Referendums Are Never Merely Referendums: On the Need to Make Popular Vote Processes More Deliberative

While there is much to command about Cheneval and el‐Wakil's ( 2018 ) proposal in favor of a nuanced and fine‐grained approach to popular vote processes as well as their specific defense of optional, bottom‐up, and binding referendums as democratic supplements to our existing representative institutions, I argue that their approach does not pay sufficient attention to the pre‐voting phase of the process that has to do with the laundering of raw preferences into generalized and informed ones, namely deliberation. I offer two suggestions to render the voting occuring in referenda more deliberative, namely the pre‐voting use of what I call “open mini‐publics” and that of Citizens’ Initiative Review. I also defend the use of top‐down and mandatory referenda in the context of a more open and technologically empowered deliberative democracy.