O'Leary Review

JH Snider, a former fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of the Citizen's Assembly blog (tracking information on developments surrounding the BC electoral innovation) has posted a review of Kevin O'Leary's "Saving Democracy" at The Journal of Public Deliberation.  It is titled "From Dahl to O’Leary: 36 Years of the 'Yale School of Democratic Reform.'"  Here's a taste:

With the perspective of hindsight, it is now clear that there has emerged a “Yale School of Democratic Reform” (“Yale School”) running from Yale Political Science Professor Robert Dahl (Ph.D. 1940) through a series of Yale Political Science Ph.D. students: James Fishkin (Ph.D. 1975), Ethan Leib (Ph.D. 2004), and Kevin O’Leary (Ph.D. 1989). The students have all scattered to various universities in California, but they have all followed in Dahl’s tracks. The central insight of the Yale School is that a large, randomly selected sample of American voters could be brought together to deliberate in such a way that some of the most intractable problems of America’s representative democracy could be solved. These randomly selected bodies--variously called a “minipopulus,” “deliberative opinion poll,” “popular branch of government,” “people’s house,” and “citizens assembly”--hearken back to the Ancient Athenian Council of 500, which was randomly selected and played a vital role in Athenian Democracy. However, the Yale School does not seek to return to the direct democracy of Ancient Athens. Instead, it seeks to graft these randomly selected bodies onto today’s representative democracy.   

I'm honored, of course, to be part of such a "school".  Still, about O'Leary's book, Snider and I agree: it is a moderately stimulating proposal (that overlooks many details about how to administer the proposal), written with a journalist's grace.  But it lacks a certain "academic" seriousness and is far too dismissive of almost everyone else who has thought in a sustained fashion about the problems the book diagnoses and has offered institutional designs to address those problems.  Obviously, an author needn't debate the details of every other competing proposal on the market or provide all the relevant details about how his or her policy plan should be implemented-- indeed, when my book was reviewed in the flagship political science journal Perspectives on Politics, I was criticized for wasting too much time exploring my differences with others who came before me and wasting too much time on developing details for my own imaginary branch of government.  But if you want to be taken seriously in a certain community of scholars and intellectuals, it seems you should try to grapple with a few competing ideas, explain why your particular proposal merits special attention, and give the reader enough detail so they can get a good feel for how your imagination is working.