Strengthening democracy through bottom-up deliberation: An assessment of the internal legitimacy of the G1000 project

Abstract

Recent scholarship claims that citizen deliberation can contribute to the quality of democracy and to the legitimacy of political decision making. By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the values a polity should promote. However, if deliberative democracy wants to contribute to the legitimacy of the political system, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative processes have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this article, we set out to refine the theory on deliberative legitimacy and to determine the legitimacy of one particularly interesting deliberative event, namely the Belgian G1000. We will argue that it is very difficult for deliberative processes to be high on all dimensions of legitimacy and that there is a tradeoff between input and output legitimacy. Moreover, we find that design characteristics to a large extent determine the legitimacy of deliberative processes.

‘Participatory consociationalism? No, but South Tyrol's Autonomy Convention is evidence that power‐sharing can transform conflicts’

“…Northern Ireland has some citizen community planning, and a variety of different participatory initiatives supported by The European Union Peace Programmes (Buchanan ; McAlister ; Hayward ). Belgium's non‐governmental 2012 ‘G1000 Citizen's Summit’ is another example (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps ). These practices have received little scholarly attention, but there is a growing normative literature on the role of deliberative democracy in consociational negotiation and governance .…”

Crowd-Sourced Legislation and Politics

“…The role of public debate and scrutiny in constitution-making has been also emphasized by Habermas (1996; who argued that its legitimacy stemmed from rich quality debates before taking a decision. The discussions that take place in the public sphere based in civil society have the capacity to legitimize the institutional will-formation and to translate citizen opinions into good political outcomes (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2015). Along these lines, the notion of popular constitutionalism presupposes an active role of the citizens in shaping the constitution in the sense of (re)gaining its popular foundations and willingness of the people to prevail (Ackerman 1993;Thomas 2008).…”

“…Such procedures are meant to create the linkage between the mini-public (those who participate in deliberation) and maxi-public (the entire citizenry). In principle, the diversity of people is likely to produce a diversity of opinions but will also ensure that no (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2015;Suiter and Reuchamps 2015).…”

Group proximity and mutual understanding: measuring onsite impact of a citizens’ summit

“…Reflecting on a new situation may change participants' perspective on the problem (Wiggins 1975) when this reflection includes perspectives that are different from their own (Gutmann and Thompson 2009). Formerly, deliberation and participation have been opposed to each other, since optimal deliberation circumstances are described as small scale, whereas public participation requires a large number of people in order to fulfil its representative aims (Rossi 1997;Cohen 2009;Fishkin 2011;Lafont 2015). However, this tension is alleviated when numerous small-scale deliberations are organised within large-scale participatory events, such as during "citizens' summits" (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2015) or "mini-publics" (Lafont 2015). During such event, participants join one of the parallel, small-scale deliberations, where they meet other participants face to face, which promotes impartial, substantive and inclusive discussion due to their small size, random composition and freedom from the public gaze (Elster 1998).…”