Citizens Assemblies and Mini-publics

Citizens’ assemblies have emerged in the last decades as a promising tool to overcome the crisis of democracy. They typically gather randomly selected participants to come together and deliberate on controversial issues. In this review of existing experiences with citizens’ assemblies, I note that they have proved effective at making deliberation more inclusive and producing fine policy recommendations, thus fulfilling two important expectations inherent in deliberative democracy. This is due to sophisticated procedures put in place to select participants, coupled with comprehensive information provision. While they have been successful at creating cohesion among participants, that is, the mini-public, their uneven ability to create resonance with the macro-public appears to be their main shortcoming. This is due to their essentially experimental status, most of the time lacking a clear commitment structure and hence consequentiality. Now at the crossroads of an ever-tenser world, citizens’ assemblies could provide greater benefits if they were more formally institutionalized.