Oregon Legislature Approves Dramatic Innovation in Ballot Referenda Process
Guest post by John Gastil
Big news comes today from Oregon. The state that gave us the initiative has now given us the most dramatic new initiative reform. The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review is a clever innovation that uses a small random sample of Oregonians to scrutinize a ballot measure for a full week, then publishes the citizens’ one-page analysis in the official Voters’ Pamphlet that the Secretary of State mails to every registered voter. Today, the Oregon Senate followed the House in passing legislation to make this pilot project a regular part of the election system. Healthy Democracy Oregon, which led the campaign to pass the law, has details about the process on their website.
With colleagues from Washington, Oregon, and Wisconsin, I secured funding from the National Science Foundation to study the 2010 version of the Citizens’ Initiative Review. Earlier this year, doctoral candidate Katie Knobloch and I presented the results of that study in an evaluation report to the legislature. The gist of our findings were that the Citizens’ Initiative Review met both a high standard for deliberation and had a clear impact on the larger electorate’s understanding of the issues and their ultimate voting choices.
Stepping back from this event gives one some perspective on what this means. The Citizens’ Initiative Review now joins a set of innovative processes that have linked citizen deliberation directly to government. It stands beside the Canadian Citizens’ Assembly, in particular, as one of the most promising new ways to link small group deliberation to mass public voting on ballot measures. The bottom line is that processes like these can bring us better ballot measures and more reflective, thoughtful voting choices.
Backing up a step more, it’s necessary to appreciate where all this comes from. There have been people creating new processes for public deliberation since the 1970s, with early efforts including Planning Cells in Germany and Citizens’ Juries in the U.S. The latter process was devised by Ned Crosby, and he is the principal architect behind the Citizens’ Initiative Review, which he first developed as an idea for Washington State. What made that process a success in Oregon was coupling Ned’s creative design and years of experience with the political acumen of Tyrone Reitman and Elliot Shuford of Healthy Democracy Oregon. The three of them worked with an even larger team of volunteers and staff to design the process, implement it carefully, and publicize it effectively.
I also appreciate that Healthy Democracy Oregon left the evaluation of the process to myself and my colleagues, letting us make an independent assessment through both direct observation of the process and statistical analysis of original survey data. Not every civic reform organization gets to work alongside a separately-funded assessment team, but anyone who designs a process as innovative as the Citizens’ Initiative Review might well find that researchers can secure grant funding to assess it.
Bottom line here is that there really are constructive election reforms underway in the U.S., and Oregon’s new process will probably catch on in larger states like California, where the stakes are even higher and the cost of the process is even smaller relative to their potential impact on the state.
John Gastil, Professor, Dept of Communication, University of Washington
Incoming Head of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University
You can reach John at jgastil at comcast dot net
