Amy Lang's Home Page

About Me | Vita

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Welcome to my website!

Research

My dissertation explores the social dynamics of citizen deliberation. Over the course of 18 months, I observed the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, a randomly selected group of 160 citizens of British Columbia who met over the course of a year to decide whether or not BC needed a new system for translating votes into seats. I use field observations and interviews with the staff and participants to write about a variety of issues, including the impact of procedure on decision- making, the development of bases of agreement among citizens, and the transformations experienced by participants in the Citizens' Assembly process. I am currently starting a follow-up study of the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform. More generally, I am interested in the many different ways citizens engage in political life, including patterns of associationalism, social movements, participatory governance efforts, and participation in institutionalized politics.

Work in Progress

But is it For Real? Forthcoming in Politics & Society, March 2007. This paper provides a detailed description of the BC Citizens' Assembly process. I address two critiques about the Citizens' Assembly model that are often raised about other citizen participation schemes. These are first, whether such a process can be truly independent, and second, whether a Citizens Assembly process is an improvement over traditional means of citizen consultation. Using evidence from the BC Citizens' Assembly I argue that the independence and quality of citizen participation depends on the institutional constraints of the participatory setting, and how citizen interests and arguments for policy outcomes crystallize over the course of their process.

Agenda Setting in Deliberative Forums (revised January 2007) Who sets the agenda in a deliberative forum? This paper opens with a brief discussion of why agenda-setting poses a problem for deliberation theorists and practitioners. Next, I examine in detail the agenda-setting processes in the BC Citizens' Assembly. I argue that the organizers of the Assembly largely controlled the formal agenda-setting process, but participants in the Assembly made an important and unique contribution by developing an informal agenda that largely guided their discussions. I conclude by suggesting how these empirical findings may revise some of our expectations about citizen deliberation.

Comments on California Assembly Constitutional Amendment 28 (March 2006) - Two California state Assemblymen have co-sponsored a bill that would organize a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Systems in California. These are comments on the bill that I submitted to the legislature.