Public Support for Deliberative Citizens’ Assemblies Selected through Sortition: Evidence from 15 Countries

Abstract

As representative democracies are increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular in academic circles and real-life politics: asking a group of citizens selected by lot to deliberate and formulate policy recommendations on some contentious issues. Although there is much research on the functioning of such citizens’ assemblies, there are only few about how the population perceives them. We explore the sources of citizens’ attitudes towards this institution using a unique representative survey from 15 European countries. We find that those who are less educated, as well as those with a low sense of political competence and an anti-elite sentiment, are more supportive of it. Support thus comes from the ‘enraged’, rather than the ‘engaged’. Further, we use a survey experiment to show that support for citizens’ assemblies increases when respondents know that their fellow citizens share the same opinion than them on some issues.

Catching the ‘Deliberative Wave’? How (Disaffected) Citizens Assess Deliberative Citizen Forums

“…In this letter, we provide new evidence to inform debates on the actual role that DCFs should play in our democracies, with a particular focus on the considerations of 'disaffected' citizens. We ask not only whether citizens currently support the use of DCFs (see Bedock and Pilet 2020;Jacquet et al 2022;Pilet et al 2020), but also take DCFs as a given institutional practice and ask how DCFs must be designed in order to solicit support among (different strata of) nonparticipating citizens. We present results from a conjoint experiment with 2,039 respondents in Germany.…”

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).…”

“…Instead of looking at how different publics perceive a specific instance of a minipublic or the general concept of a minipublic, it investigates the projected image of the purposes of minipublics. Scholars have so far focused on the recipients of various images of minipublics, for example, the opinions of the public and elected representatives about an authoritative minipublic (Jacquet et al, 2020;Pilet et al, 2020). Yet, we do not know how actors involved with the practical organization of minipublics want to depict the image of their deliberative forums.…”

Participatory Budgeting in Indonesia: from the Policy Innovation to the Democracy Innovation

“…Democratic innovations are also moving beyond traditional approaches to institutionalizing public participation, which we know as elections and consultative practices. Democratic innovation focuses on how to design innovative designs so that public participation directly impacts political decisions (Pilet et al, 2022).…”