Who Supports Citizens Selected by Lot to be the Main Policymakers? A Study of French Citizens

Abstract

Despite their multiplication over the last 15 years, studies on the support for assemblies composed of citizens selected by lot are rare and the few that exist analyse citizens’ attitudes towards such mini-publics as consultative bodies associated with traditional representative institutions. In this article, we examine support for citizens selected by lot as new policymakers who take the most important political decisions instead of political representatives. We contrast support for this radical democratic innovation with support for two other reforms that increase citizen participation: generic support for a greater involvement of citizens in policymaking, and specific support for citizen-initiated referendums. The goal is to understand whether the drivers of support for citizens selected by lot overlap or differ from the drivers of support for other forms of citizen participation. We rely upon data from the 2017 French Election Study.

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

“…Webb (2013) finds that British citizens who are supportive of a greater involvement of citizens in policymaking are more left-wing than those who are not. Del Rio, Navarro and Font (2016) find the same pattern in Spain, Bengtsson and Mattila (2009) in Finland, and Bedock and Pilet (2020a) in France. It is not clear whether this pattern is due to something unique to the leftwing ideology (for example an anti-elite sentiment), or something more contextual that has to do with which the perception of which ideology is dominant among political elites.…”

“…Four studies only have been looking at public support for citizens' assemblies (Bedock and Pilet 2020a;Bedock and Pilet 2020b;Christensen 2020;Rojon, Rijken and Klandermans 2019). They are narrower than ours in at least three ways.…”

“…We can also learn from the much thicker literature on public support for referendums and direct democracy in general. The few previous studies on support for the institution show that there are many similarities in correlates of support for referendums and for citizens' assemblies (Bedock and Pilet 2020a;Bedock and Pilet 2020b). Such similarities probably come from the fact that the two models -deliberative and direct democracy -have in common that they constitute an empowerment of citizens compared to a strict representative logic.…”

“…Bowler, Donovan and Karp (2007) refer to them as 'engaged', Norris (2011) as 'critical', and Dalton and Welzel (2014) as 'assertive citizens' (see also Schuck and de Vreese 2015). Some studies even claim that engaged citizens could be more positive about deliberative democracy instruments than about referendums (Bedock and Pilet, 2020a;Anderson and Goodyear-Grant 2010).…”

Why Voting Does Not Imply Consenting

“…Furthermore, in the current context of increasing questioning of representative institutions (which lies at the core of this research topic), the problem is all the more worthy of attention that it seems to mirror many citizens' actual preoccupations. It may also be of interest for the lively debates around sortition (Landemore, 2013;Vandamme and Verret-Hamelin, 2017;Courant, 2019;Bedock and Pilet, 2020), either as a substitute for or as a complement to elections, to attain a clearer picture of the connection between consent and elections, notably to assess what may get lost, in terms of consent, if we dispense of elections.…”