Ned Crosby passed away May 29, 2022 in the company of family. He had managed multiple myeloma for six years before his condition worsened suddenly. He is best known for his invention of the Citizens’ Jury, one of the most widely recognized and utilized forms of public deliberation in the world. He was also the principal architect and advocate of what became the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, an institutionalized variant of the Citizens’ Jury.

The Citizens’ Jury concept came to Ned while working on his Ph.D., which he completed in 1973 at the University of Minnesota. His twelve years in graduate school moved him away from the methodological details of psychological measurement and toward the meta-ethics of deliberative democracy. Ned came to believe that moral policy questions, such as the Vietnam War, are best answered not by the skilled technocrat or the wise philosopher but instead by a randomly-selected body of citizens deliberating together.

a pioneer of what has become the deliberative democracy movement.

Ned spent much of the ensuring decades working out the details of the process for conducting such deliberations. In various forms, Citizens’ Juries have been adopted across the globe. Participedia.net includes more than 200 cases of Citizens’ Juries, which account for over 10% of its entire case study database. The intellectual infrastructure of the Citizens’ Jury remains in the Center for New Democratic Processes, which has hosted innumerable juries since Ned founded it a half-century ago.

Ned was delighted when he discovered—ten years after the fact—that he had developed Citizens’ Juries at approximately the same time that Peter Dienel conceived of Plannungszelle (Planning Cells) in Germany. Peter and Ned appreciated the subtle differences between their designs, which they scrutinized down to the finest details, but both felt validated by seeing such similar ideas emerge in two different countries. When Dienel passed away in 2007, Ned eulogized him in words that could be said equally well of himself: each was “a pioneer of what has become the deliberative democracy movement.”

Maintaining contact with the academic literature, Ned authored and co-authored numerous essays on Citizens’ Juries and related ideas. GoogleScholar now counts over 4,500 references to this process, often citing reviews, such as the landmark 2002 Political Studies article “Citizens’ Juries and Deliberative Democracy” or Ned’s own writings. These include the 1988 essay, “Citizens Panels: A New Approach to Citizen Participation,” in Public Administration Review; the chapter “Citizens Juries: One Solution for Difficult Environmental Questions” in the 1995 book, Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation; and the chapter in the 2005 Deliberative Democracy Handbook, “Citizens juries: Creating a Trustworthy Voice of the People.”

I first met Ned when he presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual meeting in 1996. He had traveled there with Pat Benn, whom he had married twenty years earlier. Our long lunch at a Chicago restaurant began a friendship that fueled collaborations small and large in the years that followed. In the early 2000s, he and I both wrote books adapting the Citizens’ Jury process to elections, with his version being Healthy Democracy.

Part of the inspiration for Ned’s book was his experience convening a Citizens’ Jury during a US Senate election in 1992. Jurors serving in the Candidate Election Forum weighted the choice between two candidates, an approach revisited years later in an Ohio Congressional contest. Though the Forum garnered considerable attention, it caught the notice of the Internal Revenue Service, which deemed it a form of “campaigning” inappropriate for a nonpartisan nonprofit.

Years later, this work inspired the formation of a nonprofit in Oregon that carried through Ned and Pat’s vision for a Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). While writing Hope for Democracy, Katherine Knobloch interviewed Ned and Pat to learn exactly how the CIR came about. One snippet gives a sense for Ned’s character. Kicking the tires on a Citizens’ Jury variant in an ad-hoc “design lab,” a former governor wondered if the Citizens’ Jury process could be used to evaluate ballot initiatives. Ned and Pat had been focused on candidate evaluation, but after chewing on this idea during a half-hour lunch break, Ned recalled deciding “to change what we had been working on for two years…It seemed like a good fit, so we decided to go for it.”

Wherever life took him, Ned brought not only ideas but also abundant love, generosity, and optimism.

This led to the Oregon State Legislature passing laws that created the CIR in 2010 and made it permanent in 2011. The Oregon CIR now stands as the world’s most prominent example of a “trusted information proxy,” serving as a source of information that citizens can use to make judgments, such as whether to vote for or against a ballot measure.

The scholars, designers, and civic leaders had the unforgettable experience of meeting Ned will remember his indefatigable democratic spirit, his passion for reform, his readiness to argue any point, and his broad sense of humor. Ned and Pat’s appetite for knowledge and experiences led them to travel the world, all the while in constant conversational motion with anyone they encountered. Wherever life took him, Ned brought not only ideas but also abundant love, generosity, and optimism.

If Ned Crosby’s life teaches nothing else, let it be this. However unlikely something may be, if it is possible, it can be achieved. May it ever be so for those things our world needs most.

 

About the author

John Gastil is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences and Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is senior scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.

To hear a recent interview with Ned and Pat on the Citizens’ Juries, visit the newDemocracy podcast, “Facilitating Public Deliberations,” Episode 1.