Looking in from the Outside: How Do Invited But Not Selected Citizens Perceive the Legitimacy of a Minipublic?

Abstract

Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.

Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy

“…Normatively, this experience suggests adding 1⁸ Henceforth the word 'random' will mean 'near random and stratified, ' except where otherwise noted. 1⁹ See Arnstein 1969, however, argues normatively against giving randomly selected citizen forums full decision-making power, a position congruent with that of many citizens (Jaquet et al 2020;Devillers et al 2021;Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022). I suggest elsewhere (Mansbridge 1980 and subsequent work) that normative goals are often contingent on context.…”

“…2⁸ E.g., Devillers et al (2021). See also , cited in Werner and Muradova, Chapter 13 in this volume; , cited in Pickering, Chapter 20 in this volume; and Gastil, Chapter 14 in this volume.…”

Mixed Methods

“…Normatively, this experience suggests adding 1⁸ Henceforth the word 'random' will mean 'near random and stratified, ' except where otherwise noted. 1⁹ See Arnstein 1969, however, argues normatively against giving randomly selected citizen forums full decision-making power, a position congruent with that of many citizens (Jaquet et al 2020;Devillers et al 2021;Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022). I suggest elsewhere (Mansbridge 1980 and subsequent work) that normative goals are often contingent on context.…”

The minipublic bubble: how the contributions of minipublics are conceived in Belgium (2001–2021)

“…The literature has devoted increasingly more attention to the public perceptions of minipublics. For instance, several empirical studies investigate the support of the broader population for the concept of minipublics in general (e.g., Pilet et al, 2020;Germann et al, 2021) and for specific instances (e.g., Devillers et al, 2021;Pow, 2021). Scholars also survey how decision-and policymakers conceive the functions of minipublics (Beswick and Elstub, 2019;Bobbio, 2019;Rangoni et al, 2021) and participatory processes (Dean, 2019;Hendriks and Lees-Marshment, 2019), their support for minipublics (Jacquet et al, 2020;Koskimaa and Rapeli, 2020) and their motivations to institutionalize them (Macq and Jacquet, 2021).…”