What is an MP worth in retirement?
When Baden-Württemberg’s state parliament sought to make its own pension arrangements more generous in 2017, the public backlash was fierce. Parliament withdrew the decision and then did something unusual: it asked randomly selected citizens to deliberate on what kind of pension MPs should receive. The experiment ultimately led to a different system – and became an early example of how citizens’ forums can change parliamentary decisions.
There are political questions on which MPs can hardly hope to win. How much they should be paid is one of them. It becomes even more difficult when they are deciding on their own financial affairs – and doing so in a hurry.
That is precisely what happened in Baden-Württemberg in February 2017. The state parliament wanted to change the system of subsidised private pension provision that had been in place since 2008 and allow MPs once again to receive a state pension. The decision was taken under an accelerated procedure. Fierce public criticism followed. Parliament reversed the change.
A decision in their own interest
The legislation was gone. The problem remained: how could a parliament decide on the retirement provision of its own members without creating the impression that MPs were simply helping themselves?
Muhterem Aras of the Greens, President of the State Parliament, drew a remarkable conclusion from the affair. She wanted the public to be more closely involved in forming a view on the issue. The parliamentary groups agreed to establish an Independent Commission on MPs’ Retirement Provision, chaired by Michael Hund, a former Vice-President of Germany’s Federal Administrative Court. But alongside the experts, a second group would consider the same question: ordinary citizens.
An experiment with random selection
Thus emerged the Citizens’ Forum on MPs’ Retirement Provision – according to the state parliament, the first process of its kind in Germany in which a politically controversial issue at state level was deliberated upon by randomly selected citizens.
In the end, 25 eligible voters from all four administrative regions of Baden-Württemberg came together. The selection was designed to include different age groups and people from both urban and rural areas, while ensuring an equal balance of women and men.
Three saturdays to decide politicians’ pensions
The Citizens’ Forum met for three full-day sessions on 18 November and 9 December 2017 and 13 January 2018. The deliberations themselves were held behind closed doors. The intention was to create a space in which the participants could develop their positions without an audience, party-political pressures or television cameras.
The process was facilitated by the Konstanz-based participation consultancy Translake. The participants examined different pension systems, compared the arrangements in other German state parliaments and the Bundestag, heard from MPs and experts, and eventually found themselves discussing a question much larger than the original controversy: what does fairness in retirement provision actually mean?
Precision instead of pub talk
Facilitator Wolfgang Himmel was particularly impressed by the way the group worked. Through “intensive efforts to find the best possible solution in each case”, he said, it had been possible to achieve consensus. “It was remarkable with what precision the citizens worked their way through the subject.”
Michael Hund had likewise set a more ambitious goal from the outset than simply consulting the public. The Citizens’ Forum was intended to “complement and enrich” the work of the expert commission. In an “open-ended and transparent process”, citizens could contribute their “competences, perspectives, assessments and proposals”.
Suddenly it was about everyone
Then something happened that would later become characteristic of many citizens’ assemblies and forums: the citizens did not merely answer the question they had been asked. They were supposed to say how state parliamentarians should be provided for in retirement. Instead, the forum asked why politicians should fundamentally be governed by different rules from everyone else.
Its long-term vision was adopted unanimously: a solidarity-based citizens’ pension insurance scheme into which all citizens would pay. All forms of income recognised under tax law should be included, without an upper contribution limit. The forum knew that Baden-Württemberg could not introduce such a reform on its own. It would require action at federal level. A majority therefore wanted the state to campaign for it nationally.
Two options for Stuttgart
That was the grand answer. But the Citizens’ Forum also offered a pragmatic one.
Until such a universal scheme existed, the participants proposed two models for MPs. The first was a pension fund for parliamentarians. For reasons of cost, Baden-Württemberg should join an existing pension fund rather than establish its own. The second was a building-block model: contributions to the statutory pension scheme up to the maximum level, supplemented by an additional occupational pension.
No return to a state pension
On one point there was no compromise: the Citizens’ Forum unanimously rejected a return to the traditional state-funded parliamentary pension.
Almost more interesting than the models themselves were the criteria the participants used to judge them. Any arrangement, they argued, had to be politically defensible, morally fair, equitable between generations, practicable, legally possible and transparent. The attractiveness of serving as an MP and the financial security of family members should also be taken into consideration.
No more decisions in a hurry
The forum also made a recommendation about the decision-making process itself. Parliament should reconsider MPs’ retirement provision thoroughly. This required a “heightened degree of transparency towards the public”, while decisions needed to be explained in detail and in a comprehensible way.
Then came a sentence that sounded like a direct response to the political mistake of February 2017: “An accelerated procedure is rejected.”
Citizens tell parliament how to decide
The citizens had therefore answered not only what parliament should decide. They had also told it how a decision on such a matter ought to be made.
The results were presented publicly on 13 January 2018. Aras thanked the participants for giving up their free time to grapple with such a difficult question. She hoped, she said, that this form of citizen participation would “set a precedent” for other socially controversial issues.
Citizens’ Forum meets experts
Now came the decisive phase. Would the Citizens’ Forum actually exert influence – or would its report be politely received and then quietly filed away?
On 5 February, the participants met the ten-member expert commission in public. For more than an hour, they explained and defended their recommendations. Commission chairman Hund gave them an unusually explicit promise: “The recommendations of the Citizens’ Forum will play a major and appropriate role.” Its conclusions would be “considered very seriously”.
“The Citizens’ Forum experiment has succeeded”
Hund was also impressed by “how such a heterogeneous group arrived at such an unequivocal result”. For him, the process served another purpose: “The Citizens’ Forum can help overcome the lack of communication between elected representatives and voters, even on such a complex and difficult question.”
His verdict was correspondingly concise: “The Citizens’ Forum experiment has succeeded.”
Facilitator Himmel formulated the measure of success more cautiously. It would be a genuine success, he said, if the recommendations were shown respect by being “seriously incorporated into the subsequent deliberations”.
First sign of impact
That was now the standard against which the experiment had to be judged. In April 2018, the independent commission published its final report, presenting four possible models for MPs’ retirement provision.
The model that received the greatest support within the commission was precisely the one the Citizens’ Forum had also proposed: joining an existing pension fund for parliamentarians. Eight of the commission’s ten members supported this solution.
From citizens’ proposal to political option
The citizens’ recommendation had thus cleared its first institutional hurdle. A proposal made by 25 randomly selected people had become the preferred option of the independent expert commission.
But parliament had still not decided. And here another lesson of the process became apparent: political impact takes time.
And then it took a while
The final decision did not come until 2019. On 6 November 2019, almost two years after the Citizens’ Forum first met, the state parliament voted on the new system.
The result was decisive: 122 of the 143 MPs voted for Baden-Württemberg to join the pension fund used by the state parliaments of North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg.
Citizens return to public gallery
Some of the former participants were back in parliament that day. Aras had invited them to watch the decision from the public gallery.
“Thank you very much for your work; we were impressed by how carefully differentiated your approach was,” the parliamentary president told them. She then drew an unusually explicit line from deliberation to decision: “You can be proud. You have had a major impact, because your conclusions fed into the expert commission’s recommendation and ultimately into the decision.”
An unusually clear chain of influence
In this case, the chain can indeed be traced. The Citizens’ Forum recommends a pension fund. The expert commission prefers a pension fund. Parliament adopts a pension fund.
In public participation, such a clear trail from a citizens’ recommendation to a parliamentary decision is rare.
Not everything became reality
The recommendations were not implemented in full. The larger vision of a solidarity-based citizens’ pension insurance scheme for everyone remained just that – a vision. In any case, it would have required reform at federal level. The alternative building-block model combining the statutory pension scheme with supplementary provision was not adopted either.
What mattered, however, was that parliament chose precisely the option the Citizens’ Forum had identified as one of two realistic interim solutions. Equally significant was what did not happen: there was no return to the traditional state pension that the citizens had unanimously rejected.
What 25 people can achieve
That is what makes the Baden-Württemberg Citizens’ Forum so interesting. The citizens did not replace the MPs. Nor did they take the decision out of their hands. In the end, 122 parliamentarians still had to vote for the new system themselves.
But the participants changed the conditions under which that decision was made. They shifted the debate away from the question of what retirement benefits MPs might claim for themselves towards a different one: what system could be justified to the rest of society?
More than a democratic repair shop
They rejected the state pension, developed alternatives and demanded transparency instead of haste. An expert commission adopted their most important practicable proposal. Parliament eventually implemented it.
The Citizens’ Forum had been born out of a political crisis. What emerged from it was something rather different: an early demonstration that randomly selected citizens can do more than deliberate on a technically complicated and politically sensitive question.
Sometimes, they can change the outcome.
Note: This article was written with the help of AI