Articles by Archon Fung

Pepper D Culpepper, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy at Harvard University, Archon Fung, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard, and Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkley compare the Tomorrow's Europe deliberative poll to the Citizens Consultations undertaken by the EU earlier this year, and analyse some of the underlying aims. (Part 1)

Nearly every method of ascertaining the citizens' perspective relies upon a small number of actual citizens who, in some fashion, represent everyone else. Whereas the choices of designing electoral representation are well known - presidentialism or parliamentarianism? plurality rule or proportional representation? - the methods of direct citizen deliberation are novel and largely uncharted. It is therefore appropriate to experiment with a wide range of designs for public deliberation to identify the methods generate credible and useful citizens perspectives. Consider just a few of the important design choices.

Pepper D Culpepper, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy at Harvard University, Archon Fung, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard, and Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkley compare the Tomorrow's Europe deliberative poll to the Citizens Consultations undertaken by the EU earlier this year, and analyse some of the underlying aims.

A specter of illegitimacy haunts the democracies of Europe. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said as much last month when he noted that political parties and elections in the UK fail to engage an increasing segment of Britons. In response, he called for new methods such as citizen juries to reconnect citizens with their allegedly democratic government.

If the problem of democratic legitimacy is acute in the United Kingdom, it has reached a critical stage in the European Union.