Jefferson Center’s nonprofit status, which precluded any form of political advocacy (see p. 51).
Undaunted, Crosby searched for other contributions that Citizens Juries might make to political reform. Having relocated to the state of Washington—a state that made extensive use of ballot initiatives—he conceived with others the idea of using juries to “evaluate ballot measures rather than candidates” (p. 51). This marked the birth of the CIR. Crosby worked from 2005 to 2007 to persuade the Washington state legislature to fund CIRs but consistently received a lukewarm reception. Around the same time, however, Crosby met up with Tyrone (“Ty”) Reitman and Elliot Shuford, a pair of Oregon activists frustrated by conventional politics and interested in political reform (pp. 56–57). Reitman and Shuford together founded Healthy Democracy Oregon, later renamed Healthy Democracy, with the aim of bringing CIRs to their state (p. 186). They persuaded the Oregon state legislature to pass House Bill 2895 in 2009, establishing “CIR pilot panels in the 2010 statewide general election” (p. 60). The pilot panels were successful enough for Healthy Democracy in 2011 to propose HB 2895, which “would renew the CIR in perpetuity and include the statements produced by its panels in the Voters’ Pamphlet for future initiative elections” (p. 95). With the help of six participants in the original CIR pilot panels, Healthy Democracy shepherded the bill through the state legislature, and it was signed into law on June 16, 2011 (p. 101).
The introduction of the CIR to Oregon politics marks an important step in a process of democratic innovation—a process focused on bringing deliberation back into democratic politics—dating back to Crosby’s Citizens Juries and Peter Dienel’s Planning Cells in Germany (p. 13, figure 1.1). In particular, the CIR demonstrates well the contribution that a mini-public—“a small microcosm of the public [convened] to deliberate on an issue and make a judgment or recommendation” (p. 152)—can make. It therefore behooves deliberative democrats to understand the ins and outs of the Oregon CIR experience. That experience offers many lessons, both regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the CIR itself and the uphill struggle that deliberative reform measures have faced (and continue to face, as demonstrated by President Macron’s tepid response to the French Citizens Convention for Climate).
At the same time, however, Gastil and Knobloch sometimes turn their attention away from the Oregon CIR to consider the broader project of deliberative democratic reform. For example, they leave Oregon to consider such cases as the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly of 2004 (p. 52), deliberative opinion polling in China (p. 83), and the Irish Convention on the Constitution of 2012–14 (pp. 83–84, 171–72). Sometimes, these diversions seem well justified; the British Columbia experience, for example, directly influenced Crosby in his formulation of the CIR (p. 54). Other diversions, however, seem to come out of nowhere. I am unsure why Gastil and Knobloch devoted three pages to Argentina’s recent introduction of a jury system (pp. 166–68). The discussion seems to be in the book primarily because Gastil is passionate about juries (p. 208). Gastil and Knobloch also provide ample empirical evidence regarding the effects of the CIRs, but they occasionally interrupt the presentation of this evidence to introduce data relating to a different case, like the Australian Citizens’ Parliament of 2009 (p. 149).
These tangents matter because they distract from the focus of the book: the story of the CIR. And there are many points in which this story feels incomplete. Gastil and Knobloch, for example, devote an entire chapter to the very first Oregon CIR, zeroing in on two of its participants. But the narrative could have included more details about this critically important case. Why not include a copy of the letter sent to would-be participants to persuade them to take part? And why spend so much time discussing the deliberations of the CIR without including the final statement it produced for Oregon voters? Gastil and Knobloch regard both of these documents as afterthoughts, including them only in an appendix titled “Details and Digressions” (pp. 195–96, 196–98). (This appendix is also the only place to provide meaningful citations of any kind; Hope for Democracy contains no footnotes.)
But there is a more serious omission in Hope for Democracy, and it bears critically on the alleged success of the CIR. The initial pilot panels were funded privately, and the CIR process has never received funding from Oregon’s state government (p. 59). Private funding does not last forever, however, and as a result “Oregon didn’t host a statewide CIR” in 2018, with Healthy Democracy instead hosting “a CIR in the Portland area on a regional ballot” (p. 176). The fact that a nonpartisan reform measure with a proven track record of success finds itself without funding, despite no concerted opposition, bears out well one point stressed by Gastil and Knobloch—that “good government” initiatives lack a constituency (p. 103). But in any case, the CIR’s fate is left very much up in the air by the time the book ends, which is a strange place to leave a story about Hope for Democracy.
In the end, Gastil and Knobloch tell a story about the Oregon CIR that is well worth hearing. But their eagerness to draw grand lessons from the CIR experience occasionally works against that story. It might have been better had they allowed those lessons to flow organically from the story itself. In any case, there are many more lessons to be drawn regarding democratic reform from the Oregon CIR, and Healthy Democracy is a good place to start.
