The collected essays in Designing Deliberative Democracy provide the definitive analysis of
the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, an important innovation in the design of democratic
institutions. The government of British Columbia created an Assembly of 160 near-randomly
selected citizens and gave it the job of recommending the best possible electoral system for
British Columbia. If the Assembly recommended a system different from the current system,
its recommendation would be placed on the ballot at the next provincial election as a …

First, the claim to representativeness for the CA is based on “random sampling.” But the
actual process it employed would look peculiar to most social scientists. In British Columbia,
for example, 23,000 randomly selected voters received letters of invitation. Only 1,715
(7.4%) of those targeted responded with interest to the letters, and most of them were invited
to attend local meetings for selection of the actual participants; 964 actually showed up at
the meetings and a sample of 158 was randomly selected from those who chose to attend …