The 2023 Austin ConCon was a pilot event held in October 2023 that brought together a diverse group of 10 participants to explore and demonstrate what new constitutional ideas for the United States might emerge from a more inclusive design process. In Part 1 of this report we introduced the initial phases of a system design process, including a list of major complaints about government as it is commonly practiced today. Participants shared a set of core values that they’d want to see in a society, and expressed their foundational assumptions about the nature of reality, human nature, and political subjectivity. After laying out these assumptions, each participant wrote a “preamble” to a hypothetical constitution—a mission statement for a preferred future society. That is where we ended part 1 of the story. Part 2 will focus on the next phase of the process: operationalizing values and visions.
The shift from abstract visioning to designing functional models for governance is an extremely difficult mental leap. Complaining about government failures, laying out fundamental assumptions, and creating a preamble for society uses mental muscles many people have already built. What we don’t typically exercise are the muscles for actually designing concrete rules, procedures, and institutions of governance. We are much more practiced in interpreting and critiquing constitutions than we are in writing them.
So, in addition to the patience and humility required of such an audacious undertaking as political system design, clear frameworks are needed to catalyze, scaffold, and support creative thinking. For the Austin ConCon, we developed an original framework that built upon the foundational assumptions and preamble processes to help catalyze creative thinking around solutions to existing complaints about government — solutions that might inhabit a new constitution.
If you’ve read accounts of the U.S. Constitutional Congress, or the recent experiences in Chile or Iceland, you know that finalizing constitutional details is, to say the least, messy and complex. For a short workshop, already ambitious in speed and scope, it was unrealistic to expect to leave with a complete written draft of a constitution. So, instead, we asked participants to systematically explore what we might call the “staple ingredients” of a future governing recipe, developing viable proposals that might reflect both the substance and spirit of a possible constitution.
To do this, we divided into two working groups. These groups were self-selected based on shared interests and mindsets as expressed earlier in the foundational assumptions work and in their preambles. Each group worked with the design framework we called “Operationalizing Values and Vision.” As you see in this sketch, the framework is a matrix that provides a space for creative thinking at the intersection of professed values and the chosen challenges or defects of government as it is practiced today. Here we are looking for actual solution ideas to address these challenges given the stated values. So, for example, if you value fairness, and you want to address the problem that our government is undemocratic, you might propose to have representatives randomly selected from the population, so that it is not only the megarich (or mega-funded) who stand a chance of winning an election.
As design context reminders, we asked participants to add a consolidated statement about reality (“cosmology’) and their chosen preamble at the top. In the final column, we ask for ideas for “metrics of success” related to the values one would attempt to operationalize in the design. This metric is a feedback or learning loop that would allow one to see if the design is having the effect desired in a population, or if redesign or amendment is needed.
Initial sketch of the Operationalizing Values and Vision Framework. By Jake Dunagan
One of the ongoing challenges with any design or creative work, even in constitution design, is finding the balance between open-ended creativity (which allows room for novel or nonlinear ideas but may prove difficult for people to initiate ideas), and enabling constraints (which provide structural guidance but which may limit originality or unconventional ideas). I have found that more open-ended processes don’t ultimately end up with more creative or original ideas, and often people return to fairly conventional ideas after intellectually treading water.
At the Austin ConCon we erred on the side of providing more structure, or enabling constraints. To this end, while not written explicitly on the framework, we gave participants a list of typical https://academic.oup.com/icon/... to consider when making their proposals. These include 1. The jurisdictional (for example a federalized or a unitary system), 2. The electoral (for example a majoritarian or a proportional system), and 3. The legislative (for example a presidentialist or a parliamentary system). In addition to these formal structures, we also encouraged consideration of positive and negative “Rights” (for example the Bill of Rights amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the many positive rights listed in the 2022 proposed Chilean Constitution).
Demo of the Operationalizing Values and Vision Framework. Image by Jake Dunagan.
The Austin ConCon was the first demonstration of this framework, and it generated energetic conversations, and creative responses from each of the two teams.
Results
Team 1: Nameless
This team’s design centered around two main goals: reducing violence and expanding the “temporal bandwidth” of governing bodies. Reducing violence should be straight-forward. In an American context, with more mass shootings than days in a year, violence is a tragic aspect of regular life. Most people in the U.S. have a direct experience or close connection to some form of physical violence. Expanding the temporal bandwidth is a more abstract concept, but it comes down to two main points: 1) We need more time to think and deliver to actually make decisions, and 2) Decision-makers should consider a longer time frame in how they craft policy and law — including consideration of the impact of law on future generations.
So, it might not be surprising that two of the main design recommendations reflect these goals. The mechanism Nameless chose to use was the expression of new fundamental rights: 1) The Right to Childhood, and 2) The Right to Leisure and Rest. A Right to Childhood sounds simple, but would transform the way our society functions.
First, a Right to Childhood would include protection from violence, in the home, school, or streets. It would include access to good nutrition, affordable health care, and quality education. Many rights are unfunded bluster, but if a Right to Childhood was truly guaranteed, a transformation of American society would have to take place.
Second, a Right to Leisure and Rest would potentially have similar cascading effects on the design of our society. Guaranteed rest would mean a deep alteration of the power dynamics between workers and owners. It might resemble the move to a 4-day week, or the rules against contacting employees outside of business hours. But, it could mean a whole new way we think about work, and the role it plays in our lives. It might mean a transformation in our consumption patterns, the ways our families are structured, and what it means to be a good person. We might see a more engaged and democratic society, or possibly new spiritual movements that respond to demand for those seeking a more meaningful life. It might mean less stress, happier people, and less mental and physical illness.
Rights are extremely powerful when protected, and completely meaningless when not. So it is easy to name a long list of rights (as the 2022 Chilean Constitution did), but it is much harder to turn those mandates into concrete results. Nameless recognized that challenge, but the original and provocative proposals for a Right to Childhood and a Right to Rest and Leisure are highly generative and would enhance discussions around new amendments or policies.
Photo by Jake Dunagan. Graphic by Sara Nuttle.
Team 2: The Romantic Government
The second team called itself Romantic Government, and took a decidedly different approach to designing a political system for the future. The driving force of this group’s concept was to reorient the entire way people and their governing systems relate to each other. In fact, it was based on the premise that we should see ourselves in a relationship with government, and that we should have that connection, and in a sense, desire to love and be loved by government. Romantic love and government probably exist about as far away from each other in our emotional continuum, but it certainly changes the whole tenor of a conversation on political system design.
Interestingly, this group also independently tackled the challenges of loneliness and violence as well. A loving partner does not intentionally harm you. A loving partner is there by your side in times of trouble. In concrete terms, The Romantic Government would create a new cabinet position: the Department of Joy, Delight, and Fun. Having government this close and intimate in your life would likely make some run in the other direction. But, the exercise to imagine a government that cares for its people, rather than controls or ignores them, helps clear away a mountain of preconceived notions, and lets one see new possibilities that those notions obscured.
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The Austin ConCon was a fruitful demonstration of how a political system design process might be structured, and how it might provide a framework for social invention and creative engagement with a domain that is otherwise abstract or unapproachable. The ideas generated by participants were unconventional, but I’ve yet to shake many of them from my mind. As I've had these ideas bouncing around in my head in the months since the event, they seem less radical and more essential than ever. There is a crack in the edifice of our governments and our society at this moment. We can fall through those cracks into oblivion, or we can build bridges to the future. I hope the political system design process we tested in Austin, and the values of creativity and inclusiveness that enlivened the event, will generate some small ripples today that become a moment of social invention tomorrow.