In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold experiment in institutional design: it empowered an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to spend eleven months assessing the province's electoral system. The government asked the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) to recommend a new electoral system if the Assembly concluded that the existing system could be improved. And the government committed to putting the recommendation of the BC Citizens' Assembly to a referendum, and then to legislating the results of the referendum in to law, should it pass.

Though citizen bodies have in the recent past served as advisory bodies to constitutional commissions, the CA represents the first time a government has responded to citizen discontent by empowering a citizen body to redesign fundamental political institutions. The case stands out for the care with which the experiment was conceived. The CA approximated the kind of process a political scientist might well design to test key propositions of deliberative democratic theory. The CA was conceived with deliberation in mind, and then given the time, power, support, and financing to return a credible, representative, and deliberate decision. The selection of CA members was designed to bypass the electoral system, and yet function as a representative body through the device of near-random selection. It was carefully insulated from established political interests.