Institutionalizing deliberative mini-publics? Issues of legitimacy and power for randomly selected assemblies in political systems

ABSTRACT

Randomly selected deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are on the rise globally. However, they remain ad hoc, opening the door to arbitrary manoeuvre and triggering a debate on their future institutionalization. What are the competing proposals aiming at institutionalizing DMPs within political systems? I suggest three ways for thinking about institutionalization: in terms of temporality, of legitimacy and support, and of power and role within a system. First, I analyze the dimension of time and how this affect DMP institutional designs. Second, I argue that because sortition produces ‘weak representatives’ with ‘humility-legitimacy’, mini-publics hardly ever make binding decisions and need to rely on external sources of legitimacies. Third, I identify four institutional models, relying on opposing views of legitimacy and politics: tamed consultation, radical democracy, representative klerocracy and hybrid polyarchy. They differ in whether mini-publics are interpreted as tools: for legitimizing elected officials; to give power to the people; or as a mean to suppress voting .

KEYWORDS:

• Citizens’ assembly
• deliberative mini-public
• democracy
• democratic innovation
• institutionalization
• legitimacy

Acknowledgments

Different parts of this paper were presented in earlier versions at: the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, University of Hamburg, 25 August 2018; the International Workshop “Democratic Innovations in Theory & Practice”, University of Zürich, 6 December 2018; the conference “Le retour du tirage au sort en politique”, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon, 10 October 2019; the symposium “Localiser l’épreuve démocratique”, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 14 November 2019; and at the Political Studies Association (PSA) 72th Annual International Conference, Queen’s University, Belfast, 29 March 2021. I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Sonia Bussu, Graham Smith, Rikki Dean and Adrian Bua, as well as to Oliver Escobar and Jane Mansbridge, for their stimulating discussions on an earlier version of this paper. Some of the arguments presented in this paper have been published by the author in French in a shorter article titled ‘Les démocraties du tirage au sort: Légitimités et modèles institutionnels en conflit’. Raisons politiques 82:13-31, 2021. The present article expands the discussion to refine the typology of mini-publics’ institutionalizations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Special issue

Embedding Participatory Governance: What are the challenges of institutionalizing a systemic approach to citizen participation?

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For another interesting typology see: (White 2017).

2. Epistemic claims can be internal if focused on deliberation, cognitive diversity and common sense, or external if focused on the teaching of experts. To avoid confusion, I call this second category ‘expertise legitimacy’.

3. For a critical analysis of the concept of ‘populism’ see Vittori (2017).

4. From the Greek ‘kleros’ meaning ‘sortition’ or ‘by lot’.

5. For an approach connecting DMPs to elected representatives see Setälä (2017).

6. I use the terms ‘descending’ and ‘ascending’ rather than ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ to avoid any normative connotation. I do not think the ‘descending’ model to be inferior to the ‘ascending’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dimitri Courant

Dimitri Courant is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Lausanne and University Paris 8. He is also a democracy visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on deliberation, representation and sortition, mainly through qualitative comparative case-studies of mini-publics in Europe. He has recently published ‘Citizens’ Assemblies for Referendums and Constitutional Reforms: Is There an “Irish Model” for Deliberative Democracy?’, Frontiers in Political Science (2021), and ‘Sortition and Democratic Principles. A Comparative Analysis’, in Gastil and Wright (ed.) (2019), Legislature by Lot, New York: Verso.