John Gastil: Deliberating Before Voting

Participatory Governance Initiative, College of Public Programs, Arizona State University &
Social and Behavioral Sciences, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

present

Deliberating Before Voting: Considering an election reform from Oregon to improve the initiative process

John Gastil, Head and Professor, Communication Arts and Sciences
Penn State University


Tuesday, March 6, 10:30-noon
Seminar Room 822A
College of Public Programs
411 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix


Since 2008, the State of Oregon has been implementing and refining a deliberative process known as the Citizens' Initiative Review, an innovative way of publicly evaluating ballot measures. It is based on a panel of randomly-selected voters who meet for five consecutive days. The members of the panel hear directly from campaigns advocating or rejecting the measure, consult policy experts, and draft a ‘Citizens’ Statement’ highlighting the most important findings about the measure. The Statement also includes the result of the final vote of the members of the panel. The ‘Citizens’ Statement’, with arguments for and against is published as a prominent page in the voters’ pamphlet as a new and easily accessible resource for voters to use at election time. In June 2011, Oregon passed a law making the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) a regular feature of the initiative process. Join us for a discussion of this democratic experiment and its applicability for Arizona.


John Gastil is Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, where he specializes in political deliberation and group decision making. He is a world renown expert on democratic deliberation and the leading author of the evaluation report of the Citizens’ Initiative Review. Professor Gastil received his communication Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, and has worked at the University of New Mexico Institute for Public Policy and the University of Washington Department of Communication. His books include Democracy in Small Groups, By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy through Deliberative Elections, Political Communication and Deliberation, The Group in Society, The Jury and Democracy, and the co-edited volume The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century.


For more information about this session, please contact Professor Daniel Schugurensky at dschugur@asu.edu