What can deliberative mini-publics contribute to democratic systems?

Can deliberative mini-publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem-based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real-world case: a deliberative mini-public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini-public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini-public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini-publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.     

Coupling citizens and elites in deliberative systems: The role of institutional design

A significant shortcoming in contemporary deliberative systems is that citizens are disconnected from various elite sites of public deliberation. This article explores the concept of ‘coupling’ as a means to better link citizens and elites in deliberative systems. The notion of ‘designed coupling’ is developed to describe institutional mechanisms for linking otherwise disconnected deliberative sites. To consider whether it is possible and indeed desirable to use institutional design to couple different sites in a deliberative system, the article draws on insights from a case study in which a mini‐public was formally integrated into a legislative committee. The empirical study finds that it is not only feasible to couple mini‐publics to legislative committees, but when combined, the democratic and deliberative capacity of both institutions can be strengthened. To be effective, ‘designed coupling’ requires more than establishing institutional connections; it also requires that actors to step outside their comfort zone to build new relationships and engage in new communicative spaces with different sets of ideas, actors and rules. This can be facilitated by institutional design, but it also requires leaders and champions who are well‐placed to encourage actors to think differently.     

On a Governmentality Analytics of the ‘Deliberative Turn’: Material Conditions,Rationalities and the Deliberating Subject

Amongst social and political researchers, as well as diverse policy actors, debate has of late grown around the role deliberation can and could play in addressing contemporary social, political and environmental issues. Substantial conceptual and empirical concerns remain about this ‘deliberative turn’, including the strictures of achieving ‘true deliberation’ and a lack of focus to date on the contexts and ‘material conditions’ of deliberative events and spaces. In response, this paper argues that the recent growth of research utilising Foucault's governmentality thesis can provide a fruitful analytics to explore aspects of the deliberative turn, in particular the rationalities and subjectivities that undergird it. This argument draws on recent debates in both deliberative politics and governmentality studies, as well as examples of past and on-going deliberative research.     

Explaining non‐participation in deliberative mini‐publics

This article investigates citizens’ refusal to take part in participatory and deliberative mechanisms. An increasing number of scholars and political actors support the development of mini‐publics – that is, deliberative forums with randomly selected lay citizens. It is often argued that such innovations are a key ingredient to curing the democratic malaise of contemporary political regimes because they provide an appropriate means to achieve inclusiveness and well considered judgment. Nevertheless, real‐life experience shows that the majority of citizens refuse the invitation when they are recruited. This raises a challenging question for the development of a more inclusive democracy: Why do citizens decline to participate in mini‐publics? This article addresses this issue through a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of those who have declined to participate in three mini‐publics: the G1000, the G100 and the Climate Citizens Parliament. Drawing on in‐depth interviews, six explanatory logics of non‐participation are distinguished: concentration on the private sphere; internal political inefficacy; public meeting avoidance; conflict of schedule; political alienation; and mini‐public's lack of impact on the political system. This shows that the reluctance to take part in mini‐publics is rooted in the way individuals conceive their own roles, abilities and capacities in the public sphere, as well as in the perceived output of such democratic innovations.     

Institutionalizing deliberative democracy

• In the mass democratic polities of today, the role of citizens remains confined largely to that of voting for members of elected legislatures. Beyond that, there is scant opportunity for ‘the public’ to participate in any meaningful sense in most of the tasks that make up the policy‐making process. Indeed, influencing that process is typically viewed as the sole prerogative of technocratic experts, organized interests, and elected officials. This presumption is buttressed (and rationalized) by a too‐ready acceptance of the platitude that citizens are generally uninformed, unskilled, and uninterested in the work of democratic self‐government.
  • We begin with a definition of ‘deliberative democracy’.
  • We then briefly consider its connection to the concept of democracy more generally and argue that the moral authority of the former follows from that of the latter.
  • From both the developing and the developed worlds, we draw several examples of institutionalized deliberative participation. In some, institutionalization has been sustained; in others, it has not been sustained.
  • Reflecting on these examples, we consider the ‘lessons learned’ from these and other cases. We identify costs, difficulties and limitations associated with institutionalizing participatory public deliberation as well as the benefits and advantages thereof.
  • Finally, we briefly outline a proposal for an Australian experiment that might serve as a learning model for subsequent efforts there and elsewhere to ‘institutionalize’ participatory citizen deliberation.
• Institutionalizing deliberative participation would not replace representative government, but rather would supplement it, enabling democratic governments to reflect and respond better to the values, priorities and aspirations of the people they ostensibly serve.
• We offer this practice‐orientated paper as a discussion paper intended to introduce readers to the idea of institutionalizing participatory public deliberation and to generate constructive debate concerning it. We do not presume to provide a rigorous analysis of the concept or of any of the many issues surrounding it.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global governance and communicative action: a study of democratic participation during planning for the Lyon–Turin rail link

Organisation–stakeholder engagement during planning of a high‐speed rail link between France and Italy is described and analysed in this paper. Conceptualising organisation–citizen engagement as a form of deliberative democracy, the study's theoretical framework draws upon literature from communication, social and political science. Following a review of governance for transnational organisation–stakeholder engagement, communication methods used by one transnational organisation, Lyon‐Turin Ferroviaire (LTF), to engage in ‘discursive legitimacy’ with affected parties, is studied. A qualitative case study approach examines whether LTF's engagement with stakeholders provides opportunities for democratic participation rather than creating a democratic deficit in the public sphere. Results point to a lack of mechanisms through which transnational policy makers can be held accountable‐leading in this case, to a legitimacy crisis for institutions involved, threatening their ability to justify the economic and transportation viability of the project. This article is of interest to academics in communication and social sciences, managers working in an international context and communication professionals. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Australian Citizens' Parliament: forging shared identity through public deliberation

• Active citizen participation is increasingly being recognized as essential to effective public policymaking. A key challenge for public administrators is how to effectively engage constituents' diverse viewpoints in sound deliberation that will likely result in coherent, agreed judgments. This paper investigates one such public deliberation process, Australia's first Citizens' Parliament, which brought together 150 randomly sampled Australian citizens charged with the task of formulating concrete policy proposals to be considered by the Federal government. One unexpected outcome of this initiative, especially given Australian ambivalence about nationalism, was the emergence of a shared identity among participants that appeared to bridge cultural and geographical divides. We explore linkages between salient elements of the deliberative process, the emergence of a sense of ‘being Australian’, and the final agreed list of policy recommendations that indicated an understanding of and commitment to the ‘common good’. If the emergence of a shared identity is acknowledged as a key to the development of a coherent public voice, then further examination of these linkages will be critical to the efficacy of future public deliberations. Moreover, given the heterogeneous nature of the Australian electorate and the challenges inherent in the country's federal governance structure, the findings have significant implications for policymakers in similar constituencies, notably the EU and the USA.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democratic Accountability in Decentralised Governance1

This article develops a conceptual framework for studying democratic accountability in decentralised governance, and discusses critical issues about democratic accountability from a citizen's perspective. First, the concept is discussed and adapted to make it useful for studying democratic accountability in different governance structures. Second, the article scrutinises conditions for democratic accountability in decentralised governance based on three models. Third, democratic accountability is discussed with reference to a case study of public reviewers operating in four municipalities in Sweden. The study indicates that municipal auditors and the local media have the greatest impact on municipal policy. On the whole, auditors improve local governments’ internal control and systems for steering and monitoring municipal policy, whereas the media sometimes alter the policy agenda without changing the policy. Auditors maintain and support an elitist democratic orientation of democratic accountability, and the media maintain this democratic orientation and in addition promote democratic dialogue. Viewed from a citizen's perspective, the traditional accountability system does not work satisfactorily. State inspectors and municipal auditors – two important public reviewers in the current system – could improve their work to make it more useful to citizens’ democratic control. Another way discussed to develop democratic accountability is to promote participatory policy and concrete means of accountability (e.g. on‐site visits, conducted tours and different forms of democratic dialogue). The formal way to improve democratic accountability implies more transparency, monitoring and control, which may also lead to distrust and scapegoat thinking (i.e. a surveillance society), whereas concrete modes of accountability, more associated with participatory and deliberative democracy, imply mutual responsibility and trust building. Strengthening participatory policy, active citizens, collective responsibility and democratic dialogue could be an alternative to the emerging audit society.     

How Democratic Is “Governance”? Lessons from Swiss Drug Policy

Public action increasingly takes place in self-organizing networks that are remote from direct governmental control. While these transformations have been subject to scrutiny in regard to their efficiency, less attention has been paid to their democratic quality. This article discusses governance-induced problems of democracy by isolating two major criticisms. Deliberative criticism argues that governance, rather than allowing for true deliberation in the public space, may lead to a loss of accountability. Participatory criticism stresses that governance impinges on participatory venues. The article discusses these criticisms theoretically and empirically, drawing from research on drug policy in Switzerland. The findings show that the criticisms are relevant, albeit not entirely justified.     

Are innovative, participatory and deliberative procedures in policy making democratic and effective?

Abstract.  The overall project aims to establish a dialogue between normative democratic theory and research on policy formulation and implementation. This introductory article first notes the growth of various participatory and deliberative procedures in policy making, portrays the context of this growth and justifies the cases selected. It then presents the conceptual framework used for the study of these procedures, which mainly draws on participatory and deliberative democratic theory and the literature on the shift from 'government' to 'governance'. Based on this conceptual framework, the article focuses on four research questions the authors consider particularly important for the assessment of the contribution of the devices under scrutiny to democratic and effective decision making: questions of openness and access (input-legitimacy); questions regarding the quality of deliberation (throughput); questions of efficiency and effectiveness (output-legitimacy); and the issue of their insertion into the public space (questions of transparency and accountability).     

Deliberation,Citizen Science and Covid-19

Rather than aiming to produce more ‘rational’ or more ‘other-regarding’ citizen judgements (the outcome of which is uncertain), deliberative democratic exercises should be re-designed to maximise democratic participation. To do this, they must involve citizens and experts, a novel arrangement that will benefit both cohorts. For the former, a more inclusive form of deliberation will offer an opportunity to contribute to political discussion and be listened to by people with political or policy-based authority. For the latter, it will provide a venue through which expertise can be brought to bear on democratic decision making without risk of scapegoating or politicisation. More broadly, deliberation that prioritises dialogue (over, say, opinion change) affirms the principle that political decisions reflect value judgements rather than technically ‘right’ or technically ‘wrong’ answers—judgements that are legitimate if arrived at through discussion involving the people due to be affected by the resultant policy. This article sets out the advantages of this form of deliberation—which bears some similarity to certain types of citizen science—in the context of the UK government’s responses to Covid-19; both the confused decision making evident to date, and the forthcoming re-opening phases that will prioritise or advantage some constituencies over others.     

‘New spaces’ for change?: Diamond governance reforms and the micro‐politics of participation in post‐war Sierra Leone

While the majority of research carried out on diamonds and development in Sierra Leone has focused on debates concerning the role that diamonds played in the country's civil war of the 1990s, little attention has been directed towards understanding how the emergence and consequences of ‘new spaces’ for citizen engagement in diamond governance are shaping relationships between mining and political economic change in the post‐war period. Recent fieldwork carried out in two communities in Kono District illustrates how the emergence of such spaces—although much celebrated by government, donors and development practitioners—may not necessarily be creating the ‘room for manoeuvre’ necessary to open up meaningful public engagement in resource governance. The analysis focuses on one recent governance initiative in the diamond sector—the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF)—which aims to strengthen citizen participation in decision‐making within the industry, but has frequently been at the centre of controversy. In framing and articulating socio‐environmental struggles over resource access and control in Sierra Leone's post‐war period of transition, the article highlights how the emerging geographies of participation continue to be shaped by unequal power relationships, in turn having an impact on livelihood options, decision‐making abilities and development outcomes in the country's diamondiferous communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Theorizing Postcolonial Deliberation and Deliberative Peacebuilding

Given a legitimation problem of vertical (state vs society) and horizontal (modernity vs tradition) inequalities and differences as a historical and cultural cause of conflict, deliberation is instrumental in addressing this legitimation problem and transforming conflict into peace in the postcolonial, post-conflict context. Although deliberation has gained academic attention as a means of addressing the legitimation crisis in Western liberal democracies, its application to contemporary peacebuilding remains under-researched. This article thus aims to theorize postcolonial deliberation and deliberative peacebuilding, highlighting postcolonial history and culture and the critical role that agencies have played in deliberation to re-legitimize the non-Western polity and transform conflict into peace. It then deduces a hypothetical mechanism of the different paths to peace either with or without the external intervention that signifies how agencies deliberate.     

Deliberative Politik in transnationalen Räumen — Legitimation und Effektivität in der grenzüberschreitenden Umweltpolitik zwischen Kanada und USA

The article addresses new, horizontal and dialogue-oriented forms of political governance in transnational spaces. A normative-analytical model of deliberative governance will be developed to appraise the democratic potential of transnational structures and actions. The research is guided by the observation that the North American Great Lakes Regime reveals a high democratic-deliberative quality whereas international governance rather tends to de-democratization. This raises a challenging research question: To what extent does the deliberative governance of the Great Lakes Regime provide a model case, which allows drawing conclusions on institutional prerequisites and means how to “democratize” governance in similar issue areas.     

Deliberative participatory budgeting: A case study of Zeguo Town in China

The search for a better practice instrument of civic engagement has led to participatory budgeting and deliberative polling in recent years. Participatory budgeting stresses empowerment and citizens' struggle against the establishment and unequal social structures, whereas deliberative polling works within the system and focuses on improving democratic decision‐making processes by applying credible social science methods. Often, these two processes are presented as being in conflict with each other, which is to the detriment of the search for best practice in deliberative governance. This paper develops a theoretical analysis of deliberative participatory budgeting which is distinguished from unrepresentative and non‐deliberative but self‐selected participatory budgeting; that is, it considers how the quality of participatory budgeting can be improved through deliberative polling. This theoretical analysis is backed by an empirical study of deliberative participatory budgeting in Zeguo Township, Zhejiang Province, China. It explores whether, how, and under what conditions it is possible to combine deliberative polling and participatory budgeting. It details four experiments and assesses the successes, failures, limitations, and problems of the experiments. The case of Zeguo offers scholars, activists, and officials lessons about how to pursue best deliberative practice in both authoritarian states and democratic societies.     

Citizens' Juries and Deliberative Democracy

In the face of widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary democratic practice, there has been a growing interest in theories of deliberative democracy. However theorists have often failed to sufficiently address the question of institutional design. This paper argues that recent experiments with citizens' juries should be of interest to deliberative democrats. The practice of citizens' juries is considered in light of three deliberative democratic criteria: inclusivity, deliberation and citizenship. It is argued that citizens' juries offer important insights into how democratic deliberation could be institutionalized in contemporary political decision-making processes.     

Fear's Anger: Virginia Woolf's Psychology and Deliberative Democracy

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resistance that is part of reasoning in a deliberative system—especially when political deliberation results in a challenge to a person's identity. Woolf's solution for women writers, the material security represented by a room of one's own, can be applied to the larger problem of political deliberation as well. This leads to an expansion of the conception of substantive equality required for a deliberative democracy. Further, Woolf's insight challenges deliberative democrats to de-center capitalist economic relations. As a way of protecting the individual from the psychological dynamic Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, deliberative democrats should advocate a non-competitive economic space for those threatened by the powerful psychological reactions to deliberation.     

Corporatism, Pluralism, and Democracy: Toward a Deliberative Theory of Bureaucratic Accountability

This essay proposes a deliberative model of bureaucratic accountability and assesses its feasibility. Conventional wisdom suggests that a deliberative theory of bureaucratic accountability has little utility outside corporatist contexts. I reject this view because recent changes in patterns of interest representation have transformed both corporatist and pluralist bureaucracies into more hospitable environments for public deliberation. Contrary to the claims of democratic corporatists, recent pluralist practices of interest representation also seem to be compatible with public deliberation. Hence, movement toward greater openness in administrative decision-making is possible from both liberal pluralist and corporatist starting points. Corporatism clearly has no monopoly on democratic deliberation.     

Institutionalising participatory and deliberative procedures: The origins of the first permanent citizens’ assembly

In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens’ assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long-term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. Our analysis of this particular conception lead us to argue for the need of developing context-sentive approaches to participatory and deliberative procedures, as well as to discuss whether we should consider the latter as mere elites’ legitimation tools.     

Commentary on Widmalm: A rebuttal

Abstract

This paper examines the public involvement in a particularly sensitive and highly contentious field of EU policy making: the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) sector. It argues for the establishment of a larger public debate in the EU policy field and interactive discourses that involve public voices, rather than just technocrats or scientists, in the GMO sector. In terms of deliberative democracy, an assessment of the EU's GMO regime is mixed: on the one hand, new practices have been introduced, which indicate a shift towards more participatory policy making; on the other, enhanced societal participation does not necessarily support the emergence of a larger engaged public and deliberation in the general public sphere. Thus, after the design of the ‘participatory garden’, the wider European public debate on GMOs has not ‘grown’ due to a lack of horizontal co-ordination among EU initiatives; the preference for institutionalized forms of cooperation with civil society; and the lack of evaluation methods for public involvement in GMO approvals.