Citizens' assembly
[9] Its members form a representative cross-section of the public, and are provided with time, resources and a broad range of viewpoints to learn deeply about an issue.
[15][16] Achieving a sufficiently inclusive and representative group of everyday people helps ensure that the assembly reflects political equality and the diversity of a community.
Amongst everybody who responds positively to this invitation, there is a second lottery process, this time ensuring that the final group broadly reflects the community in regards to certain criteria such as gender, age, geographic, and socio-economic status, amongst others.
This can help to maintain viewpoint diversity in the long term and avoid sorting the assembly into in-groups and out-groups that could bias the result, become homogenous or get captured by private interests.
[33] Pierre Étienne Vandamme points to other methods of accountability (including from separate Citizens' assemblies) and the benefits of being able to vote one's conscious and not be subject to the same external pressures as elected politicians.
[38] Jamie Susskind disagrees, arguing that complex issues with real trade-offs are better for a deliberative body of citizens leaving it to political or industrial elites.
The most famous example is Athenian democracy, in which sortition utilized to pick most[39][page needed] of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 men).
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic[39][page needed] and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office.
In 1730, the British Parliament passed the Bill for Better Regulation of Juries which introduced sortition by lot as the method of selection,[46] though full randomisation would not be secured until the 20th century.
The use of sortition as a means of selecting the members of government while receiving praise from notable Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu in his book The Spirit of Laws,[48] and Harrington, for his ideal republic of Oceana.
[49] Rousseau argued for a mixed model of sortition and election,[50] whereas Edmund Burke worried that those randomly selected to serve would be less effective and productive than self-selected politicians.
[61][non-primary source needed] Consensus conferences are generally deemed suitable for topics that are socially relevant and/or that require public support.
France hosted another convention on the end of life concerning assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2022 and 2023 to advise the French parliament in coordination with a consultative legislative assembly, which some worry will dilute the process.
[64] One of the variations that originated in Germany and has inspired similar experiments elsewhere is known as planning cells, where one or more cohorts of randomly-selected citizens go through a process of hearing from speakers and deliberating on an issue in order to efficiently get more representative and deliberative input from a population.
[69] The Fine Gael–independent minority government formed after the 2016 general election established an assembly in July 2016 "without participation by politicians, and with a mandate to look at a limited number of key issues over an extended time period.
"[70][needs update] Held in 2006 and composed of 143 randomly-selected Dutch citizens, the Burgerforum Kiesstelsel was tasked with examining options for electoral reform.
[72] Beginning in July 2016 after the municipal response to flooding was deemed inadequate by many citizens, Gdańsk assemblies comprising approximately 60 randomly-selected residents from the city's voter rolls made binding decisions to address problems.
[74] In 2019 the British government announced the UK Climate Assembly,[75][non-primary source needed] with 108 citizens aiming to deliberate over how to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
[86] The state of Oregon created the first permanent Citizens' Initiative Review in 2010, while pilots have been run in places including Colorado,[87] Arizona,[88] Massachusetts,[89] and Sion (Switzerland).
[91][92] Electoral reform, redistricting, campaign finance law, and the regulation of political speech are often claimed to be unsuitable for management by self-interested politicians.
[93][41] Fearon[94] and separately Nino[95] support the idea that deliberative democratic models tend to generate conditions of impartiality, rationality and knowledge, increasing the likelihood that the decisions reached are morally correct.
[106] In fact, Mill famously argued that governing assemblies should be a "fair sample of every grade of intellect among the people" over "a selection of the greatest political minds.
[109] Dietram Scheufele worried in 2010 that the selected individuals with the time and interest to join civic meetings like consensus conferences often results in an unrepresentative survey sample, especially if most of those invited do not choose to participate.
[60]:16-19 He also cites concern around participant group dynamics and how personalities have played an important role in producing different outcomes of discussions in experiments in the 1990s.
[110] The biggest potential for cost-savings stems from the wisdom of the crowd that could be less susceptible to forms of influence by special interests seeking narrow benefits at the expense of the rest.
Daniel Chandler, for example, argues that "on its own, random selection would leave most people with no way of participating in the formal decision-making", which could lead to public disengagement with politics.
Lafont rejects this characterization, arguing that people are "subjected to a filter of deliberative experience" which makes them "no longer a representative sample of the citizenry at large.
[101] Chandler argues that citizens' assemblies should not replace elections but instead have an advisory or hybrid role; he discusses a more radical proposal that one could be a permanent legislative chamber.
[113] Warren and Gastil claim, in the British Columbia case, that other citizens should have been able to "treat it as a facilitative trustee (a trusted information and decision proxy).
The introduction of the assembly, according to John Parkinson, undermined the trust and power that British Columbia political parties and advocacy groups had gained.
