Assembly Project

Frome, a mid-sized town in the English county of Somerset

A few of us have predicted that radical assembly-based parties could be The Next Big Thing in politics. But how would one actually work?

Assemblies

What do we mean by assembly-based? This would partly mean that the party would use the incredible potential of randomly-selected citizens’ assemblies to govern, in a way that is more responsive to the people.

However, the limitation of citizens’ assemblies is that they allow only allow a limited number citizens to take part. There is a good chance that everyone else will be left wondering, “Who are these people?” or “Who elected them?” So the wider population need a chance to experience the joy of assembly democracy, and that should be done through local people’s assemblies, open to all residents in a local area.

An assembly-based party would therefore also make use of local people’s assemblies. These have several uses. They can advise its politicians at the most local level. But they can also help the citizens’ assemblies by encouraging people to support and trust the process.

To explain how this works, suppose a citizens’ assembly recommends something counter-intuitive on an issue like the environment or immigration. Politicians may be reluctant to act on it. Now suppose that local people’s assemblies bring a larger number of people to discuss the issue. Even though it won’t be most people, and even if their own decisions are different and not as radical, it’s a large number of people who can spread support for the citizens’ assemblies’ decision.

An assembly-based party would aim while having the goal of making assemblies into permanent organs of the state. Until that is possible, it could run citizens’ assemblies to advise its elected officials, candidates and activists on what policies to pursue. But local people’s assemblies will have to be their own organisations, rather than part of the party apparatus. Although the assembly-based party may run them to begin with, the locals will inevitably want them in their own hands.

The party apparatus

That would leave the question on how to organise the other aspects of the party. Who would do the campaign work? What would be the requirement for membership? Would it even have membership? Who would run the local branches?

Consider the question of how the party should choose its leader. Should it have a leadership election open to its members? On the one hand, it is good to give its activists a direct say in governing the party. However, elections cause polarisation and thoughtless decision-making, so it could place someone who appeals is at odds with its politicians and voters. Politicians and party activists often have very different views, motivations and mindsets to the wider electorate, and to each other.

One excellent suggestion is that the party should have a sortition council, a citizens’ assembly of its own membership, as its highest governing organ. Such a council would be free from the factions and careerism that often derails new political movements. The Women’s Equality Party used this to great effect to come to a wide agreement on transgender rights, allowing them to navigate a hugely divisive issue for feminists. Such a sortition council could also decide on how the party should choose its leader, like whether a leadership election is necessary.

On other counts, I wouldn’t recommend organising most things differently from a traditional political party. Outside of the assembly-based approach, it is better to stick with what works for existing party. The members would pay dues and have the sole rights to vote on internal decisions and sit on its sortition councils.

The party apparatus would be busier and bigger during the election campaigns, but it would not just exist for campaign time, because:

• Most political systems allow for unexpected votes — by-elections, snap elections or both — so the campaign machine should be able to spring into action if one arises.
• Even regular elections require more than a month-long campaign. The most effective way to do this is to canvass households, but this is time-consuming, so it is important to do this outside of campaigns.
• It keeps the activists bonded by regularly seeing each other and doing physical tasks together (proximity).
• It helps the activists learn about what matters to voters.

So outside of election campaigns, a core of the most active party members should be out canvassing each week.

Leadership

Leadership matters. The Australian prime minister John Howard used to say that “Disunity is death” for a party. The Keys to the White House, a model with a strong track record for predicting American presidential elections, includes signs of dissent in the ruling party as increasing their chance of defeat. Voters will only support a party when it is seen as effectual.

What does history teach us about leadership? It teaches that the best leaders tend to be the ones who listen to and mediate with many people rather than centralising power around themselves. By inviting open debate and listening to many perspectives, they are less likely to make mistakes. Even just one dissenter in the group can be a powerful correction. But good leaders also get things done, not by doing everything alone, but by empowering subordinates.

In our current political culture, we often expect heads of government and their rivals to understand every issue and have a policy ready to deal with it right away. But they can’t, and with new developments like 24-hour news and social media, it has become increasingly hard for them to hide how they can’t. So the leader of a decentralised party should be honest that they don’t know everything.

Politicians are often mocked when they changed their mind, known as U-turns in the UK and flip-flopping in the US. But in truth, good politicians need to U-turn when the situation or common knowledge changes, and people have no problem accepting that. Until around 2010, most Western politicians believed marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Many politicians ‘U-turned’ when they to decided it could include gay and lesbian couples too, but few people complained of it. ‘U-turns’ become a problem when it betrays what they offered to voters, such as axing a spending proposal that they’d made to win votes.

So decentralised parties need a different kind of leader, one who shows humility and acknowledges that they don’t know everything, but will consult whenever practical with the wider public. And whenever this is impractical, they will consult with their politicians or ministers.

This may sound like a passive leader. But leaders do have an active role to play:

• They make decisions that need to be made on the spot, such as crisis management and giving interviews. Deciding what to do in these situations is too cumbersome for a meeting, let alone a citizens’ assembly.
• They put a human face on the party. It is advantageous that supporters may have a parasocial relationship with them.
• They hold their subordinates to account, making sure they do their jobs well.

Like the Romans in the republican period, I am quite sympathetic to the idea of having co-leaders, as it symbolically discourages the ‘one guy in charge’ mentality.

Discipline

Most political parties in the world operate with the whip. Their elected politicians are ordered to vote the same way on most bills, and politicians who defy the whip can be thrown out of their party, which is typically a political kiss of death. The US is an exception, with its tradition of decentralised parties that has been spectacularly strained in the last 15 years. (I’m writing this during a government shutdown.)

One of my recent posts was on why parties and especially the whip system are unfit for purpose, as it encourages blind loyalty, dishonesty and greed for power, and the public know it. So assembly-based parties should abolish the whip for regular bills. (I caveat this by adding it may be worth reserving it for emergencies.) If the party is in opposition, it’s easy enough to let the party’s elected officials vote as they please.

But as I also noted then, if there was an upside to the whip system, it at least got things done. How would an assembly part get things done if in power, and avoid the deadlock of the kind that plagues the US Congress? The answer is that citizens’ assemblies could break it. They could resolve contentious issues. It won’t be practical for them to deal with every single line of a law, let alone day-to-day decisions that ministers make, so their focus should be resolving the main political disputes of the day.

Because of this, a decentralised party would not make “promises” as politicians traditionally do, although in multi-party systems, people are used to the idea that a party can’t always get what it wants. Instead, it would focus more on offering “priorities”, keeping an open mind about how it would govern.

All this is a challenge. There would likely be mistakes, such as a government paying consequences for rushing into a policy change that the public weren’t ready for, or failing to come to an agreement around a key promise. Still, the example of Frome shows it is possible for a decentralised party to govern successfully, at least at a very local level.

Top-down or bottom-up?

Creating one such party requires thinking about what your destination is. But how would you actually create it? Perhaps the important question is here is whether it be created from the top down or bottom up?

The advantages of top-down movements are obvious. What a tremendous boost it would be if a cast-out politician or a rich businessman announced plans to create one. But the disadvantages are obvious too. As we have seen with Your Party, new radical movements are vulnerable to infighting. Some like Barcelona en Comú have managed to hold together for many years, but even they have faced friction managing their many factions and never fully repeated the energy of their 2015 debut.

Even if they can get their act together, they are likely to fall back on the same methods of the existing parties. This is what appears to have happened with Denmark’s Alternativet party, which initially aimed for a new postpartisan alternative but increasingly became more like a conventional green party.

Nevertheless, I would encourage anyone in a position to launch a top-down movement to give it a try. Even if it fails, it could be valuable publicity for the concepts. The best method would be:

1. Make a national announcement of the new party to great publicity.
2. Invite interested people to sign up.
3. Train local organisers in basics such as holding assembly-style meetings. (This may also require training trainers too.)
4. Let branches hold local Zoom calls to start their formation.
5. Let branches hold their first local face-to-face meetings.
6. Sign up the branches to join the party structure.
7. Using sortition, select delegates from each branch, who will then make decisions at higher local, regional and national levels.

But it is more likely that it will grow out of a grassroots movement of local assemblies first. Once a strong assembly culture has taken root in a local area, it can ally with local politicians or stand its own candidates. It would also spread to other local areas, which can happen astonishingly fast if you find a winning formula. These assembly cultures would ally and then federate with others in their local area, eventually forming regional and national federations. Throughout the process, they would use assemblies selected by sortition to organise.

It may not be as exciting as a top down start, but it has often been more effective. But it’s often better to try more than one way.