The TRM Experiment

From December 19th, 2024, through April 21st, 2025, the True Representation Movement (TRM) conducted a structured experimental study to evaluate the feasibility of citizen-driven legislative decision-making. Over the course of this period, a cohort of voters participated in 386 votes on real U.S. Congressional legislation, receiving both full bill texts and AI-generated summaries to assist their deliberation. The study sought to measure rates of alignment between individual participants and majority outcomes, and to assess whether citizens across a broad political spectrum could consistently engage in reasoned, majority-based governance. The results suggest that a carefully structured majority-rule system can produce outcomes perceived as legitimate by a wide cross-section of participants.

Participants in the experiment were presented with:

• The full legislative text of actual bills considered by the U.S. Congress.
• An AI-generated summary providing:
  • A plain-language explanation of the bill’s core provisions.
  • Bullet-point analyses of likely supporters and opponents of the bill, with reasoning for each side.
  • Each participant had 24 hours to review the materials and cast a vote.

Votes were aggregated using simple majority rule, and alignment was measured by comparing each individual's vote with the final collective outcome.

Key Metrics:

• Average Individual Alignment Rate: 72%
• Median Alignment Rate: 71%
• Standard Deviation: 13%

Additional observations:

• Lowest recorded individual alignment: 56%
• Highest recorded individual alignment: 94%
• Range: 38 percentage points
• Interquartile Range (IQR): 9.91 percentage points
  

The distribution of alignment rates was relatively tight, indicating that most participants experienced a broadly similar relationship to the majority outcomes.

These results suggest that under conditions where:

• Participants are given full access to primary source materials,
• Receive neutral, structured summaries,
• Are allotted reasonable deliberation time, citizens from diverse ideological backgrounds are able to:
• Engage constructively with legislation,
• Accept majority decisions even when personally outvoted, and
• Maintain a high sense of procedural legitimacy.
  

Notably, even the least-aligned participants found themselves agreeing with the majority decision more often than not.

This contrasts favorably with levels of alienation often recorded under current representative and party-driven systems, where perceived capture or misalignment can be much more severe.

For details on the votes, please go here.