Gerken and Elmendorf Reply

Gerken (Harvard/Yale) and Elmendorf (UC-Davis) had a thoughtful thesis at Balkinization yesterday.  I replied earlier today here.  Now, Gerken and Elmendorf have a incisive reply that they have graciously allowed us to post here:

Ethan Leib is right that the Citizens' Assembly technically failed.  It garnered only 58% of the vote, failing to clear the 60% hurdle imposed by the BC government for its proposal to become law.  If one digs deeper, however, we think it provides strong (if limited) evidence that citizens' assemblies can provide a powerful cue to voters.  After all, the Assembly had no money for a public education campaign, and political elites maintained a virtual radio silence about the issue, both of which would usually represent a death knell for any initiative proposal.  To us, it therefore seems quite remarkable that 58% of the BC citizenry -- having received little or no information about the referendum -- were apparently willing to gamble on the reform proposal simply because the Citizens' Assembly had proposed it. 

Leib also fails to take into account what has happened in BC since the referendum went down.  Even though the proposal failed to pass by the necessary 60% margin, the fact that it garnered almost such a large proportion of the vote made it all but impossible for incumbent politicians to ignore the proposal.  As a result, the Lieutenant-Governor recently announced that the government would take up the issue again.  Interestingly, in making this announcement, the governing party was extremely cautious about creating the appearance that it was displacing the Assembly’s proposal with a different reform idea.  As the Lieutenant-Governor herself emphasized, the governing party “does not accept that the 79 members of [B.C.] assembly are any better qualified than the 161 members of the Citizens Assembly to choose the best electoral model.”  Indeed, even as the Lieutenant-Governor announced important changes to the Assembly’s proposal, she insisted that her party was merely hewing to the Assembly’s plan – “just taking it to its ultimate conclusion.”  The governing party also gave in to the demands of the Assembly’s alumni by promising adequate funding for an education campaign for the next referendum. 

The fact that the Assembly’s failed attempt to pass its proposal through a referendum induced this level of political pussyfooting by the party in power is, in our view, quite suggestive.  It reveals how difficult it is for partisan elites to compete with a citizens’ assembly on authenticity grounds and thus how hard it is for them to ignore or challenge its proposals. 

Whether the now-disbanded B.C. Assembly can keep the pressure on politicians and what effect elite endorsements and challenges will have on the next part of the story remains to be seen.  Here we agree with Leib – there is a danger that a strong negative campaign and readily available partisan cues would swamp the effects of the cue offered by the endorsement of the Citizens’ Assembly. 

For now, however, we think that the BC experience is too much of a success to be ignored.  Evidently, a number of Canadians share this view.  In Ontario a citizens’ assembly on the BC model is slated to be up and running by the spring of 2006.  At the national level, a committee of parliament has recommended establishing a citizens’ body to provide advice on electoral matters, and one Conservative MP is pushing for a national citizens’ assembly whose recommendations would receive a referendum vote.  In the wake of the Ohio and California defeats, the question for U.S. reformers is whether it is time to follow Canada’s lead.