A Random Group of Irish Citizens Solved a Problem Their Politicians Had Avoided for Decades

In 2016, Ireland did something almost no other country had tried at that scale: it handed one of its most divisive political questions to a group of 99 ordinary citizens, chosen at random, rather than to elected politicians.

The question was whether to change the country’s strict abortion laws — an issue Irish politicians of every party had spent decades avoiding, for the obvious reason that touching it risked losing votes either way. The Citizens’ Assembly spent months hearing evidence from doctors, lawyers, religious leaders and campaigners on both sides. Then it deliberated, and voted.

Here’s the part that surprises most people when they hear about it: the group didn’t produce a shouting match. It produced a considered, majority recommendation for reform — one that went on to shape a national referendum in 2018, which passed decisively.

Politicians hadn’t been unable to solve this because the public was too divided to reach an answer. They’d been unable to solve it because solving it, one way or the other, was politically dangerous for anyone facing re-election. Randomly selected citizens had no re-election to worry about. They just had a problem to work through, together, with enough time and information to do it properly.

Ireland has since used the same model on several other contentious issues. It’s become one of the closest real-world tests of the idea at the heart of The Answer: that ordinary people, given time and balanced information rather than a campaign to win, are often better equipped to handle divisive questions than the professional politicians we currently elect to do it for us.

If a random group of citizens can resolve a question your elected representatives spent decades avoiding, what does that tell you about who should actually be deciding it?

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