day-and-half long meetings over the course of one year. Their deliberative process consisted of
an educational component in which they learned about various electoral designs, a consultative
phase in which they attended open meetings throughout the province to solicit the views of other
citizens, and a decisional phase in which members deliberated about the merits of various alter-
natives, including the status quo. Attendance at the meetings was very high — around 94%. Each
member dedicated approximately thirty days to the Assembly process over the course of one
year.
In the course of their deliberations, members decided that B.C.’s electoral system ought
to serve three fundamental values: fairness, understood as proportionality in the allocation of leg-
islative seats; local representation, understood as the connection between an elected representa-
tive and her geographic constituency; and choice, understood as the number of candidates and
parties from which voters select. It is not at all clear that notables socialized into the culture of
professional politics would have favored the same organizing values. Assembly members, for
example, explicitly selected these values at the potential expense of strong and coherent political
parties. In the educative phase of the Citizen Assembly process, the members learned about the
workings and implications of alternative voting schemes from various political scientists. Ac-
cording to observers’ accounts, their subsequent deliberations were quite sophisticated. In con-
sidering the merits of various schemes, members simulated the operation of different proposals
to evaluate their relative levels of complexity and potential consequences. At the end of the proc-
ess, Assembly members voted between two alternatives — a mixed member proportional (MMP)
system and a version of the single transferrable vote (STV). The STV option defeated MMP by a
123 to 31 in a vote of Assembly members. Bypassing the legislature, the citizens of British Co-
Reflective Equilibrium in Democratic Theory — Draft Only!
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Convention