If something works once, why not try it again?

The lead investigator on this project, John Gastil, had the rewarding experience of helping to design an electoral reform that became a reality. In 2000, he authored By popular demand: Revitalizing representative democracy through deliberative elections. That was book helped inspire civic reformers in Oregon, who lobbied their legislature to enact one of the ideas in the book. That new process, the Citizens’ Initiative Review, became the focus of Gastil’s research for ten years–work that he and Katie Knobloch summarized in the 2020 book, Hope for democracy: How citizens can bring reason back into politics. The lesson learned is that ideas can become reality, so you’d better have a research plan in place to make sure they work.

The Democracy Machine is the tongue-in-cheek name for just such a project, which extends from theory about what’s possible for democratic innovation online to practical methods for implementing those ideas and testing their efficacy. This all begins with a deliberative vision of the democratic process, which can be summarized reasonably well in this figure from a 2018 article, “Early Glimpses of a Robust Public Consultation System in San José, California.”

Before such a system can be tested, it has to come into existence to a sufficient degree. That’s where our project partners come in because they aim to build online engagement tools and platforms that will test out one or more of the key features of this so-called “Democracy Machine.”