Matt Qvortrup dissects citizens’ juries

It’s called a ‘citizens’ jury’. Prime Minister Gordon Brown called it his new big idea; a mechanism which – according to the PM – will bring about ‘a new kind of politics’, and result in a revitalisation of citizen engagement and participation. Alas it will not.

The idea of a citizens’ jury is a simple one really. Instead of relying on tried and tested, adversarial, party politics, the government will select ‘ordinary people’ who – like members of a jury in a court case – will deliberate and make recommendations after they have taken evidence from experts.

In the past, citizens’ juries have been used to discuss GM crops, priorities in the NHS and to gauge support – or otherwise – for nanotechnology. So it is stretching it to call it new!

Pioneered by left-of-centre American social scientists, citizens’ juries were introduced in Britain in the mid-1990s by the Institute of Public Policy Research – also known as New Labour’s favourite think-tank.

Of course, this association with the centre-left is not an indictment in itself. The problem with citizens’ juries and the other mechanisms used by the current government is that we have no evidence that they work.

They don’t work
Citizens’ trust in politicians has not gone up in countries that have used citizens’ juries. If anything the reverse has happened. In Denmark – one of the countries that have experimented most extensively with the mechanism – trust in politicians is at an all-time low.

The reason for this could be that governments often choose not to listen to the views of the people. Take the often quoted example of GM-Nation in Britain in the summer of 2003. Billed as ‘an unprecedented experiment in citizen participation’, the website received 2.9 million hits and 24,609 visitors – of whom 60 per cent submitted feedback forms (1). Yet, despite the expressed uneasiness on the part of the public, the government paid scant notice to their concerns.

Another example of non-listening was the citizens’ juries on nanotechnology conducted by the think-tank DEMOS and Lancaster University. Contrary to expectation, the citizens grew wearier of nanotechnology once it had been explained to them (2). These findings have had little impact on the government.

Governments rarely like to be told that they are wrong and that their policies do not work. Like Lord Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen they have an in-built tendency to put the telescope to the blind eye.

In a review of more than 200 articles published on citizens’ juries in the last decade, none was able to show any positive statistical effect on public services.

Manipulation
In short, Brown’s new big idea is neither new nor effective. Indeed it is difficult not to see citizens’ juries as simply focus groups by another name. Except citizens’ juries are more open to manipulation. For whereas participants in a focus group are free to talk, members in a citizens’ jury – unlike in court cases – are constantly controlled by a facilitator.

Given that citizens’ juries are often organised by government-friendly organisations, it is little wonder that the government often finds the result it wants.
This has grave consequences as the outcome of citizens’ juries departs from public opinion. When citizens’ juries have had an effect is when participants have said what the government wants to hear. It is, perhaps, not surprising that citizens’ juries recently have received the stamp of approval by the Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China!

The fact of the matter is that we live in a consultative democracy. Brown wants to strengthen the House of Commons – or so he says. But instead he continues to send legislation for consultation to interest groups. Since Labour came to power in 1997 there have – according to Cabinet Office figures – been more than 500 consultations per year. This means that there are 1.5 new consultations every day.

Real engagement
Britons are some of the most active, engaged and committed citizens in Europe. Fully 55 per cent of us sign petitions and 25 per cent of us have engaged in lawful protest (e.g. demonstrations) within the past five years (3).

If Gordon Brown really wanted to engage us, he could introduce citizen-initiated referendums. In Switzerland, many US states and New Zealand, voters can demand referendums provided they can gather a specified number of signatures. Where the system has been introduced, voters’ knowledge of policies increases, as does engagement and turnout.
But there is a snag. If you give power to the people, they might use it against you.

References
Matt Qvortrup is the author of The Politics of Participation: From Athens to e-Democracy (forthcoming 2007), Manchester University Press
1. GM Nation Final Report
2. M Kearnes, P Macnaghten and J Wilsdon (2006) Governing at the Nanoscale, London, DEMOS
3. Matt Qvortrup (2007) The Politics of participation, Manchester University Press

Professor Matt Qvortrup is at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and currently affiliated with Policy Exchange, an independent thinktank in London