The Perception of the Legitimacy of Citizens’ Assemblies in Deeply Divided Places? Evidence of Public and Elite Opinion from Consociational Northern Ireland

Abstract

How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support decision-making by a citizens’ assembly, even when the decision reached is one they personally disagree with. However, support is lower among those with strong ideological views. We also find that elected politicians oppose delegating decision-making power to an ‘undemocratic’ citizens’ assembly, but are more supportive of recommendation-making power. These findings highlight the potential for post-conflict consociations to be amended, with the consent of the parties, to include citizens’ assemblies that make recommendations but not binding policy.

Conflicts of Legitimacies in Representative Institutions: The Case of the French Citizen Convention for Climate

“…Members of the opposition may exaggerate their hostility towards sortition. Hence, anonymous interviews might be a useful complement to our analysis (see Niessen, 2019;Rangoni et al, 2021;Garry et al, 2021). Another limitation of our study is the lack of quantitative insight.…”

“…Recent empirical evidence provides preliminary support to the hypothesis of a legitimacy conflict: elitist MPs who see themselves as more competent than ordinary citizens tend to consider that all democratic legitimacy emanates from elections, are particularly critical about deliberative mini-publics and reject the very idea of representation through sortition (Rangoni, Bedock, & Talukder, 2021), especially when it goes beyond consultation (Niessen, 2019;Garry et al, 2021). In this article, we look for further evidence of a legitimacy conflict in practice.…”

Gendering Constitutional Change in Northern Ireland: Participation, Processes and Power

“…As above, it is unionism's potential self-exclusion from this kind of deliberative forum that has dominated the debate on the appropriateness of citizens' assemblies for dealing with the constitutional question in the region (see Flynn, 2021). Moreover, it has been suggested that without unionist inclusion, the process could not be viewed as legitimate (see Flynn, 2021; see Garry et al, 2021Garry et al, , 2022, for discussions of potential models). Disputes around whether unionists would participate in a citizens' assembly on the constitutional question are likely to continue, but it is also important to examine the potential effects of this mechanism on other social groups; an issue currently buried under the machinations of on-going ethno-nationalist inspired quarrels.…”

The perceived legitimacy of deliberative minipublics: taking the perspective of polarized citizens

“…Arguably, it is the views, and indeed behaviour, of these polarized citizens that constitute the toughest test for democratic decision-making in general. Moreover, the few to study minipublics in a polarized setting often do so without examining the effect of different forms and individuals' degree of polarization (Garry et al, 2022;Pow, 2021). Consequently, we lack insights into how minipublics are perceived by highly polarized citizens, and to what extent these perceptions differ for more moderate citizens.…”

“…Moreover, they have focused on polarizing issues rather than polarized citizenssimilar to the few empirical studies that examine perceived minipublic legitimacy on a divisive issue such as migration (Pilet et al, 2022;Werner and Marien, 2022). Meanwhile, the few studies that look at minipublics in a highly polarized context do not look at the impact of different forms of polarization on perceived minipublic legitimacy (Garry et al, 2022;Pow, 2021). All in all, we lack insights into the perceived legitimacy of minipublics among polarized citizens and how these perceptions differ from those held by more moderate citizens.…”