The American ballot initiative1 is a powerful tool. Initiatives can innovate: Four states can credit ballot initiatives for legislative redistricting commissions that removed redistricting from the hands of lawmakers.2 Initiatives can break legislative logjams: Since the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act,3 citizens in seven states have used initiatives to expand Medicaid eligibility after representatives refused to do so.4 Initiatives can clarify public opinion and force action on polarizing issues such as abortion protection.5 In theory and practice, voters use citizen-initiated measures to demand swift, substantial, and popular government action.
But the ballot initiative is also broken. In some states, minimal ballot access requirements leave voters with pages of complex, confusing, and contradictory propositions.6 Special interest groups fund expensive campaigns to place obscure priorities on the ballot or oppose measures they dislike.7 And when initiatives do pass, they can face legal and political challenges that delay or outright erase their intended impact.8 Democratic? To its critics, the ballot initiative is anything but.9
Advocates have responded with a range of reforms that would cabin, streamline, and supplement initiative processes.10 Others would go much further. Recently, opponents of direct democracy have seized upon critiques to push for ostensible reforms that would effectively neuter initiatives altogether by reconcentrating power within legislatures.11 Many of these efforts have followed ballot initiatives enacting liberal priorities that conservative legislatures strongly opposed — and tried to preempt through their own use of direct democratic processes.12 While ballot initiative processes suffer from real flaws, opponents of direct democracy would throw out the baby with the bathwater. Such an outcome would be disastrous for popular sovereignty and for active, responsive government. To preserve the ballot initiative and its democratic promise, its defenders need an answer.
They may find it in citizens’ assemblies. Citizens’ assemblies are a form of democracy by lottery, in which randomly selected and demographically representative groups of citizens come together to deliberate and make recommendations or decisions on particular policy issues.13 Governance by random selection, or “sortition,” is as old as democracy itself.14 Unlike representative assemblies, such as Congress or state legislatures, citizens’ assemblies use “random or near random [selection] process[es]” to arrive at bodies that “descriptively” match the particular demographics of the body politic15 in ways that representative systems often cannot.16
This Note offers the citizens’ assembly as one way to restore the promise of direct democracy by answering criticism levied toward modern initiatives. Citizen “initiative” assemblies can ensure representative control over direct democracy, use deliberation to generate clearer, more productive initiatives, and, above all, drive more meaningful public participation in the initiative process. The argument proceeds in three parts. Part I details the democratic deficit17 built into current American initiative processes. Part II introduces citizens’ assemblies as a solution. While sortition and the related concept of deliberative democracy are relatively rare in American government today,18 more expansive cases in Europe19 and Canada,20 and experimental interventions in California,21 Oregon,22 and Massachusetts23 offer contemporary models. Drawing on these models, Part III sketches a vision for initiative assemblies — citizens’ assemblies tasked with crafting ballot initiatives — that can remake and strengthen American direct democracy.
Accordingly, this Note makes two distinct contributions. First, it makes the case for a more expansive role for the citizens’ assembly. Most prominent examples of assemblies abroad have been formed by legislatures to advise on or formulate proposals for discrete issues.24 The more limited implementations in the United States have been purely advisory in nature.25 This Note argues for a broader mandate in which standing citizen assemblies have authority, at least in part, to craft the subject matter of initiative proposals and set the process by which measures make the ballot.
Second, this Note argues for that expansive role by casting new light on the citizens’ assembly’s democratic qualities. Much has been written about the “deliberation”26 in deliberative democracy and its benefits for initiative processes.27 But equally important, and closely intertwined, is the other half: democracy. Citizens’ assemblies are powerful both because of how they make decisions and whom they empower to make them. This Note considers each. The initiative assembly can channel the democratic intent of ballot initiatives through a more genuinely democratic process than the status quo — one that grants direct political power to a representative panel of the public while still giving voice to the whole polity. And it can use intentional deliberation to make that process more productive and fair. Employed correctly and boldly, initiative assemblies can help direct democracy forge a more deliberative and representative path forward.
The primary purpose of this Note, then, is to equip supporters of direct democracy with a tool to better channel the values of representation, participation, and deliberation that ballot initiatives ostensibly foster. But this Note has something to offer skeptics of direct democracy as well. To the extent opposition emerges from the defective processes discussed here, citizens’ assemblies offer a responsive solution.28 Furthermore, citizens’ assemblies can imbue state and local government with a healthier politics that fosters participation, deliberation, and trust.29 That is hopefully something even skeptics can get behind.
I. The Ballot Initiative: Theory and Practice
A product of the Progressive Era, the ballot initiative stands for the proposition that citizens have a right to make legislative decisions outside the control of elected representatives.30 Nearly half of states, composing two-thirds of the U.S. population, have some kind of process31 through which citizens can generate legislative or constitutional32 plebiscites.33 In the 2022 elections, voters assessed twenty-nine initiatives across twelve states and Washington, D.C., passing nineteen; the November 2024 general elections featured nearly twice as many initiatives put to voters.34 These sums do not include countless ballot measures in municipal elections nationwide.
Majorities of the public support the initiative as a tool voters can use to check unresponsive state governments.35 But many critics argue that, in their contemporary form, initiatives fall short of that aspiration.36 They have a point. The next section lays out three primary critiques of ballot initiatives: the vulnerability of initiative campaigns to outsized special interest influence; the problem of “agenda control” arising from ballot access requirements; and the tendency of initiatives to produce confusing or defective policies. It then describes how opponents of initiatives exploit those critiques not to improve direct democracy, but to attempt to eliminate it altogether.
A. Ballot Initiatives: The Core Critiques
Critiques of ballot initiatives are largely operational or conse-quentialist. Operationally, critics argue initiatives fail to construct the democracy that they promise. Signature requirements, substantial campaign spending, and a low-information electorate create processes that the wealthy can easily “subvert . . . to their own purposes,”37 making direct democracy as vulnerable to the influence of moneyed interests as its electoral counterpart. In practice, voters only decide on specific proposals before them, not on what kinds of issues make the ballot in the first place. Operational flaws create a democratic deficit, which this section analyzes in two parts: the problems of interest capture and agenda control. The consequentialist critique is simpler: Initiatives generate bad policy due to confusing, politicized wording, and they conflict with the legislature’s own preferences and processes.
1. Operational Critiques: Interest Capture and Agenda Control. — The first critique is perhaps the most common: The procedures that govern initiatives make the process ripe for subversion by wealthy interests — an ironic outcome, given direct democracy’s populist origins.38 One contributing factor is how most state-level initiatives make the ballot. Every state that allows initiatives uses minimum-signature requirements to gatekeep ballot access.39 Signature requirements ostensibly ensure a floor of public support for any initiative put before the electorate. However, the practical effect of signature requirements is that ballot access becomes not so much a function of public support as a measure of fundraising and campaign capacity,40 regardless of where the threshold lands. Too high a threshold, and campaign dollars become especially important, making the ballot inaccessible to initiatives without resourced campaigns.41 Too low, and far more initiatives make the ballot, muddying the waters for voters and giving wealthy interest groups another opportunity to use their dollars to shape public opinion on potentially obscure proposals.42 No matter where states set signature minimums, interests with more resources and sophistication can play an outsized role in the process.
California provides an instructive and well-documented43 example of this challenge. With an eight percent signature threshold,44 California voters can expect to see a dozen or more initiatives on their ballot each cycle, some backed or opposed by over $100 million in campaign spending.45 In 2020, Uber, Lyft, and other companies spent over $200 million in a successful campaign to enact Proposition 22, exempting millions of gig workers from full-employee status and its accompanying benefits, such as a minimum wage.46 The “yes” side outspent the “no” campaign by tenfold,47 and there is strong evidence that the spending distorted voters’ understanding of the policy before them.48 According to one poll, forty percent of Californians who voted “yes” on Proposition 22 — depriving Uber and Lyft drivers of minimum wage protection — characterized their vote as “[e]nsuring Uber / Lyft and DoorDash employees can earn livable wages.”49 In another 2020 initiative, which sought to expand rent control, “no” voters were nearly split on whether their vote “[s]upport[ed] [r]enters” or landlords, and twenty percent did not know one way or another.50 While reasonable minds can argue about the relative wisdom of each policy, there is little doubt money substantially shaped the presentation of the issues to the electorate.
The resources involved in signature gathering point to a related problem: Ballot access requirements fail to provide voters with meaningful control over the initiative agenda. The problem of agenda control within the initiative process is a more theoretical yet under-theorized51 critique. As a starting premise, initiatives assume elected representatives sometimes “misbehave”: That is, they fail to represent and adequately pursue their constituents’ interests.52 Initiatives circumvent that failure.53 But adequate representation requires more than just reflecting constituent views on discrete questions. Legislatures can also align or misalign themselves with the public through the issues they choose to prioritize and address.54 By granting voters an opportunity to put forth their own policy proposals, initiatives purport to allow citizens to pursue their priorities when their representatives do not.
As this section suggests, however, initiatives are rarely pure instruments of grassroots politics. To the extent initiative processes return agenda control to voters, they do not do so in a democratic way. Instead, organized interests use structural advantages to put their priorities on the ballot,55 while the interests of voters with less capital may never make it there. The role of money and organization in determining ballot access threatens to turn initiatives into, at best, a form of referenda in which voters weigh in on the questions that special interests have already determined worthy of a vote.56
2. Consequentialist Critiques: “A Recipe for Confusion.”57 — The second core critique addresses the consequences of policymaking by ini-tiative. States generally include safeguards to ensure initiative language meets basic requirements for “clarity and accuracy,”58 and opponents of initiatives frequently litigate to edit or remove certain measures.59 But these safeguards fail fully to prevent initiative writers from designing policy proposals with dense, technical language60 and politicized or misleading framing.61 This design problem can contribute to the kind of voter confusion that surrounded Proposition 22. After enactment, initiatives can hamstring legislatures or agencies tasked with executing initiatives that conflict with existing policy or result in other unintended consequences.62
Contradictions and vagueness aside, there is a broader critique that initiatives generate bad policy, period. Even when initiatives clearly communicate the public’s wishes, they can do so in ways that impede future legislative efforts.63 Clunky, inefficient policymaking is not unique to direct democracy, but it adds to the initiative’s democratic deficit. Opaque or misleading language on ballots makes it harder for voters to align their policy preferences with their actual votes.64 Likewise, when legislatures and executive agencies delay, dilute, or distort65 an initiative designed and supported with a particular goal in mind, voters fail to receive the policy outcomes they voted for. Such results are neither direct nor democratic.
B. The Risks of Non-Reform
These structural flaws lead to an initiative ecosystem that frequently fails to live up to its promises. From a normative and democratic perspective, this is less than ideal: Initiatives both fall short of their potential as tools of popular power and are susceptible to the influence of moneyed interests. But even with their flaws, initiatives present voters with unmatched opportunities, under some circumstances, to shape state policies. That makes the need for reform even greater: Without it, valid critiques of initiatives may enable antidemocratic actors to do away with initiatives altogether.
In recent years, efforts to subvert or eliminate ballot initiatives have reached a new tenor. Several states have considered proposals that would make it much harder for citizens to propose and enact ballot initiatives.66 Most notably, these include three state efforts to require that initiatives receive sixty percent approval, rather than simple majorities, to succeed.67 These proposals all failed, but they are of a piece with broader efforts by largely conservative state legislatures to wrest control back from direct democratic processes.68 These efforts would have the practical effect of making initiatives nearly impossible to use,69 particularly for grassroots interests already at a disadvantage.
Even more concerning, these aggressive “reforms” have cropped up in clear response to voters using initiatives in ways that seem to make good on their purpose: enacting popular priorities when elected representatives will not. In November 2023, Ohio voters approved a ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to protect abortion.70 Anticipating that vote, the majority-Republican legislature put before voters a separate measure that would have required constitutional initiatives to reach sixty percent approval for passage71 — a threshold that would have doomed the abortion amendment, which ultimately garnered fifty-seven percent approval.72 Voters rejected the supermajority requirement, which campaigns on each side clearly tied to the November abortion vote.73 After the amendment passed, opponents began discussing ways to use legislative power to challenge the pro-choice amendment.74 Echoing critiques described above, some legislators attributed the amendment to “[f]oreign billionaires” rather than Ohioans’ popular support.75 Others claimed the amendment used “clever language” to sneak in radical consequences that voters did not want.76
This fight brings the stakes into focus: If democracy’s supporters do not reform and improve the initiative, then democracy’s opponents will continue to exploit its flaws to undermine direct democracy altogether. To build a better system, supporters should look to citizens’ assemblies.
II. Deliberative Democracy and the Citizens’ Assembly
In their various forms, citizens’ assemblies share a singular aim of empowering citizen voters. As forms of “deliberative”77 democracy, they allow citizens to draw on their own views and experiences to deliberate on and generate solutions for the issues of the day. In doing so, assemblies seek to remedy a persistent problem in representative democracy: Most citizens play a very minor role in policymaking.78 Direct democracy shares a similar origin — but, as described above, it often falls short of its goals, empowering only certain voters in uneven and limited ways. This Part outlines both the “deliberative” and “democratic” advantages of citizens’ assemblies, suggesting how they may provide answers to the initiative’s struggles. It then surveys recent examples of citizens’ assemblies abroad and in the United States, highlighting lessons that reformers can draw from each.
A. Deliberative and Democratic
For at least thirty years, political scientists have hailed citizens’ assemblies and similar structures as laudable examples of “deliberative democracy.”79 Assemblies create opportunities for diverse swaths of the public to come together and deliberate. Beyond building consensus political proposals, extensive ancillary benefits emerge from the assembly’s deliberative process. Deliberation allows individuals who may know little about a particular issue to learn and formulate new views on important policy matters through meaningful engagement with their fellow citizens.80 Deliberation can “blunt[] polarization” by helping citizens cultivate greater generosity and respect toward one another than they otherwise would.81 And deliberative structures, particularly those empowered by government, can increase trust in political systems82 and encourage broader political participation.83 Altogether, deliberative assemblies can breed healthier and more robust political participation.
If citizens’ assemblies are deliberative because of what citizens do when they are “in the room,” then they are democratic because of who is in the room to begin with. As instruments of democracy, they can deliver well-aligned political solutions because assemblies — “mini-publics”84 — model a representative, engaged body politic. At the very least, they can model the public much better than voting alone can. Democracy-by-lottery can better reflect the makeup of the public at large by avoiding the demographic skews endemic to both candidate selection85 and differential voter turnout.86 This is not to say citizens’ assemblies are ipso facto perfect models of the political bodies they intend to represent. They are, however, intentionally designed to overcome uneven patterns of representation that can occur in representative assemblies.87
When deliberation works, it leads to compromise solutions that represent not just the public at large, but a public that has meaningfully and intentionally wrestled with all dimensions of an issue. And participants’ deliberative product is representative in a direct, unvarnished way: free, at least in theory, of skews based on incomplete information, imbalanced campaign spending, and uneven participation. It is for that reason that some advocates have gone so far as to propose that assemblies replace direct and electoral democracy altogether.88 This Note does not go that far. A sortition-only system would undermine the project of mass democracy that elections facilitate. And assemblies, subject to their own logistical realities and structural challenges, are no panacea. But deliberation can meaningfully respond to the core critiques laid out above, making assemblies an excellent candidate to complement initiatives and help direct democracy make good on its promises.
B. Experiments in Assemblies
Though sortition is quite old, the modern assembly is new. Nonprofit and academic groups have recently experimented with deliberative democracy,89 even as few governments have empowered assemblies in policymaking. In these examples, assembly power has been meaningful but nonbinding — allowing assemblies to, for example, send recommendations to referenda or legislative consideration.90 This section details those cases. It first considers assemblies convened abroad to deliberate on and respond to discrete issues. It then examines the Citizens’ Initiative Reviews established in Oregon and piloted in other states. The subsequent section highlights lessons from each case and considers a first-of-its-kind proposal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that would represent an unprecedented expansion of assemblies in the United States.
1. Assemblies Abroad: Canada and Ireland. — In 2004, British Columbia initiated one of the first contemporary citizens’ assemblies.91 One hundred fifty-eight people, representing electoral districts and demographic communities across the province, had a singular task: to formulate a recommendation on whether to maintain the province’s existing system of single-member, plurality-elected districts, or to propose an alternative system instead.92 If the latter, the assembly would design a new system and submit it to a referendum.93 Two years later, Ontario initiated a similar assembly process with a similar task.94 The British Columbia assembly proposed a “single transferable vote” system;95 Ontario’s citizens chose “mixed member proportional” representation.96 Both required sixty percent support for adoption.97
Neither proposal passed, but both experiences were successful. Participants in British Columbia described their experience quite positively; one participant said that deliberating with people from across the province helped demonstrate the need for “more nuanced representation[].”98 The deliberation process encouraged participants to stay engaged: Almost ninety percent of assembly members presented on and campaigned for the proposal in the months leading up to the province-wide vote.99 Many voters felt the proposal’s origins — in citizen, rather than legislative, deliberation — gave it greater legitimacy.100 Despite its failure, the British Columbia proposal was popular: fifty-eight percent voted in its favor.101 The Ontario proposal failed, but the assembly was a success: Participants were “able and eager to learn,” and members’ ninety-eight percent attendance rate spoke to their commitment to the process.102
The Canadian experience inspired imitations elsewhere,103 with Ireland becoming Europe’s most enthusiastic and regular adopter. Beginning with a multi-year constitutional convention made up of randomly selected voters, Ireland has since used several nationwide assemblies to address a number of issues.104 The initial convention, for example, generated a successful 2015 referendum legalizing same-sex marriage.105 A subsequent assembly led to the overwhelming passage of a constitutional amendment repealing the country’s abortion ban.106 As in Canada, assembly members in Ireland described their experience with satisfaction.107 Some citizens have expressed concerns over government follow-through: Though the Irish government acted quickly on the proposed abortion referendum, it has been much slower to take action on other citizens’ proposals.108 Still, Irish citizens have responded positively overall to assemblies as a tool of policymaking, and their representatives have listened, establishing subsequent assemblies focused on other issues.109
2. American Assemblies: The Citizens’ Initiative Review. — As of 2024, no American states have charged citizens’ assemblies with making policy, either directly or subject to popular or legislative review. But they have begun their own modest experiments. Oregon, for example, enthusiastically uses ballot initiatives.110 With that usage in mind, the legislature enacted House Bill 2895, establishing “citizen panels to review and create statements on . . . initiated state measures.”111 These panels became Citizens’ Initiative Reviews (CIRs), in which small, random, representative panels of Oregon voters meet before elections to review initiatives on the ballot and write brief statements evaluating initiatives’ merits.112 Statements include “[k]ey [f]indings,” messages from assembly members for and against each initiative, a statement of “[s]hared [a]greement,” and a general description of the CIR process.113 Statements are published in the official voters’ pamphlet distributed statewide.114
CIRs represent a new model: one in which deliberation helps correct the skewed messaging and informational gaps that accompany initiatives. This structure is distinct from the Canadian and Irish models, where legislatures preselected topics for assembly deliberation and tasked assemblies with formulating more specific proposals on which the broader electorate would then vote.115 Those processes did not generate initiatives; legislatures retained control over the high-level agenda of democracy and delegated to assemblies the authority to design and direct the ultimate proposals.116 Oregon, meanwhile, maintains an initiative process that grants the public full control over the direct democratic agenda, for better or worse. There, CIRs perform a different intervention: They inject another layer of “democracy” after initiatives have been added to the ballot but before voting, using assembly deliberation to inform voters on the measures before them.117
There is evidence that Oregon voters find CIR assessments valuable — to the extent they read them.118 In one survey, a large majority of voters who read CIR statements before the 2010 election said the statements were at least “somewhat important” to their ultimate vote.119 But fewer than half of surveyed voters actually knew about the statements and the assemblies that wrote them.120 That limited uptake speaks to the CIR’s modest intervention. As of 2025, Oregon remains the only state to regularly use CIRs as part of the initiative process; Arizona, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts have each employed CIR pilots.121
C. Lessons and Opportunities
Models from Oregon and abroad demonstrate the advantages and limits of different kinds of deliberative interventions. CIRs address directly, and with some success, the problems of confusion and understanding that arise from interest-driven initiative processes. A CIR in California, for example, may have served a valuable purpose in California’s Proposition 22 debate. Rather than filtering public debate through an expensive and noisy campaign,122 a CIR could have allowed a representative, deliberative panel at least some chance to intervene. Even in expensive campaigns in the country’s most populous state, a CIR with scale and communicative power could have provided the even-handed, disinterested explanations that the campaigns lacked.
Still, CIRs fail to meaningfully address other criticisms that plague initiatives. Their influence is nonbinding and advisory: A CIR offers an opinion, even if well-considered, that voters may ignore. To the extent they do influence other voters, it is only after specific proposals, designed and advanced by interested parties, have made the ballot. CIRs cannot help voters use initiative processes to reclaim genuine democratic control over the agenda. Voters remain stuck with whichever initiatives make the ballot; they may feel better prepared to vote “yes” or “no” on proposals before them, but CIRs give them no more say over what those proposals are. CIRs address the “confusion” and “bad policy” critiques of current initiative processes, but only graze the surface of interest capture, and do nothing to affect agenda control.
The Canadian and Irish examples succeeded in different ways and fell short in others. To begin, their assemblies were not really part of initiative processes at all. Legislatures retained control of the agenda, entrusting assemblies to answer particular questions. Within that delegation, however, Canadian and Irish assemblies had meaningful space to come up with proposals that were truly their own. The Canadian assemblies were not stuck with a “yes” or a “no” on a legislative proposal; they had free rein to recommend nearly any electoral system they wanted.123 Irish assemblies had similar room to maneuver. Though some topics were more discrete — like whether to recommend an amendment legalizing abortion — others were much broader. The legislature asked a 2016 assembly, for example, “how the state can make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change.”124 That assembly generated thirteen recommendations.125
But while assemblies abroad have reasserted some agenda control, their outputs have had varying levels of consequence. For example, several Irish proposals, including many on climate change, have landed with parliamentary committees with little or no obligation to act.126 Ireland’s experiments have earned it recognition “as a world leader in the linking of deliberative democracy . . . and direct democracy,”127 but its system is still incomplete: It gives assemblies limited control of the agenda and allows only some proposals to reach the full public.
In the United States, a more robust proposal recently emerged on a local scale. In January 2024, the Charter Review Committee of Cambridge, Massachusetts, submitted to the City Council a series of recommendations,128 focused mainly on whether to keep the city’s “Council/Manager” system or to elect a mayor instead.129 But the Committee developed several additional proposals, among them a call for the Council to establish a “Resident Assembly”: a panel of at least thirty Cambridge residents, selected at random, with a regular role in the city’s policymaking process.130
The Committee proposal suggests a number of powers for the “Resident Assembly.”131 Like some Irish examples, the assembly would be able to answer questions posed by the City Council, followed by mandatory council hearings or responses.132 Like CIRs, the assembly could review, assess, and endorse resident-generated initiatives before they receive a vote.133 Unlike other assemblies, however, the Cambridge Resident Assembly would also have independent power to advance initiative petitions that fail to meet local procedural requirements.134 The assembly would also have freestanding authority to propose initiatives and draft proposed legislation.135 Importantly, the proposal requires the city council to convene at least one assembly per term.136
Though it is unclear when, or if, Cambridge will adopt the resident assembly model,137 the proposal offers another model for merging deliberative and direct democracy. Its evaluative power would serve the same productive deliberation role as CIRs, and legislative delegations would enable it to represent the public on important issues. But the expanded and systematized authority stands out. The Cambridge proposal would create assemblies that give residents the power to set the terms and content of direct democracy. And assemblies would become a more meaningful part of the system: institutions with independent authority to generate and moderate the political process, rather than ad hoc bodies responsive only to legislative assignments.
III. The Initiative Assembly
The above examples illustrate several ways states and cities can incorporate assemblies. The final Part of this Note draws on these lessons to sketch a new design for a citizens’ initiative assembly that uses deliberative democracy to make the ballot initiative a more effective, inclusive, and representative conduit for popular sovereignty. Section III.A outlines that design, suggesting approaches to and expansions for initiative assemblies. Though this Note does not recommend any one specific approach, it broadly advocates for initiative assemblies that feature two novel, more expansive characteristics: first, some kind of binding authority to generate, approve, or reject ballot initiative proposals, and second, a systematic and institutionalized role in the political and electoral process. Section III.B considers the political challenges of assemblies, identifying obstacles that advocates must overcome and arguments that may persuade skeptical legislatures. It concludes by returning to the potential benefits initiative assemblies may hold for political culture: heightened trust, deliberation, and participation.
A. Designing the Initiative Assembly
An initiative assembly can improve current ballot initiative processes by addressing each of the three primary critiques described in Part I: vulnerability to special interest capture; failure to democratize the initiative agenda; and a tendency to generate confusing, opaque, or ineffective proposals. Two general elements can make headway on each of these critiques: expansions of assembly authority and scope.
1. Expansion of Authority. — Expanding assembly authority means ensuring its power is more than advisory. Cambridge provides a useful starting point. Their resident assembly would have two main forms of binding authority: the power to independently generate legislative proposals and the power to advance petitions originating with other residents.138 Both address the “interest capture” and “agenda control” concerns involved in current processes. The proposal then provides one more form of agenda control, vesting the authority to decide whether to submit the proposal to the legislature or to voters at large.139
An initiative assembly could adopt any or all of these Cambridge provisions, or take a more expansive approach that eliminates signatures altogether. States and municipalities could, for example, replace signatures with a kind of “notice and comment” submission period overseen by assemblies. Rather than seeking signature support, voters could submit proposals directly to the panel. These proposals could range from technical and specific (for example, a fully realized carbon tax) to broad and directional (for example, a request for initiatives tackling climate change, as in Ireland140). Assemblies could then sift through and study these ideas. Their mandate would be to emerge with a set of proposals ready for public consideration, generated through public input, deliberation, and the assembly’s democratically representative authority.
Alternative models could give assemblies a more modest but still substantial refinement and selection role. States could design assemblies that approve and veto, but do not generate, proposed initiatives. They could give the assemblies authority to address and reconcile conflicts between proposed initiatives, or between initiatives and pending legislation. Each approach could address the democratic deficit: limiting the extent to which resources can shape ballot initiatives put before the entire public. Expanded authority could thus ensure that assemblies, as representative and deliberative organs of the electorate, become the conduit for the public’s political priorities.
2. Expansions of Scope. — The second change is related: expanding assemblies’ scope by broadening and institutionalizing their role. Making assemblies a regular part of the initiative process creates a systematic role for public input into direct democracy. Systematized initiative assemblies can wrest more authority from unresponsive legislatures and build toward the long-term use that can make initiative assemblies productive policymaking bodies. Granting assemblies a subject-matter-neutral role in the initiative generation process is essential to that aim. This power would distinguish the initiative assembly from the Canadian and Irish examples, which gave citizens only limited subject-specific mandates.141 There could still remain a role for assemblies empowered by legislatures to respond to particular, concrete questions, as the Cambridge proposal suggests.142 But an effective assembly should have the power to consider, generate, and advance initiatives of all kinds.
A regular, topic-neutral initiative assembly could take many forms. At a minimum, it would have to be recurring, incorporating new, randomly selected members for each election cycle. Beyond that, states could fill in the details: Helpful elements could include, for example, manageable caps on initiatives per ballot; clear rules for when and how often initiatives make the ballot or go before legislatures for consideration; and incorporation of public hearings or assembly disclosure requirements. Any of these structural choices could help initiative assemblies fulfill their core goal: to inject greater citizen control into the democratic process, and to improve civic participation and policymaking as a result.
Systematization would help initiative assemblies run better over time, turning them into integral partners in the legislative process. The mere existence of citizens’ assemblies can push legislatures in the right direction. There is evidence that legislatures in ballot-initiative states pass laws more closely aligned with voter preferences;143 that relationship could grow stronger with assemblies that better align initiatives with voter priorities. And reliable, systematic initiative generation can build an iterative relationship between direct and representative democracy.144 Even when initiative ideas are voted down or fail in assemblies, legislatures can take cues from those deliberative processes. The process also works in the reverse. Assemblies can take up popular policy ide-as that stall in the legislature. Expanding assemblies’ scope can thus stimulate a democracy-reinforcing dialogue between voters and their representatives.
B. Realizing the Initiative Assembly
Whatever form they take, assemblies will face political obstacles. Most pertinently, assemblies will require support from legislators — legislators who would be signing up to delegate even more authority to direct democracy. Even if voters can use ballot initiatives to enact assemblies, those assemblies could themselves face the same kinds of legislative pushback and noncompliance that this proposal means to address.145 Success will entail at least some cooperation. So how can assemblies find it?
First, assembly advocates should stress that better initiative processes benefit everyone with an interest in responsive government — legislators included. Though initiatives work at least in part through the political pressure they put on legislatures,146 assemblies provide an opportunity to reconceptualize the relationship between the public and their representatives as collaborative rather than competitive. A commitment to genuinely public policymaking can put representatives in a different role as “facilitators of a public dialogue, energizers for public action, or organizers of public problem solving.”147 That may be an overly optimistic view of democratic representation, but legislative behavior supports it. Across states and issues, initiative processes encourage legislators to align themselves with constituents by understanding their views and adopting congruent policies.148 Even if for cynical reasons, legislatures have an interest in responsiveness that assemblies can facilitate.
Beyond expedience, initiative assemblies provide another critical benefit: They may provide an answer to the widely acknowledged problem of political participation.149 Many proponents of assemblies advocate for deliberation as a way to repair frayed relationships between government and the public. In an era plagued by distrust150 and polarization,151 face-to-face deliberation has an intuitive appeal. Experiments in deliberation have demonstrated the practice’s positive effects. Participants leave deliberation feeling better informed, less polarized, more respected, and more prepared to engage.152 Initiative assemblies can have the dual effect of generating better, more responsive policy, and building a healthier politics along the way.
That is easier said for small cities like Cambridge than for large states like California. Scaling deliberative democracy has long been a challenge for its advocates.153 But initiative assemblies seem as good a place to start as any. Assemblies can provide both participatory benefits and incorporate other mechanisms of public access that extend their benefits even further. A notice-and-comment period for initiatives, for example, could make assemblies visible to and inclusive of many more voters. A CIR may appear to Oregon voters as little more than a public service pamphlet, but a full-on initiative assembly could be much more: a cross-section of voters with meaningful power to sort through public proposals and set policy agendas. Greater benefits of trust, cooperation, and enthusiasm could follow. And those benefits could compound into further participation, delivering even more of the democratic creativity and empowerment that ballot initiatives aim to provide.
Conclusion
The initiative is in a moment of crisis. Despite lofty ambitions and a distinguished record, the initiative today suffers from many of the flaws it set out to address. Those flaws prevent initiatives from achieving their full potential as tools of effective, responsive government. They also make initiatives vulnerable to attacks from opponents who would rather see no instruments of direct democracy at all. To save the initiative, its defenders should reform it.
They should turn to the citizens’ assembly. Initiative assemblies can make good on the ballot initiative’s democratic ideals by injecting it with the meaningful deliberation and genuine representation that it currently lacks. As a moderator of state initiative processes, assemblies can effectively respond to each of the initiative’s core critiques. Assemblies can democratize control of the agenda by giving representative panels opportunities to identify the public’s priorities and formulate their preferred solutions. Initiative assemblies can limit the influence of wealthy, organized interests by making ballot access a product of deliberation, rather than signature campaigns. And initiative assemblies can make the ballot initiative a more efficient and effective tool of governance, working in concert with legislatures instead of in opposition to them.
Finally, the citizens’ initiative assembly provides one answer to the participatory challenges that plague American civic life. Direct democracy counts on a public that is able, eager, and prepared to engage in the hard work of policymaking. Deliberative democracy demands — and facilitates — that participation. Citizens’ assemblies offer an opportunity to make a government that is genuinely of the people, rather than apart from them. Returning the reins of direct democracy to citizens can help them build faith in the process and in one another. That may give them good reason to keep coming back.