JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
About a hundred citizens in Connecticut recently took part in a radical experiment in democracy. They were randomly selected to come up with a solution to the state's property tax conundrums. From the Planet Money podcast, Erica Beras explains.
ERICA BERAS, BYLINE: Connecticut has some of the country's highest property taxes. Sean Scanlon, the state comptroller, says to fix this problem, politicians might have to keep raising taxes or cut spending, but which taxes? What spending? Their choices would almost certainly make some voters mad.
SEAN SCANLON: Every few years, somebody like me comes along, and what happens is they write a report, that report gets a couple days of press, and then it collects dust on a shelf.
BERAS: Last year, Sean was approached by a group with an idea of creating essentially a random jury of 100 citizens. Get them to fix this problem. Sean was in. In that group were academics, including Helene Landemore, a Yale professor who wrote a book called "Politics Without Politicians." She has never wanted to be a politician.
HELENE LANDEMORE: Oh, no way. No. Ah, my goodness.
(LAUGHTER)
BERAS: Over the past decade, Helene has been wondering, why can't we have more everyday people in politics? Right now, politicians tend to be men, a lot of time from the same fancy colleges. They even tend to share some of the same personality traits.
LANDEMORE: Like extreme confidence, attraction to power, corruptibility.
BERAS: Helene is like, how can you help the people if you aren't of the people? She has studied citizen assemblies in France, the Netherlands, Ireland and now Connecticut. Over a few months, these citizens learned tax policy from experts with the goal of writing a proposal. They each got $1,200. First, the citizens came up with their own rules about things like, who would speak when? What would quorum be? And what would their values be? And just that discussion got heated.
JASMINE DAWSON: It was very traumatic for me. That made me realize, like, oh, this is not going to be as easy as I thought.
BERAS: That's one of the citizens, Jasmine Dawson. But the citizens started to form relationships and work through it. Citizen Bob Bailey really got into tax policy.
How much did you know about property taxes before you started?
BOB BAILEY: Very little, very little. Now we've become tax policy nerds.
BERAS: Yes.
Helene says, this is the natural arc of this type of process. People meet, they bicker, get to know each other and then come to an understanding and work together.
LANDEMORE: People who normally would hate each other across their screens, across party lines, across age differences, race differences, et cetera - when they are brought together in that way and are given proper conditions - enough time, et cetera - end up actually striking very deep friendships.
BERAS: And those relationships resulted in a proposal that was released this week. In it were 10 recommendations, including a tax on high earners and a plan to regionalize schools. Now this big experiment in politics is in the hands of politicians. It is now Comptroller Sean Scanlon's job to give that proposal to the legislature and see what they do with it. Erica Beras, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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