This is from Democracy's Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson.
Much more on the MacLeod/Johnson book at r/deliberativedemocracy
I can think of two barriers. First is that practically nobody has ever heard of things like citizens' assemblies, etc. I was at a local political party meeting (provincial), and nobody had heard of citizens' assemblies. Even the constituency chairperson and the candidate in the previous election had no idea. Even though, in the adjacent province (BC), there was one back in the early 2000's to look at possibly changing the constitution.
And second, if someone has heard of citizens' assemblies, they might just associate them with populism, which is pretty much the polar opposite. Ignorance prevails. The following clip is from the book Democracy's Second Act, which I've slowly been reading and have posted about in a separate thread. Check out what the massive corporation BASF thinks. (It's regarding the French citizens' assembly on climate change policy).
the last few words on the next page are \"they wanted it to go.\"
Evan Bedford on deliberative democracy, social cohesion, and civic journalism, etc
Wow. Another book just out on citizens' assemblies. So I'll start another chapter by chapter commentary with snippets here and there. This one is from Canada, a place I know sorta well, since I was born here back in 1959.
An opinion piece in the Globe and Mail from the author (Helene Landemore) just came out last Saturday. It looked intriguing, so I purchased a copy. So far, so good (I'm just finishing Chapter 3).
Here is the first paragraph in the piece:
I assume that the rest of the piece will be behind a paywall (I get the physical paper delivered to my door), so I took the liberty of posting a pdf of it on my website.
