Last July, an unusual letter arrived at Kathryn Kundmueller’s mobile home in central Oregon. It invited her to enter a lottery that would select thirty Deschutes County residents to deliberate for five days on youth homelessness – a visible and controversial issue in a region where the population and cost of living have soared. arrow in recent years. Those chosen would be paid for their time – almost five hundred dollars – and asked to develop specific policy recommendations.
Kundmueller was invited to join what’s called a citizens’ assembly. These gatherings do what most democracies claim to do: trust normal people to make decisions on difficult political issues. Many citizens’ assemblies follow a basic model. They gather a random but representative sample of a population, provide them with high-quality information on a topic, and ask them to work together to make a decision. In Europe, these groups helped spur reform of the Irish constitution to legalize abortion, an Austrian pharmaceutical heiress guided in her speech on how to give his wealth and became a regular member of the government in Paris and Belgium. Although still rare in America, this model reflects the striking idea that the fundamental problems of politics—polarization, apathy, manipulation by special interests—can be transformed by radically direct democracy.
Kundmueller, who is generally frustrated with politics, was intrigued by the letter. She loved the prospect of helping to shape local policy, and the topic of housing insecurity had particular resonance for her. As a teenager, following an argument with her father, she spent months bouncing between her friends’ couches in Vermont. When she moved across the country to San Jose after college, she lived in her car for a while while she looked for stable employment. She worked in finance but became disillusioned; now in her early 40s, she ran a small cleaning business. She was still thinking about living in a van and renting her mobile home to save money.
From an initial mailing to twelve thousand seven hundred homes in Deschutes County, approximately one hundred and twenty people responded. The assembly’s organizers – a group of nonprofit organizations supported by local elected officials and philanthropic funding – wanted the selected delegates to reflect the county’s demographics along many axes, including age, gender, housing status, ethnicity, political affiliation, and education. Using the results of the survey of respondents, the Portland-based organization Healthy Democracy deployed software to create numerous combinations of delegates that would reflect the region in microcosm. When one of these groups was chosen at random, through a lottery-like system, Kundmueller was one of them.
The assembly lasted five full days, spread over two weekends spaced a few weeks apart. Cohort members, ranging in age from their teens to their 80s, included a retired pipe fitter, an IT specialist, a restaurant manager, an employee of a local ball manufacturer, and several small business owners. Some delegates struggled to pay rent in cramped apartments; others had spacious houses with many spare rooms. About fifty percent were politically unaffiliated, with the other half split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
They met in the airy, wood-paneled atrium of a new building on the campus of Oregon State University-Cascades, in the Bend County seat, and spent the first weekend learning about homelessness among young people and about each other, with icebreaker activities and small group discussions. , and expert presentations. “There was an awkward vibe in the room for me, in a very good way, a sort of first-class college feel,” a member of a regional government board who observed the first weekend told me. end.
An awkward but civil conversation was an improvement on recent political discourse on homelessness in Deschutes County. A Bend City Council member recalled a public meeting in which someone compared homeless people to raccoons, saying that if they were fed, they would stay in the area and do more no more raccoons. Advocates for the homeless might also be extreme; another local elected official described being compared to a Nazi for suggesting the need to regulate encampments.
During the first weekend, assembly members formulated questions that they wanted to answer during the second session. Organizers then convened panels comprised of nonprofit service providers, government employees and community advocates to address delegates. Some questions were very general, such as “How can we break the cycle of generational poverty?” » Others were very targeted: “How much money is spent cleaning up homeless encampments? and “Is there more funding or resources to build more tiny houses?” »
In an era of high political polarization and dysfunction, a diverse group of citizens studying and calmly discussing a nuanced issue presents a surprisingly functional picture of politics. “It was like Congress without the showboating,” Elizabeth Marino, an associate professor of anthropology at OSU-Cascades whose research explores divisive conversations, said of the first weekend. Marino, alongside a group of MIT researchers, wanted to observe the assembly to understand how people navigated charged conversations. Marino’s research team found that when they change the moral frameworks used to discuss polarizing topics, greater consensus becomes possible. In one study, researchers found that when climate change was framed in terms of patriotism, personal responsibility, and the purity of America’s environment, conservatives were more likely to say it was caused by humans than when the topic was approached with an emphasis on values like justice or fairness, which generally appeal more to liberals. The team found a similar result when a suicide prevention message for gun owners invoked tradition and responsibility. These were controlled studies; Whether something similar would happen spontaneously in Bend was an open question.
On a cool Friday morning in October, delegates chatted over coffee and fruit in the light-filled atrium as they waited for the final three days of the assembly to begin. The room’s aesthetic was split between an elk-hunting cabin and a trendy cafe; some people wore jeans, work boots, or cowboy hats, while others wore leggings, down jackets, and hoodies. Bend reflects a similar mix: The town, population about one hundred thousand, is a former logging town that is now home to craft breweries, high-end boutiques, and tech companies.
As delegates took their seats at a large U-shaped table, they chatted amicably. After the first weekend, they now knew who played Scrabble, who owned alpacas, who did upholstery work. The atmosphere was more like a potluck between neighborhood associations than a city council meeting.
On a row of windows was a cloud of yellow sticky notes on which delegates had written points they wanted the whole group to consider. These ranged from the factual (“500 homeless kids in central Oregon”) to the political arguments (“Direct cash transfers have shown life-changing changes for youth in the homeless system “) to an aphorism attributed to conservative economist Thomas Sowell (“There are no solutions, only compromises”).
During the morning session, a delegate named Benjamin, a bearded man in a blue and white checkered shirt, tapped the microphone on the table in front of his seat and began speaking. Based on the information presented, he said, it seems reasonable to assume that it is not possible to increase the supply of housing quickly enough to bring prices down. Rather, he wonders if there is a way to reduce demand from “out-of-area buyers” who have “disproportionate purchasing power.”
The three panelists — all housing policy experts and members of city or county government — offered no concrete ways to accomplish this. “It’s probably a larger philosophical debate,” said Erik Kropp, Deschutes County deputy administrator. “I don’t know how you limit the buyer in terms of where they’re coming from.” When a second speaker mentioned a policy in Portland that used property tax revenue to fund affordable housing, Benjamin, reading on his laptop, cited various places that tax buyers from outside the area: “I have a list here,” he said. . Kundmueller, a few seats away, nodded as he spoke and jotted something down on his clipboard. “Is this something you consider politically feasible? » Benjamin asked the panel members. They didn’t know it; one suggested that this was a question for elected officials, not staff.
Benjamin’s idea could be considered a wealth tax, but that’s not how he presented it. Instead, he made an implicit call to defend the region’s residents against foreigners who are driving up prices. “It hit me,” Marino said later. “It seemed like a new way forward. That’s something you don’t get very often when you’re listening to a debate on site, is it? »
During a snack break, I approached Benjamin, who was speaking to a small group of delegates about the unreliability of the media. Rumors about immigrants eating animals in Springfield, Ohio, were based on truth, he claimed – he was from there, so he should know. He was happy to talk with me about his life and his political views, which he described as “somewhere near anarchism, agorism and libertarianism.” But he believes these labels are misleading. “Which Libertarian Have You Heard Suggesting Raising Taxes?” »