Intellectual Background of the Citizens Jury Process
Construct Validity, 1965. This work, done for my M.A. in political science, is posted because it was an important step in my intellectual development and because it shows that I have a solid background in empirical measurement. Paul Meehl, one of the most prominent psychologists of the 20th century, liked it. It was he who helped me believe I could think critically. He taught me to use the best objective measurement tools possible, but when good tools were not available or too costly, to then use careful observation or even intuition. It also shows that I have a solid background in empirical measurement, even though the epistemology on which the Citizens Jury was built was more in line with the later Wittgenstein than logical empiricism.
Justifying Ethical Statements, 1973. This was Appendix A for my Ph.D thesis “Concern for All.” This was my summary of the three years I spent in graduate school reading meta-ethics. It was when I convinced myself, in 1971, that it is not possible to create solid intellectual foundations for social ethics that I invented the Citizens Jury process. For better or worse, this shows the analytical approach I took to social ethics. I was encouraged in this by Prof. Herbert Feigl, who started his career in the late 1920s as one of the youngest members of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. It indicates how I tried to bridge the logical empiricism of Feigl with the “reason in ethics” philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s who were deeply influenced by the later Wittgenstein.
Extended Rational Discussions, 1973. This was Appendix B of my Ph.D thesis. By 1975, we rename these “Extended Policy Discussions”. The Jefferson Center conducted three projects along these lines: in 1975 on U.S. government-held grain reserves, in 1977 on serious juvenile offenders, and in 2011 on the relationship between the single-payer approach and the affordable care act.
In Search of the Competent Citizen, 1975 This paper discusses research that might be done to ascertain what kinds of political decisions an everyday (average) American was capable of making. It discusses the kind of sophisticated research that might be done in order to learn how well citizens could perform in novel settings such as Citizens Juries. It also shows my naivité in believing that such research might actually be funded.
“Citizens Panels: a new approach to citizen participation” Public Administration Review, vol. 46, #2, March/April 1986. It was this paper that caught the eye of Prof. John Stewart, Professor of Local Government, University of Birmingham. About 10 years later, I learned that he had spent several years urging the Institute for Public Policy Research in London to examine the work done by Professor Dienel and me. This led to a booklet published by IPPR in 1994, authored by Stewart, Anna Coote and Elizabeth Kendall. Because of the promotion of the process by IPPR, within a decade roughly 300 “Citizens Juries”, of widely varying quality, had been conducted in Britain.
Renn, O., Webler, Th., Wiedemann, P. (eds.): Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation. Evaluating New Models for Environmental Discourse. Dordrecht and Boston (Kluwer 1995)
The book in Minnesota on environmental decision making
Essays: Starting in 1965, I wrote essays as a way of reflecting on what I was learning in graduate school and what to write for my Ph.D. thesis. These are the foundation of all my work from 1965 to present. Just a few essays are listed here as examples. None of the early essays (handwritten until the middle-80s) will be posted in this website unless there is considerable interest in them.
#429 – #435 These were the essays in 1971 where I invented the Citizens Jury. They are somewhat of a mess, covering things from the creation of a real social contract (as opposed to the hypothetical social contract advocated by John Rawls) to a book, My Daddy was a Numbers Runner, which helped me to think through why I should adopt the RRCL decision process, my original name for the Citizens Jury.
#544 – #580 (September ’74 to January ’76) I invented a number of new democratic systems in the 1970s. These essays lead up to the creation of “System 4”, the new democratic system in which Citizens Juries were empowered to legislate. I gave up on this rather quickly. System 9, the heart of the unpublished book Towards a New Democracy, was the one I liked best.
Essay #968 (7-18-85) – #2229 (4-16-09) A few years ago, I created a folder on my computer about agenda setting, one of the most complex and difficult aspects of the Citizens Jury process. It deals with the problems of setting a fair agenda and how to bring in witnesses from a variety of points of view that are “balanced”. The folder contains 80 essays, along with a number of other things I wrote that were not saved as essays. This is an example of the unfinished (or sloppy) nature of my work. I never finished reviewing these to write something definitive on agenda setting. It is unclear to me whether it would be worth anyone’s time to explore these. But some of my best thinking on agenda setting was done in the 1980s when the Jefferson Center ran some of its largest projects.
Essay #1810 (7-12-99). This is about the invention of the Citizens Initiative Review.