THW permit legislating by citizen initiated referenda

Citizen-initiated referendums

We cannot all go down to the local town centre as the ancient Athenians did. Our nations and our states are too big for that. Citizen-initiated referendum is one way for citizens to have a direct say in government decisions where there are large populations. Two of the things citizen-initiated referendum can do are:

• allow citizens to propose a new law

• allow citizens to vote against laws passed by parliament.

Some countries that have citizen-initiated referendum have one of the above and others have both.

Citizen-initiated referendum in three countries

Switzerland

The Swiss have had citizen-initiated referendum for over 100 years and in that time have voted on more than 300 issues. In 1977 the people rejected a proposal by the government for a new kind of tax. In 1984 they rejected another government proposal to reduce the working week from 42 hours to 38 hours.

United States

In the United States many states have some form of citizen-initiated referendum. In California during the 1990 elections, voters had to deal with a ballot paper with 20 referendum questions and 144 pages containing arguments for and against each referendum proposal.

In the 1960s the Californian government passed a law that real estate agents and owners of apartment houses could not use racial discrimination against people who wanted to rent or buy apartments or houses. The real estate agents initiated a referendum to overturn this law so that they could discriminate against people in this way. The real estate agents won.

Four states have voted to bring back the death penalty through referendum. Anti-gun laws have been introduced in several states.

Italy

In Italy the citizens can only initiate a referendum to vote against a law passed by the government. They cannot initiate a referendum to propose a law. In 1991 Italian people voted to remove a law which prohibited divorce.

How citizen-initiated referendum could work

Step 1

Some people in the community want a new law or to remove an existing law. They collect a number of petitions of registered voters and take them to the electoral office (say 1 per cent of voters in a majority of electorates in order to move to the next step).

Step 2

Parliamentary officers prepare a proposed law.

Step 3

The proposed law is debated in the parliament. If the parliament does not pass the proposal, it moves to Step 4.

Step 4

A referendum is held and if a majority of voters in a majority of electorates support the proposal, it becomes law.

This House Believes That we should have more direct democracy?

Arguments against more direct democracy	Arguments for more direct democracy
People already have a choice between members of parliament and the government programs they support.	People have more say about particular issues. Sometimes politicians of opposite sides agree among themselves on a policy they know the people don't support.
People already have to vote for federal, state and local governments. They don't want to have to go to polling booths more often. Electronic voting is not a realistic option; it has too many problems.	Electronic media allows debate and voting among large populations without any need for people to come to one place.
People have an opportunity, apart from elections through community and lobby groups to influence governments and governments are often guided by opinion polls.	Governments and parties can still play a role as they do today.
Citizen campaigns can more easily be led by people or groups with money - meaning wealthy groups have too much influence. Individual citizens or groups of citizens who propose change may not have the interest or the ability to make proposals in the best interests of all the different groups in the country or state.	Politicians are not the only people who are expert in making decisions for the nation as a whole. As people become more involved they become more expert.
Representative governments should look after the interests of minorities as well as the majority that voted for them. The people may be more influenced by prejudice or less concerned about minority rights.	Representative governments have not always looked after the interests of minority groups.
Once the people had voted on a citizen-initiated referendum it would have to become law. There would be no opportunity for the parliament to review the proposed legislation or make changes before it became law.	There is no reason to think that citizens will be any better or worse than governments.

referendum campaigning is much less well developed and well understood than the art of election campaigning. More effective in saying “NO” than saying “YES”
Amongst other things, modern political advertising tends to be:

* negative, often fiercely so;
* visual rather than textual;
* targeted to different segments of an electorate which is profiled and segmented in depth by party organisations;
* in particular, targeted at “swinging voters” who are considered by the parties to be the voters who are least well-informed, least civic minded, most materialistic and most easily stirred to negative emotions;
* increasingly short and simple;
* content-free as far as substantive issues and policies are concerned;
* geared to selling personalities rather than policies.

None of this is well suited to securing the passage of a referendum proposal, and task which requires (a) clearly explaining the proposal so that a large majority of the voting population understand it and (b) providing persuasive arguments to convince a majority of the voters to support it.

Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.
On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school. The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”
The study did not take into account employee turnover, a reality in many day care centers that can have a negative effect on children, said Marci Young, deputy director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, which represents day care workers.
In 2001, the authors reported that children who spent most of their day in care not provided by a parent were more likely to be disruptive in kindergarten. But this effect soon vanished for all but those children who spent a significant amount of time in day care centers.
“What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day

States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.
But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already.
Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools.
And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.
The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run.
Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.
“As people are starting to really sweat, they’ve increasingly started to think really hard about ‘are we giving them enough time?’ ”
Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects — is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.
Money also has proved a big obstacle.
Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.
Many parents in Fall River said they were pleased by the commitment a longer schedule signaled, reasoning that more hours meant more chances for their children to succeed.
Some parents in this working-class community, like John Chaves, father of a seventh-grader, Mindy, said they supported more time at school simply because so few are home earlier to welcome their children. “We’re never home at the time that they’re home, so at least we know where our kids are,” Mr. Chaves said.

Mr. Puck’s Good Idea

From time to time, consumers are reminded of the power they have, and the power of the choices they make. There is no better example than the rising popularity of organic food — a matter of conscience and of taste. More and more people are buying local, organic produce and trying to find meat and eggs and dairy products from farms that are not part of the horror of factory farming.
Not surprisingly, people who shop that way also like to dine out that way. That will now be easier thanks to Wolfgang Puck, the universal restaurateur. He has decided that his culinary businesses will now use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards.
Mr. Puck is not the first chef and restaurateur to decide to forgo factory-farmed meat and eggs. You can find a few restaurants upholding these standards in nearly every major American city. But Mr. Puck runs an empire, not a restaurant. His outreach is enormous, and so is his potential educational impact. In fact, he has come late to this decision, perhaps because it affects a corporation, not the menu of a single restaurant.
For one thing, Mr. Puck’s new standard will help correct a misimpression. Many diners assume that most of the cruelty in factory farming lies in producing foie gras and veal. But Americans consume vastly more chicken, turkey, pork and beef than foie gras and veal, and most of the creatures those meats come from are raised in ways that are ethically and environmentally unsound. Until recently, most Americans have been appallingly ignorant of how their food is produced. That is changing. And Mr. Puck’s gift for showmanship will help advance Americans’ knowledge that they can eat well and do right all at the same time.

Down the YouTube?

IT HAS been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential “new-media” companies, own any of the content that they organise so well.
Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.
Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.
The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.
All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.
The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.
Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.

Europe, a Moment to Ponder

IT is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the new Spain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.”
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. The European Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr. Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but not always of those who are part of large-scale Muslim immigration. The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among the European peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power has lagged.

Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a country whose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985, 90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorship seems utterly remote.
“The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been powerful in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, with universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become a tenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity.
It is also open politically: How much of a federation should Europe be?
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”

City in Florida Fires Official Who Planned to Change Sex

The longtime city manager here was fired early Saturday, one month after he disclosed his plans to seek a sex change.
The City Commission voted 5 to 2 to dismiss the man, Steven B. Stanton, after a six-hour hearing in which he and his supporters argued that he could do his job just as well once he became a woman. Some commissioners said they had voted to fire Mr. Stanton not because he wanted to become a woman, but because he had violated their trust and caused a major disruption.
Several transgender people spoke on Mr. Stanton’s behalf, including a former deputy mayor of St. Paul, as did a few dozen people from Largo and throughout the state. A smaller number spoke in favor of firing him, including one man who said Mr. Stanton had made Largo “the laughingstock of the whole country.”
Mr. Stanton’s wish to become a woman named Susan came to light last month, after The St. Petersburg Times learned of it, got him to confirm it and published an article. Before that, Mr. Stanton said, he planned to announce his decision later this year, when his son would be out of town.
The City Commission had generally praised Mr. Stanton in performance reviews, and it gave him a raise last year. But within a week of the newspaper’s report, the commission voted to begin the process of firing him. Mr. Stanton filed an appeal on March 8 in hopes of keeping his job of 14 years, which paid $140,000 a year.

Federal Judge Blocks Online Pornography Law

background
A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to access material deemed “harmful.”
Under the law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

pros
Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. He added that there are far less restrictive methods, including software filters, that parents can use to control their children’s Internet use.
“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”
“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “All Internet would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet.”

cons:
But others were disappointed.
“It’s a very frustrating decision. We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”
In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain federal money to use software filters. The high court upheld that law in 2003.
Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University, said the case decided today indicates the shifting stances that civil libertarians have taken regarding controls placed on the Internet.
“Civil libertarians have long had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with filters,” he said, adding that while the A.C.L.U. argued in this case that filters are preferable, the organization has also voiced concerns about them.
“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said. “The result is to reinforce this infrastructure of filters.” That, he said, may lead to “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”
Mr. Hansen said that his organization has only opposed the mandatory use of filters, not filters themselves.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web publishers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law would have a chilling effect on free speech.
“We know from experience that putting up any barrier in front of your content, whether its an advertisement or a subscription wall or anything that delays someone’s access, has a big impact on traffic,” said Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com.
In a post-trial brief, Peter D. Keisler, a government lawyer, argued that depending solely on filters was insufficient. “It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” he wrote.

China Scrambles for Stability as Its Workers Age

The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees.
That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age.
By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
Obviously, raising the retirement ages would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But there are no plans to do so, and raising the retirement ages would present another set of problems for the government, experts here say.
Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed. Unemployment is high among those who are not university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.
The bind that China finds itself in takes form in an often-posed question: Can the country grow rich before it grows old? Increasingly, experts here say the answer, which also has huge implications for the global economy, appears doubtful.
Already, experts say the large financing gap resulting from the early retirement of public sector workers has repeatedly caused the state to improvise to keep the system afloat. Receipts from lottery ticket sales and from foreign initial private offerings of stocks, for example, have been drawn upon to finance the system.
Most troubling to financial experts, the government has used payroll taxes paid by the current generation of workers, who in theory are paying into their individual retirement accounts, to pay pensions for the previous generation.
China’s relatively young private life insurance industry is one of the sectors that stands to benefit most from the growing uncertainty over aging and pensions, but even within the industry, analysts express worry.
“If we continue to have sound and healthy development in the economy we might get through this, but what if we cannot?” said Jiang Shihua, a senior official of the Pingan Life Insurance Company, who spoke of a time when China would have 400 to 500 million old people who “only consume and don’t produce at all.”

F.D.A. Rule Limits Role of Advisers Tied to Industry

Expert advisers to the government who receive money from a drug or device maker would be barred for the first time from voting on whether to approve that company’s products under new rules announced Wednesday for the F.D.A.’s powerful advisory committees.
Indeed, such doctors who receive more than $50,000 from a company or a competitor whose product is being discussed would no longer be allowed to serve on the committees, though those who receive less than that amount in the prior year can join a committee and participate in its discussions.
A “significant number” of the agency’s present advisers would be affected by the new policy, said the F.D.A. acting deputy commissioner, Randall W. Lutter, though he would not say how many. The rules are among the first major changes made by Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach since he was confirmed as commissioner of food and drugs late last year.
Advisory boards recommend drugs for approval and, in rare cases, removal, and their votes can have enormous influence on drug company fortunes.
“The $50,000 threshold is something that we think strikes an appropriate balance between” getting smart advisers and reassuring the public that their advice is not tainted, Dr. Lutter said.
The changes are intended to respond to a growing chorus of critics who contend that drug and device makers have hijacked the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process by paying those who serve on the agency’s advisory panels.
In one famous example, 10 of the 32 advisers who voted in 2005 to allow the painkiller Bextra to remain on the market and the painkiller Vioxx to return to the market despite safety worries had taken money from the drug makers. Under the new rules, their votes would not have counted and the committee would have voted to keep both drugs off the market.
In the end, the F.D.A. removed Bextra from the market anyway, and Vioxx has never returned. But the controversy surrounding that panel’s vote, and similar ones, tarnished the process and provided new fodder for critics in Congress.
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, said he was delighted with the change, which will not become final until the end of a 60-day comment period.
“So many lives have been lost as a result of the failure of the F.D.A. to review drugs properly,” said Mr. Hinchey, who for two years has proposed legislation to ban agency advisers from having financial conflicts of interest. “The F.D.A. is now moving back to where it was supposed to be, a principled agency that protects the people.”
“F.D.A. is trying to strike a balance here,” Mr. Troy said, “and they would rather strike it themselves than have it struck for them.”
Drug makers routinely hire doctors as consultants for marketing and research. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that records in Minnesota show that at least 20 percent of licensed physicians in the state received money from drug makers between 1997 and 2005 — an average of $10,000.
Some conservatives were not happy with the new rule.
“I think it’s likely to improve the quality of the recommendations, remove the taint of the recommendations and improve the credibility of the recommendations,” Dr. Lurie said.
Advisory panels are important to the F.D.A. not so much because they provide the agency with expert advice — the F.D.A. can get that privately any time — but because they serve to increase public confidence in the agency’s decisions.