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Whenever academics and policymakers think about how to design electoral reform commissions, they almost always emphasize the importance of independence - the need to ward off the infection of politics and shut self-interested legislators, special interest groups, and political parties out of the decisionmaking process. The modest point of this essay is that independence is a double-edged sword. Giving electoral reform commissions too much independence may undermine the likelihood that reform will ever take root. That is because a central dilemma for most reform commissions is that its members must play politics in order to change the way politics will ultimately be played. This essay therefore argues that rather than quarantine electoral reform commissions from everyday politics, we ought to inoculate them. Inoculation, of course, requires one to be infected with the very disease one seeks to avoid. My proposal is thus to infuse the decisionmaking process with some of the concerns that dominate everyday politics. The first half of this essay lays out the empirical grounds for believing that fully independent decisionmaking bodies can sometimes be less effective at achieving reform than institutions that are partially enmeshed in the political system. The second half of the essay offers a first cut at the more difficult question raised by this essay: how do we strike the proper balance between political infection and political quarantine, between engagement and independence? Because any such analysis depends heavily on context, this part sketches some general considerations while focusing on the experience of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly as a case study.

The Double-Edged Sword of Independence: Inoculating Electoral Reform Commissions Against Everyday Politics