During the early 1990s I served on the school board in Burlington, Vermont. One thing led to another, and I became research chair of the Vermont chapter of Common Cause and then Chair of the Vermont Secretary of State's Task Force on Information and Democracy. As a result of these experiences, the difficulty of implementing democratic reform became vividly apparent to me. I tried to get the Secretary of State to propose a citizens assembly type body, but the proposal was too radical and he demurred. Nothing like it had ever been tried since ancient Athens.
In 1994 I began a Ph.D. program in political science at Northwestern University, and in December 1994 I named my new son Solon, after the man credited with founding Greek democracy as well as the Council of 400, which was the annually chosen body of citizens selected by lot (random selection) that chose the agenda for the general assembly of Athenian citizens.
My primary interest in political science was e-democracy. I had just written a book on e-commerce (Future Shop) and my attention was now focused on bringing America's democratic institutions, including its systems of political communication, into the information age. All my ideas were premised on a robust telecommunications infrastructure. But telecommunications politics were abysmal. Vast amounts of money were at stake and the public didn't understand the issues and didn't give a damn. One thing led to another and I found a way to write a dissertation combining two of my favorite subjects--telecommunications politics and political communication. The vehicle was the TV broadcasters' extraordinarily successful lobbying campaign to win tens of billions of dollars worth of spectrum and other government perks without providing anything substantial to the public in return.
Sure enough, I found a way to squeeze the citizens assembly idea (what I called a "citizens electoral jury") into the final chapter. No one can get a Ph.D. in American Government by proposing a reform that has never yet existed. But if it's tucked into the last chapter of a suitably rigorous body of research, no one can object too much, even if the idea smacks of a pipedream.
But then the world took an unexpected turn. What was mere speculation became reality when the head of the government in British Columbia inaugurated a citizens assembly on electoral reform. Not only that, but the idea was implemented remarkably successfully. Suddenly, the politics of pursuing this type of democratic reform had taken a 180 degrees turn.
With something actually to study, smart political scientists are now hot on this issue like bees are attracted to honey. Within 12 to 24 months, a wealth of this research will start showing up in political science journals. But meanwhile and most exciting, two California legislators, initially pitched the idea by the New America Foundation's California office, have decided to pursue this proposal with the help of the New America Foundation.
My purpose in writing this blog is to spread the word about the citizens assembly and empower the diverse folks all over the world who have begun to take a serious interest in this issue. In six months to a year I hope this blog will no longer be necessary, as the mainstream media catches on to the issue. But in the meantime I want to assure all those out there interested in this issue--from Australia to England to the United States--that you are not alone. There are a lot more of you than you might think. This issue has momentum. The ball is now in California's court, and I desperately hope that those in possession of it will move it ahead with the passion, thoughtfulness, attention to detail, and political wisdom necessary for it to overcome the countless obstacles in its path.
As someone trained in the field of political communication and who works in the field of media policy, my academic and professional interests in democratic reform have focused on how voter preferences are formed rather than how those preferences are translated into seats (formal power). A citizens assembly is tailor made to handle both types of democratic reform problems.
Much of my writing, including my work on telecommunications and media policy, deals with the problem of political information as a public good, which in the democratic reform literature may be classified under the category of "campaign finance." One case study that I've devoted a lot of attention to concerns local TV broadcasters. Congress and the FCC have given local TV broadcasters tens of billions of dollars in subsidies (mostly in the form of spectrum rights, copyrights and tax breaks) in the name of preserving and enhancing "free TV," which supposedly provides citizens with free access to highly valuable public affairs programming. This roundabout system of media subsidies was largely designed to avoid First Amendment concerns of abuse of power. Yet, as I argue, a more inefficient and corrupt system of media subsidies could hardly be imagined.
In 2002 I ran for the Maryland House of Delegates, with democratic reform one of my signature campaign issues. I was one of two Democratic nominees in a gerrymandered two member Republican dominated district and came in third of the five candidates in the general election.
My first published work that touched on creating a citizens assembly type entity was "Democracy Online: Tomorrow's Electronic Electorate," The Futurist, September-October 1994. This article was later reprinted in The Information Revolution, edited by Donald Altschiller (New York: H.W. Wilson 1995), and in Exploring Your Future: Living, Learning, and Working in the Information Age, edited by Edward Cornish (Bethesda, Maryland: World Future Society, 1996). That article called for creating a citizens assembly type entity to empower voters with better information.
In an article published in the spring 2004 issue of the National Civic Review with the title "Alleviating the Problem of Rational Voter Ignorance: A Proposal for a Ballot Portal," I suggested another function for a citizens assembly type entity: to create a ballot for the 21st century that would include links not only to candidate websites but to a radically new type of information agent.
My belated Ph.D. dissertation (Low Visibility Politics, Northwestern University, September 2004), which was a case study of one of the most egregious cases of special interest politics in the 20th century, also called for a citizens assembly type entity in the last chapter. The dissertation was later published as Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick (iUniverse, April 2005), with a modified version of the last chapter published in the winter 2005 issue of the National Civic Review as "Solving A Classic Dilemma of Democratic Politics: Who Will Guard the Guardians?"
On June 7, 2005, July 12, 2005, and September 16, 2005 I held events at the New America Foundation promoting these policy recommendations. In January 2006, the New America Foundation launched a political reform program in California with this policy initiative as its centerpiece.
J.H. Snider, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, is a graduate of Harvard College and holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Mr. Snider's graduate work on telecommunications and media policy won two graduate student paper awards from the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and two Goldsmith Research Awards from Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy. His op-eds have been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick (iUniverse), a book on telecommunications and media politics and co-author of Future Shop (St. Martin's), an early work on e-commerce. He has been invited to testify before Congress and the Vermont legislature a number of times, with one of his congressional speeches receiving the rare honor of being published in Vital Speeches of the Day. At the New America Foundation, Mr. Snider's work focuses on the policy paradigm changing implications of emerging information technologies. Mr. Snider came to New America in early 2001 after serving in the U.S. Senate on the staffs of Senators Wyden and Leahy as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Communications and Public Policy.