This week we ask: What is going wrong with our democracy, and how we might fix it?
In this episode we’re discussing elections, referenda, and how to fix our democracy, with none other than our long-time podcast host, Alan Renwick. In his inaugural lecture, Alan described democracy as rule for, and by, all, and suggested that the UK’s democratic system is falling short of that ideal. We discuss three suggested "fixes": electoral reform, improving citizen's access to reliable information, and the use of citizen's assemblies.
One of the central commitments in Prof Alan Renwick’s work is to the importance of the citizen, and our role in the democratic process. He is a leading expert on citizens assemblies, and his fourth book, Deliberative Mini-Publics examines how these can contribute to the policy process and even revitalise democracy. Most recently, Alan’s research examines the public’s attitudes about democracy, and democratic institutions, post Brexit.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
assemblies, democracy, citizens, electoral reform, politicians, processes, system, politics, experts, discourse, political discourse, alan, lecture, deliberative, power, problems, institutions, government, uk, parliament
SPEAKERS
Emily McTernan, Alan Renwick
Emily McTernan 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we're discussing elections, referenda, and how to fix our democracy with none other than our longtime podcast host, Alan Renwick.
My name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Our guest today is Alan Renwick, who, as listeners of the podcast will be aware, is generally found in the host's seat. Following his packed-out inaugural lecture – and it isn't often these are standing room only – today we will be exploring Alan's research and career.
Alan is Professor of Democratic Politics and Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit here at UCL. His career to date has included academic positions at Oxford and Reading before UCL and a great deal of work with policymakers providing evidence to governments and parliamentary select committees.
And Alan has some important ideas about what is going wrong with our democracy and how we might fix it that will be the subject of today's podcast. He is an expert on citizens' participation in formal politics, with three books on electoral reform and a wealth of work on how to conduct referenda. One of the central commitments in Alan's work is to the importance of citizens and our role in the democratic process. He is the leading expert on citizens' assemblies, and his fourth book, Deliberative Mini-Publics, with an impressive nine co-authors, examines how these can contribute to the policy process and even revitalise democracy. Most recently, Alan's research is examining the public's attitudes about democracy and our democratic institutions after Brexit.
And so let's get to discussing his ideas on how democracy is going and how it might go better.
Alan, welcome to the guest's chair of Uncovering Politics.
Alan Renwick 02:00
Thanks so much, Emily. It's slightly terrifying being on the other side of the microphone, but great to be talking about these issues, and great with you as well as an expert – much more of an expert than me – on many of these matters.
Emily McTernan 02:12
Thank you, Alan.
Let's start with what is going wrong with the UK's democracy. In your inaugural lecture, celebrating your career thus far, you described democracy as 'rule for and by all' and suggested that the UK democratic system is falling far short at that ideal. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what's going wrong?
Alan Renwick 02:33
Yeah, I think in many ways our democracy is falling short. So as you say, I define democracy as 'rule by and for all the people'. And if we think about democracy by the people, then that requires participation. But participation in a democracy is very low. So you know, many people don't really take part. Many people take part a little bit: they might vote but they don't really do anything else. And crucially also that participation is unequal, so there are some groups and society that take part much, much less than others, particularly the young and disadvantaged as well. So, you know, real matters of concern there.
And I suppose that would be less of a problem if people were well represented. But people certainly don't feel represented very effectively. And you know, in many ways people aren't well represented. We have seen improvements in some ways. So women, for example, are better represented than they were in the past, people from ethnic minority backgrounds are better represented. But it's still far from equal in terms of representation across society. And we've seen some declines in some aspects of representation, particularly people without university degrees. We've seen representation going down really quite markedly over recent decades.
And then I also talked in the lecture about rule for all the people. And here we can look partly simply in terms of does the system deliver for all the people in policy terms. And we can see many cases of policy failure. So I gave an example in the lecture which actually came from a recent book that I was just reading while I was preparing the lecture by Ian Dunt on How Westminster Works... and Why It Doesn't. And he gave the example of the partial privatisation of the probation service as a case of just very clearly grossly misjudged policymaking on the part of government.
And in other cases, we just see government not doing things that would clearly be beneficial. So changes to the tax system that would simultaneously increase growth, reduce inequality and enable us to deal with climate change more quickly. So you know, things that would just clearly be beneficial.
So in many ways the system is failing to deliver. And that's partly about structures of power. So we need to get a balance between government being able to act decisively – being able to get things done, as Boris Johnson used to say – but also checks and balances being in the system, so that everyone's voice is heard, so we don't breed corruption, and so that there's proper scrutiny and decision making takes place on the basis of careful thought and lots of voices being heard. And that balance, I think most experts would say in the UK, is too skewed towards government power and away from checks and balances.
And then I guess finally I talked in the lecture about problems in our democratic discourse. And we can have government working effectively for all the people and delivering, you know, sensible policies only if policymaking is informed and considered. But we have a discourse in our democracy that is neither of those things very often. You know there's lying – there's outright lying sometimes – but much more broadly than that there's just a lot of spinning and avoiding the question and short-term-ist thinking. So you know there are so many problems in our discourse that prevent us from having a thoughtful, careful discussion of the key policy questions that mean that it's hardly surprising that the system fails to deliver.
Emily McTernan 06:18
And do you think the UK is uniquely bad on these fronts or do you think this is a problem for lots of democracies at the moment?
Alan Renwick 06:24
Yeah, I think it is a problem across the board really. So some democracies are probably doing even worse than we are, and the United States comes to mind as a very clear example where, you know, under Trump, the degree to which these sorts of problems – and polarisation in discourse as well – developed just far beyond what even in the UK we've seen.
But I think in most democracies we see similar kinds of problems. So I think we shouldn't imagine that you know we just need to become like whatever country, you know, Denmark, for example – we often think that Denmark is the ideal democracy, that somehow everything is working fine there. You know, even in Denmark things are better in many ways. But even in the best performing democracies, there are problems of participation, there are problems of poor-quality discourse, there are increasing problems of polarisation.
So, yeah, I think it is a very general problem. And one of the arguments that I was making in the lecture is that there are no easy quick fixes. So we can't just get a nice off-the-shelf model of how to do democracy from somewhere else and just apply that; we need to be a bit more innovative in our thinking about how to address these problems.
Emily McTernan 07:46
And are these problems new problems, do you think? Do we have evidence that they're getting worse? Somebody might think people have always thought debate is quite polarised, politicians have always lied and spun things. Or are things less good now?
Alan Renwick 07:57
Yeah, I think in many ways things have always been bad. And we shouldn't fall into sort of 'golden ageism' of imagining that there was a perfect, beautiful past when our democracy function very, very well. And in particular, public disaffection with the state of our democracy has always been very marked.
I think as the media and then the social media have developed, the nature of political competition and discourse – the competitive nature of our political discourse – has become much more intense. And therefore politicians and others have had to become much more strategic in how they play that discourse game, such that they are just playing many more games than they used to.
And if you look at how politicians talked – you know, go back to the 1950s, 1960s, there is a more serious discussion of policy and policy options. Often there is a bit more at least of a recognition that there are strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, that there are trade-offs to be made, that there's no kind of ideal solution, that it's not black and white between one side being perfect and the other side being utterly imperfect. So I think in some ways, things have got worse over the years. And we do therefore just need to work a lot harder in order to try to get things back again.
Emily McTernan 09:23
Before we get to the answers about how to fix all of this, let's go back to your origin, so the origins of your academic interest in democracy. So your earliest work focused on the design of new democratic systems during transition from communism in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. You mentioned in your lecture that this has laid the foundations for your work ever since, which has mostly been on much more established democratic systems. I was wondering in what ways has it done so?
Alan Renwick 09:51
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. It's not one that I had time alas to get into in the lecture. But I guess two things really.
One is it gave me a focus on the role of democratic thought and democratic values in political processes. So in that early research – this was my doctoral research – I was looking at the design of democratic institutions in those countries during the transition from communism. And I was looking particularly at the impact of dissident thinking – the thinking of the anti-communist dissidents – upon these processes. And I was looking, I guess, at a dominant political science literature on institutional choice that was coming from what we call the 'rational choice perspective' and was assuming that any political actor is interested simply in power – their own power – and they will push for the institutions that will maximise their own power.
And then in 1989 and 1990 I find myself looking at these roundtable negotiations between representatives of the communist systems and representatives of the various dissident movements. And you have in these dissident movements people who gave up their careers in order to fight for democratic values, who sometimes went to prison in order to fight for democratic values.
And the dominant model in political science of saying: well, they're only interested in their power. That cannot be – that is clearly not the case. They would not have been doing what they've just been doing for the last 10 or 20 years if all they were interested in was their own power.
So I looked at the role of their thinking about democracy, their democratic values. And they had quite different values in different countries. So Hungary was very, very different from Czechoslovakia, for example, in how they thought about democracy. And that to some extent shaped the kinds of democratic choices that they made.
And then when I was moving away from that work into looking at democratic institutional choices in more established democracies, I was seeing again that the dominant model said it's just about politicians maximising their power. But I was looking at that time at processes in Italy, in Japan, in New Zealand – they were kind of three really big cases of electoral reform in the 1990s. And in none of those cases could you explain the outcome simply by looking at politicians trying to maximise their power. There was more going on in this these processes. So that focus on understanding the role of values in democratic institutional choice – but more broadly, I guess, in politics – was one very important thing that came out of that early focus that I had.
But also I guess combined with that was a recognition that, you know, we can't be starry eyed either. And it's not that we have all of these wonderful politicians who are pure, upstanding people who will just try to do the right thing in all circumstances. And you know, perfectly fairly, sometimes the right thing in the long term is to win power, so that they can do things. And therefore they have to be quite strategic about getting power in the first place.
So thinking about that combination of democratic values, but also how that plays out in practice in a political world where strategic gameplaying is quite important was, I guess, what came from that early research.
And it was fascinating looking at the sort of evolution of the dissident movement thinking in the late 1980s as they moved from a context where they couldn't hope for power – they couldn't hope to achieve things in the world of power and sort of macro politics. And therefore, particularly in Czechoslovakia, where the regime was most restrictive, they focused simply on creating internal space within their own movements and within their own minds, for being free and enacting the sorts of values that they believed in. Gradually they shifted, as the possibility of political change became more real, into a world in which they were thinking more strategically, and they were having to deal with these difficult tensions between their values and the need for strategic action in political space.
So yeah, fascinating to see that. And I think it really, you know, it says something useful about how politics works in established democratic contexts as well.
Emily McTernan 14:53
That's fascinating and such a good opportunity to think about the ways in which our democratic systems could be renewed and changed given how much change those countries saw in that transitional moment.
So on that note let's return to UK's is democracy and its fixes.
So a key area of your research has been electoral reform. And the first response to some of the problems with democracy that you've been mentioning might seem to be that kind of reform, and in particular the reform of our first past the post system in favour of a system of proportional representation. Then people think our votes would count, they'd be reflected in the makeup of the parliament, and there'd be no more excessive focus on winning over the swing voters in marginal seats. So you might think it would come with an improvement in our political discourse as well. But you're quite sceptical of this solution, I think. Is that right, and why?
Alan Renwick 15:45
Yeah, I'm certainly more sceptical than many of the voices in this debate. So I mean, I think, on balance, I probably would tend to think that electoral reform would be a good part of an overall reform of our democratic institutions. But we sometimes... Quite often actually you hear kind of electoral reform being talked about as this great thing that is going to unlock all sorts of changes in our democracy and going to improve things a great deal. And I'm quite sceptical about that.
One reason for that is just the barriers to achieving electoral reform are very high. And it's when you're talking about something like electoral reform that politicians' own personal interests are more at stake than in any other kind of policy choice, really. And, you know, even if there are politicians who have wonderful democratic values, and many of them do, then still they are going to care about whether they can keep their own jobs or not. And they're going to worry about a system change that might threaten their positions.
So, you know, it's not surprising that the leaderships of both the Conservative and Labour parties are quite clear in being opposed to significant electoral reform, even though, you know, within the Labour Party now the grassroots of the Labour Party is very strongly in favour of electoral reform, and the trade union movement has really moved in that direction as well.
So part of the concern is just that this is a very hard reform to make happen. And devoting too much energy just to that I think maybe distracts attention from other things that are more feasible.
But partly it is just that there are advantages and disadvantages in any electoral system. And while a more proportional system is clearly beneficial in terms of enabling fairer, broader representation in parliament, it does also make it harder for the voters, to use the usual phrase, to 'throw the rascals out' in terms of being able to change who is in government. Because if you've got a proportional system, you will very likely have no party winning a majority and therefore coalitions need to be built.
And, you know, we've seen in some democracies that a proportional system can cause things to get quite kind of stuck with voters just really struggling to change who is in power, because the coalitions always just change a little bit in response to election results, but nothing fundamentally shifts. So I think we just have to recognise that there are advantages and disadvantages to any voting system and changing it is not going to be radically transformatory.
Emily McTernan 18:42
Luckily though you have two other fixes that you presented in your inaugural. So let's talk about both of those.
Let's start with the improvement to the kind of information citizens get and to our political discourse. So clearly we do face a significant issue with misinformation, disinformation, as well as lies and spin. So how can we make things better?
Alan Renwick 19:05
Yeah, so I offered a few ideas about how we might do this in the lecture. I mean, I'm far from being expert on all of the different things that could happen here. And I think, you know, we also need experts from the world of media, for example, thinking about what can be done in the context of media.
I mean one very immediate thing that I think is important is that we have seen threats to some of the best and most impartial and most careful voices in our political discourse recently. So I'm thinking of threats to the public service broadcasters – their independence.
We've seen that very clearly with the BBC both in you know some concerns about the recent chair of the BBC and whether he was properly impartial, at least in his appointment, but also in the funding model for the BBC. We also saw it with threats to privatise Channel Four which, you know, were pretty clearly attempts to get at Channel Four and the perception that it was not toeing the – well, was unduly hostile to the – government line in some of its reporting. So I think that is one important thing.
I've also suggested in some of my research, and particularly a report I did a few years ago with Michela Palese, that we could have what we called a 'democracy information hub', which we were imagining as this kind of online portal where you can go and you can find out about elections and candidates and policies and political processes and all these kinds of things.
And at the moment it can be really quite hard to know where to look in order to find just really basic information. So we had local elections in the UK a few weeks ago. Where do you go to find out who are your candidates and what do they believe? What are their policy positions? What are their party's policy positions? Do their parties have manifestos for these elections? If so, what do those manifestos say? You know if you're a voter who actually wants to find out about these things, it's quite hard to know where to look. So we suggested that you could have what we were calling a 'democracy information hub' that could begin to build up this kind of information.
And you need to be quite careful in how you do this because there is a danger with creating any kind of institution like this that it will generate some kind of backlash and that, you know, if someone is unhappy with the information that it's providing, then they will shout and they will say it's the establishment stitching things up. So you have to be very careful. And we suggested kind of building this kind of thing up very, very gradually, starting with the most uncontroversial information.
And actually since we wrote [the report], the Electoral Commission has started to do this. So now it is possible to find out where your polling station is, for example, whether there are elections taking place in your area. So you know that really basic information – which a few years ago, it was often very, very hard to find – is out there a little bit more.
And as you as you build the trust and you build familiarity with something like this, then gradually you can get a little bit braver and you can develop it further. So, you know, that was one of the ideas that we had.
But you have to combine that, I guess, with education as well. So I also talked in the lecture about education around politics and around media literacy and, just more fundamentally, around kind of basic reasoning and evidence-based reasoning.
So it's often a barrier to taking part that people just feel they don't understand the system – that the world of politics is very unfamiliar to them. And therefore, you know, there's a big kind of just mental barrier to starting to get involved because it requires quite a lot of effort to make sense of what you're seeing in the world of politics if you're outside it. So better education about politics I think is really important.
And then crucially better education around media literacy and reasoning to help people think about what it is that they are reading or listening to or watching and think about how they can evaluate it, and how they can work out whether it is trustworthy, whether it is basing arguments on the basis of sound evidence or not.
So combining these sorts of things. Again, you know, none of these things is going to transform democracy on its own. But if you can combine various things like this then I think you can gently nudge the system in a better direction.
Emily McTernan 23:52
It's interesting that you put a lot of the duties onto the citizen, right: they're going to have to become much more informed, they're going to have to be much more careful about their information sources, they are going to be trained in politics and reasoning and maybe even philosophies so they can understand how arguments are working. You might have thought that there should be more pressure on politicians to reform the system so that it is more intelligible to people, so that it doesn't have these forms of debates that seem very strange to the outsider not used to the kind of Westminster bubble. But you think: no, go for the citizens.
Is that a pragmatic reason? That you just think it's easier for everyone to change how they think about things and to educate them better than to try and make politics more accessible?
Alan Renwick 24:21
No, I think that that's a very good challenge. And I think you're absolutely right that we need change from both ends. And I think there is scope to change politics and those sorts of political processes. I mean, I guess in the lecture I was steering away from, you know, how do we reform parliament, how do we form the relationship between government and parliament, that kind of thing, partly just because, you know, you can't cover everything – there are so many important aspects of our democracy that are important – and partly also because, you know, my expertise is more at the citizen end rather than at the end of the kind of elite level institutions. And I have other wonderful colleagues who do focus on parliamentary reform and so on.
But no, I think you're absolutely right that change at the politician end of that process is very important. But we cannot imagine that it is enough on its own. Because if the incentive structures that politicians face don't change then, you know, they're always going to be pulled back to these very unhelpful forms of discourse. And the incentive structures fundamentally come from what will enable them to get elected and re-elected and to exercise power effectively. And, you know, we the voters are fundamental to those incentive structures.
Emily McTernan 26:03
And just one question on the 'democracy information hub' idea and on the importance of institutions like the BBC. It does seem that even if we go gently, gently and start with very uncontroversial information, as soon as anything a bit more than that gets on, don't you think it's very likely to be treated as a political act and politically motivated and rejected by some, given we have such significant polarisation? I mean, the BBC certainly is not regarded as neutral by everybody. Or there is a bit more optimistic here?
Alan Renwick 26:38
Well, this will always be contested space. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we can't imagine that we're going to produce a perfect political discourse in which everyone acts very reasonably and there aren't any problems. So, yes. You're right that there will be some of this, some of what you described.
But I think the more we have institutions such as this working carefully and gently to open up the space for more thoughtful discourse, then the more we can push back against the pressures coming from various different forms of populism and polarisation.
But it's not easy. You're right, it's absolutely not easy.
Emily McTernan 27:30
So onto the third fix, then, and perhaps the most hopeful. More recently you've been looking at the feasibility of deliberative mechanisms and especially citizens' assemblies, where a group of members of the public are brought together to deliberate on some issue, often with briefings from experts to make their discussions properly informed. And you think that these might improve our democratic processes.
So how can we use these citizens' assemblies and how will they help?
Alan Renwick 27:58
Yeah, so we've started using citizens' assemblies in various different ways in democracy in the UK and around the world as well. And you know we've already seen, I think, that they work very well in themselves.
So you know typically you give a citizens' assembly a particular question to explore and come up with recommendations on. And you create the space, you make sure there's enough time. And there are professional facilitators, and you bring in a wide range of experts in order to enable an informed discussion, and so on.
And you get really, really good quality discussion taking place within the citizens' assembly. And they come up with recommendations that I mean, whatever, you know, whatever you might personally think about the recommendations, they're clearly coherent recommendations and they cohere with the sort of underlying principles that the citizens' assembly members were motivated by.
So we know that they work. And I think so now is the time for us to get really creative and start thinking, well, how can we embed these kinds of processes in our democratic processes.
So sometimes they have been used in order really to kind of shift or frame the terms of national debate about a big and important issue. And the classic examples of this, I think, are from Ireland, where there were citizens' assemblies first on same sex marriage and then on liberalisation of abortion law. And in both cases, it is pretty clear from the research that's been done in Ireland, that these citizens' assemblies worked very well in themselves, but also helped feed into the public discourse that took place first in parliament and government when they received the recommendations and reflected on them, and then in the wider public sphere in referendum campaigns that took place in order to enact the changes that had been proposed.
So I think we can use citizens' assemblies in that way and choose issues where politicians feel they have to act in some way, don't have a clear view of how they want to act, the parties don't have entrenched positions that they're not going to move from. These are the kinds of issues where I think citizens' assemblies could work very well in the UK. Something like social care reform, for example, or actually the future of the BBC where, yeah, I think a public engagement on these issues could be very effective.
But then also you can use citizens' assemblies as a more sort of regular part of the legislative process. So this is an idea that various people have talked about and that actually in Scotland they're beginning to move towards. So the Scottish parliament has been building up some internal capacity to run these kinds of processes as part of the inquiries and the legislative processes that take place within parliament.
And it's, you know, it's a means of opening up the parliamentary discussion of, again, injecting a bit of high-quality, open-minded deliberation into parliamentary discussions. Because I guess one of the problems often with our political discourse and parliamentary discourse is that even if we have politicians who, you know, all really want to do the right thing and really believe in a range of different policy goals, they're constrained by the fact that they're elected on manifestos and they want to get re-elected. So they can't just engage in free flowing open deliberation. Whereas if we can inject something like a citizens' assembly or a smaller citizens jury into the process, then we would bring in a little bit more of a deliberative ethos to the legislative process. And that's happening at local level as well as at national level. So local councils are doing this quite a lot too.
But then I think you can do lots of fun things that haven't really been tried terribly much. So one of the ideas I explored was using some form of citizens' assemblies, citizens' juries, citizens' panel in the context of election and referendum campaigns where, you know, we've already got a bit of expert fact checking, which is very useful in the course of campaigns for assessing what campaigners are saying, but there is that sense sometimes that why are the experts really impartial, should we really trust them?
So I think having a citizens' panel that is able to offer its take on what are the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments that are being put; where do they feel that they're being fed untruth, half-truths; where would they like more information; where do they want better answers from politicians; where are they not yet satisfied? I think doing that could, again, really help to inject a bit of seriousness into election campaign periods.
So there are lots of ideas. And there are lots more. I mean, you know, these are just a few. I think we should be just quite kind of excited by the possibilities that are created by deliberative, public deliberative institutions and think about how they could be injected into the system in various different ways in order to, yeah, just make everything work a bit better.
Emily McTernan 33:29
Is there a worry that if these citizens' assemblies have this kind of power over how the debate gets run, what politicians are responsive to, that there's something troubling about the lack of accountability those assemblies have to the rest of the citizens, and a kind of exclusion of those who just happen not to be picked, right? You can imagine a lot of disillusions – citizens who think I would really have liked to be part of the process of deciding what to do about abortion, and yet instead it was this random group of people.
Alan Renwick 33:56
Yeah, I don't terribly much about the unaccountability of the members of the assembly, because they are chosen simply at random by lot. And you know, they are in a very meaningful sense representative of everyone out there. And part of the point is that they're not accountable – that they can simply listen to the arguments, listen to the discussion, listen to their fellow participants in the assembly, and come to a view without being encumbered by all of the wider considerations that elected politicians have to think about.
What I would be more concerned about is the accountability of the organisers of these processes. And some people have suggested that we could do away with elected institutions and simply have a democracy by lot and that all the decision making would take place through these kinds of so-called 'sortition processes', processes where we are choosing people by lot. And it seems to me that that is dangerous because you're removing any accountability mechanism from the system at all if you do that. And the danger is that if power is concentrated in these institutions, then the powerful will try to corrupt them. That's just kind of what the powerful do. And they will try to take over the process of running the assemblies and, you know, influence, manipulate the roster of experts who are speaking to members of a citizens' assembly, that kind of thing.
So it seems to me that decision makers need to be accountable to the wider electorate. And without that you risk seriously undermining the integrity of the whole system. So I don't go along with the view that some have expressed that public deliberative institutions could replace elected institutions. But they can work alongside elected institutions and enable the elected institutions to do a better job. That's what we should be aiming for.
Emily McTernan 36:14
Even without citizens' assemblies having so much power, could we worry that there's still a kind of pre-setting of the terms of debate and how it's likely to go by the facilitators, by the decisions about which experts to put? You know, it might raise the questions of who's running these citizens' assemblies, and however you decide to construct them is going to influence the kinds of recommendations they're likely to come out with. Is that a concern or do you think it's not too worrying?
Alan Renwick 36:42
Oh, no, we should worry about it. But I think we can deal with it. So we should always be vigilant. And there are these dangers. But I think we can design things well in order to minimise those dangers.
So in part, there will always be a question that is set for a citizens' assembly. And that question inevitably, you know, frames what it thinks about, how it thinks about it. Any question frames an issue necessarily. But that question should always be set by elected representatives. So you know, that is going back to the elected system.
Then the facilitation and the range of experts that take part, that should always be subject to oversight by some kind of body that is representative of a wide range of different perspectives on the issue. So for any of the citizens' assemblies that I've ever been involved in we've had an advisory board or a stewarding board or whatever it's called that includes people of all different persuasions related to that issue.
So we did one on Brexit, rather bravely, in 2017 – the Citizens' Assembly on Brexit. And we had an advisory board on that, for that, that included a range of experts, some of whom had voted remain some of whom had voted leave. And we had politicians, again, remain politicians and leave politicians. We had someone from UKIP on the advisory board for that process.
And that is essential. Otherwise there is a danger that the process will be skewed in a particular direction. And even if it isn't, the perceived legitimacy of the process will be harmed unless you can show that those safeguards have been in place.
Emily McTernan 38:45
Thank you, Alan, for a fascinating and optimistic vision of how we can make our democracy better.
We've been exploring the career and research of Alan Renwick.
Next week, we will be speaking to Katerina Tertytchnaya about preventative repression and public opinion in electoral autocracies.
Remember, to make sure that you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcast, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.
Works referenced
Curato, N., Farrell, D., Geissel, B., Grönlund, K., Mockler, P., Pilet, J.-B., Renwick, A., Rose, J., Setälä, M. and Suiter, J. (2021). Deliberative Mini-Publics: Core Design Features. Policy Press.
Dunt, I. (2023). How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn’t. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Renwick, A. and Palese, M. (2019). Doing Democracy Better: How Can Information and Discourse in Election and Referendum Campaigns in the UK be Improved? [online] Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/sites/constitution-unit/files/184_-_doing_democracy_better.pdf.