A new kind of town hall meeting
Radically rethinking a powerful but in some ways outdated tool could empower both Australian politicians and their constituents
First up, this post is really a plug for the central innovation of the “Connecting to Parliament” project: the “deliberative town hall”. Three of these processes have already been run in Australia but the process is still very nascent there and confined to one or two use cases (one being the case where the issue is subject to a conscience vote). With this in mind, I try to make the case for readers who might not have encountered the idea and also propose that it could and should be deployed more expansively than the project publicly envisages.
And also, it’s a bit longer than I plan to be the norm. Settle in friends (if you love democracy and opportunities to apply deliberative and participatory democratic innovation in Australia).
Meaningful communication between citizens and representatives is at the heart of good democracy
Good democracy requires meaningful communication about policy between politicians and their constituents. It requires that citizens both understand policies and feel understood. The communication should be informed, and there should be strong potential for both parties to come away having changed their mind in some way. I don’t think this claim is very ground-breaking, but here’s some theory to support it if you don’t agree.
There isn’t enough of it in Australia
When was the last time you had or observed a conversation like this about policy with an Australian politician? (Ok, if you’re not Australian, this question is a little bit rigged, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s a similar story in your own context). As far as observing goes, we know that this isn’t the way conversations play out in the media. Far too often, policy is communicated via three-word slogans. As far as direct communication goes, politicians invest a lot in meeting with constituents in their electorate through attending community functions and events and meeting with interest groups. But interest groups aren’t “the typical citizen” and while some conversation about policy takes place between politicians and citizens at community functions and events, the conversation is at the least, likely to be pretty short.
The most common forums for hearing and conversing directly with a politician about policy are town hall meetings or community meetings: open forums for politicians to address and hear questions and feedback from constituents on policy issues. At least in 2019, Bill Shorten was edging towards his hundredth town hall, not an uncommon range for MPs to aspire to. Many newly elected independents are highlighting their commitment to the town hall or community meeting, in line with their platform of commitment to meaningful representation.
As they’re currently configured, town hall meetings go some way towards supporting communication between politicians and their constituents. My objective certainly isn’t to undermine the effort of representatives and often selflessly committed community members to participating in them. I do want to suggest that as the primary vehicle for facilitating this kind of communication, they suffer from important shortcomings and innovation is needed to address these. And to my mind, running more of them in their current form isn’t going to address the fundamental deficit of meaningful communication between citizens and politicians in Australian politics.
The problem with town halls in their current form
First, town hall meetings are very far from representative. In brief, participants are disproportionately older, more socioeconomically advantaged and more civically engaged than the general population. They reflect the broader global scholarship on political participation: socioeconomically advantaged and elderly individuals are more likely to participate and have their voices amplified. I found it hard to find an aggregate study of demographics in the Australian context, but descriptive studies certainly bear out the problem. One recent study notes that “we repeatedly noted the impact of place on who was in the room, whose voice was valued and who was absent. The usual places for formal community gatherings – town halls, community centres – attracted people already networked into these formal places. These ‘tried and true places’ limited community participation to the ‘tried and true’ performance…The irony of inclusion is that many of our formal processes aimed at inclusion are experienced as very exclusionary.”
And if you need a visual, and with absolutely no disrespect to the participants, the recorded Australian town hall meetings I can find (take this one or this one, for example) tend to bear out the demographic skew.
Second, coming back to the democratic ideal of informed and meaningful communication that involves understanding and opinion change on both sides, the quality of conversation in town hall meetings falls short. Conversation isn’t typically deeply informed and it’s not deliberative. There’s nothing stopping politicians from sticking close to talking points and evading questions. Citizens aren’t obliged to ask questions that are informed or weigh up alternative arguments before putting their view.
This isn’t a criticism of participants. To the contrary, people are capable of engaging with deeper information and complexity if you give them a chance to, and policy is better when you make it by weighing up information and arguments. So why wouldn’t you structure meetings around this kind of engagement? I don’t think this is the intention, but it seems likely that some subliminal condescension driving this.
The result
Trust in government is declining again, even if after a brief increase in the early stages of the pandemic. In 2022, 43% of Australians trust government leaders. More than half of Australians see government and media as divisive. More than 60% of Australians believe that government (and journalists) are actively trying to mislead them by saying things they know are false or grossly exaggerated.
It’s hard to draw precise causal conclusions, but it seems intuitively fair to attribute at least some of this trust problem to a lack of meaningful communication.
And even more directly, more than 60% of Australians say “it has gotten to a point where Australians are incapable of having constructive and civil debates about issues they disagree on.” Just before COVID in 2019, less than 60% of Australians were satisfied with how democracy was working.
Reimagined town halls could provide the kind of communication we need
The tool I’m proposing as part of the answer: the “deliberative town hall,” pioneered by political scientist Dr Michael Neblo. They solve for the issues noted above by adding four key design features to the traditional town hall meeting:
Random selection – constituents are randomly sampled
Neutral, independent third-party moderation
Focus on a single issue
Provision of non-partisan background information in advance
Random selection solves for the major demographic skew we currently see in town hall meetings (always with the caveat that random sampling can never be perfect, but it’s certainly a step toward far better representation). Participants who you might otherwise call “disengaged” are given a voice.
The features of moderation, a deeper focus on a single issue and provision of non-partisan background information improve the quality of the conversation, ensuring that it moves productively and creates open dialogue.
You could imagine an in-person deliberative town hall but as I understand it, the original format involves a live-video feed. Making town halls as they’re currently run virtual definitely isn’t new, but the virtual format is particularly well-equipped to accommodate random selection, including at the national level or even when you’re trying to reach people who live further away from an in-person venue in a smaller electorate.
There are obviously trade-offs between the practical constraints of time and cost, and the level of deliberation and direct engagement that’s possible, especially when it comes to:
Number of participants: processes have been run in the US with thousands of participants, but of course they can be run far more intimately with smaller groups.
Compensation of participants: the closer you’d like to get to a true random sample, the more important it is that you compensate participants. My understanding is that even without compensation, especially given the short, online format, uptake has been very strong, and samples have been relatively random. But I don’t have the exact statistics and I’m trying to find them.
They’re a win for both politicians and citizens
The politician perspective
More than 90% of participants in a US-based experiment said they’d do the townhall again and that the sessions were valuable to democracy. In US-based randomized controlled field experiments that substantially mirrored the deliberative townhall format, researchers found “evidence of substantial persuasion effects on specific policy issues, attributions of trust and approval, and ultimately the decision to vote for the leader”.
Time and cost are obvious potential barriers to any kind of direct engagement between politicians and constituents. Those two barriers can seem pretty damning when it comes to achieving the scale that a politician might imagine makes this worthwhile, and that supports the argument for these forums as potential mechanisms for improving the quality of political communication in Australia at a meaningful scale.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say a politician runs two online meetings per week, each one hour, with 50 randomly selected participants. Each participant talks to two people about their experience. No in-person event costs are incurred and an academic institution prepares the briefing material (perhaps drawing from a list of agreed nonpartisan sources). Let’s assume you don’t compensate participants so that the volume in this example isn’t so costly.
Over the course of a three-year term, the politician could reach 45,000 people (some admittedly indirectly). That’s nearly 40% of the average 116,000 person federal electorate. Through random selection and the virtual format, you’re reaching way more of your electorate and way more people who aren’t usual suspects, and the conversation is far more deliberative. Or if you take the lens of a state or national government (rather than the local electorate lens), twenty representatives acting in their role as party members at the state level (addressing issues attached to their portfolio or committee) could reach nearly 20% of QLD, or more than 10% of NSW, for example. Yes, for argument’s sake, I’m dreaming big here; amongst other things, I’m assuming parties go all in and I’m ignoring some of the challenges in recruiting participants. But even if you cut those numbers in half, they’re still striking.
The citizen perspective
Politicians use fewer talking points. In US-based experiments, “they took an interest in the material and used thoughtful, fact-based questions, arguments and statements”. They’ve also changed their positions on bills or provisions during sessions. And as mentioned above, citizens came away saying they’d do it again and that the session were valuable for democracy.
Where do we use them?
As I mentioned, the Connecting to Parliament project has overseen three deliberative town halls in Australia: one run by Andrew Leigh MP on mitochondrial donation, and two run by Alicia Payne MP on young people and Australian politics. The mitochondrial donation example highlights the appeal of using deliberative town halls to address issues that haven’t really become politicised yet; this particular issue was subject to a conscience vote. I’m a big fan of these projects and the openness of these politicians to trialling something innovative.
The first step is to bring more MPs on board to conduct more town halls like these at the level of their local electorate, as the Connecting to Parliament project envisages. At the federal level, 149 of 151 MPs haven’t tried it yet, and hundreds more state and territory electorates are yet to give this a go.
But I think the unique features of deliberative town halls in combination, especially random selection, a virtual format and a focus on informing participants, also create exciting possibilities for using deliberative town halls more expansively. I want to highlight the possibilities along two dimensions:
Who uses deliberative town halls: What if they were used by parties (or independents) or legislative committees, going beyond use by an MP in their capacity as a representative of the local electorate, recruiting samples at the state or national level? You might imagine that a Minister (state or federal) uses a deliberative town hall to inform discussion on a state or federal policy issue.
The issues they’re used for: What if you used deliberative town halls to inform state or national policy issues that are a core part of a party’s platform, but where the details haven’t yet been worked through or are already slated to be put to public consultation? At the national level, here are a few examples, drawn from ALP policies that would appear to fit the bill of promised action, the shape of which should be informed by public consultation:
A national youth engagement model, building on Alicia Payne MP’s work in this space
Options for delivering greater certainty to the national broadcasters to safeguard against ideological cuts and political interference
I’m not suggesting that these relatively short engagements are appropriate for working through detail on all of these issues, but they could be a powerful form of communicating with and soliciting feedback from the public on high-level options.
To my mind, there are many more use cases for deliberative processes, but given the focus of this post on communication between representatives and citizens, I wanted to highlight this one as a case that could be particularly mutually beneficial for both parties.
Thanks to Prof John Gastil and the Connecting to Parliament project for the Tweets! https://twitter.com/jgastil/status/1546508303433207808?s=20&t=ZKyDb3E9wQlAKBBtjtjcNA, https://twitter.com/connecting2parl/status/1546895918905135104?s=20&t=ZKyDb3E9wQlAKBBtjtjcNA
I reckon: yes. Every aussie community I've been connected to—from tradies in Rouse Hill to surfers on the Northern Beaches—have had valuable perspectives to contribute to policy discourse that otherwise seem to be ignored. Why rely on 151 brains (227 if you include our senators) when you could use 25 million? Are any of the Aussie unis currently doing work in this space, Rach? What key hurdles do the "Connecting to Parliament" project face in their attempts to scale? Is it lack of interest from politicians? Organisational capacity? Something else?