State workers can propose ideas to make California’s large government smarter and faster with a new digital democracy tool. The state is taking action on some of the suggestions.

Deliberative democracy is now officially entangled in state bureaucracy.

And that’s good news.

Last year, all 247,000 of California’s state government workers gained access to a new digital democracy tool called Engaged California. Those who used it proposed and developed 2,600 ideas, most of them ways to make California’s large government smarter and faster, according to a new report.

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State workers suggested eliminating rules and forms that caused delays, asked for less paper and better digital tools, called for the state to listen more to regular people and urged the creation of internal think tanks within government. The state is already acting on some recommendations, including improving data sharing between agencies and speeding up the state’s famously slow hiring process.

By jumping into questions of bureaucracy and efficiency, Engaged California constitutes an important advance for a promising but underperforming democratic movement.

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Deliberative democracy refers to processes in which juries or assemblies of everyday people, often chosen with the assistance of a lottery, deliberate on public questions and make policy recommendations to public institutions. One such process, the citizens assembly, has become so popular worldwide that scholars speak of a “deliberative wave.” 

But viewed up close, citizens assemblies are underwhelming — feel-good exercises that are removed from the realities of governance. The default is to design deliberations as lab experiments, highly controlled and kept separate from nasty politics, powerful and aggressive lobbyists, and stifling regulators.

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In a similar vein, assembly topics are often chosen by governments or the conveners themselves and steer clear of the most pressing problems facing 21st century technocratic governance. Deliberative bodies tend to debate narrow local controversies about land use and make aspirational local or regional plans for climate change and social issues.

I looked in vain through a worldwide list of assemblies for a deliberative assembly that focused on how government really works, in a fundamental way — debating methods of regulation or the reorganization of bureaucracies.

Alas, this distance is by design. Practitioners and scholars of deliberative democracy can be a prissy lot. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them, advising projects, including Rewrite LA and Engaged California, as a Berggruen Institute fellow.) We, along with the governments and foundations that sponsor our work, also tend to think of bureaucratic organization as a highly technical matter, best left to technocrats.

The problem is that the technocracy, regulatory bureaucracies and lobbyist offices are where the most important government decisions actually get made. Citizens assemblies can consume many months only to produce recommendations that get ignored because they are disconnected from political and bureaucratic realities.

Indeed, there are signs of a backlash. Political scientist David Farrell, who advised successful citizens assemblies in Ireland, has warned that the bodies risk losing effectiveness and political momentum.

In a provocative recent paper in the journal Politics, two scholars sympathetic to deliberative democracy — University of Edinburgh political and international relations scholar Oliver Escobar and Barcelona Autonomous University theorist Adrian Bua — sound the alarm that the field has lost touch with reality. They argue that deliberative practitioners and scholars too often devote themselves to citizens assemblies and other “mini-publics” in ways that exclude other promising forms of democratic practice, including participatory or digital processes that draw in more people.

Escobar and Bua suggest this obtuseness can’t be defended “amid rising socio-economic inequalities and global democratic recession, including growing dissatisfaction with democracy and governance incapacity as well as the rise of authoritarian populism.”

Escobar and Bua aren’t just naysayers. They offer a solution: Embed deliberative processes in the darkest, dirtiest corners of government. And instead of allowing assemblies to be temporary bodies that disband after making recommendations to authorities, keep them alive for follow-up and implementation.

“Questions of change-making capacity require opening the black-boxes of public administration and the state,” Escobar and Bua said.

Escobar and Bua have put a finger on a larger problem in human governance: the vast chasm between policy and reality. Policy changes get attention — but then don’t get fully implemented and don’t produce real-world results. And frustration grows.

Governments have kept the forces of democracy — elected officials, engaged people and democratic processes — far away from the implementers — regulators and bureaucrats inside our institutions. Reviving democracy requires more than just closing that distance. It requires a fusion of the policy with the implementation and the democracy with the technocracy.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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Which is why it’s so encouraging that California is moving its democracy into its bureaucracy.

Joe Mathews is the California columnist for Zócalo Public Square, leads the planetary publication Democracy Local, and, as a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, advises the design of Engaged California.

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