Citizens' assembly
Citizens' assembly is a group of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public questions so as to exert an influence. Other names and variations of deliberative mini-publics include citizens' jury, citizens' panel, people's panel, people's jury, policy jury, consensus conference and citizens' convention.
A citizens' assembly uses elements of a jury to create public policy. 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. Through skilled facilitation, the assembly members weigh trade-offs and work to find common ground on a shared set of recommendations. Citizens' assemblies can be more representative and deliberative than public engagement, polls, legislatures or ballot initiatives. They seek quality of participation over quantity. They also have added advantages in issues where politicians have a conflict of interest, such as initiatives that will not show benefits before the next election or decisions that impact the types of income politicians can receive. They also are particularly well-suited to complex issues with trade-offs and values-driven dilemmas.
With Athenian democracy as the most famous government to use sortition, theorists and politicians have used citizens' assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy in a variety of modern contexts. As of 2023, the OECD has found their use increasing since 2010.
Defining features
Membership
Achieving a sufficiently inclusive and representative group of everyday people helps ensure that the assembly reflects political equality and the diversity of a community. Some of the components are described below.Selection
Assembly members are most often selected through a two-stage process called sortition. In a first instance, a large number of invitations are sent from the convening authority at random. The principle is that everybody should have an equal chance of being selected in the first place. 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 is called stratification – a technique that is also used in opinion polls.Random selection in governance has historical significance and the earliest known instances include the Athenian democracy and various European communities.
Size
The size of a citizens' assembly should ideally be large enough to capture a representative cross-section of the population. The size depends on the purpose, demographics, and population size of the community. Assemblies typically consist of between 50 and 200 citizens.Turnover
Regular turnover of participants is common. 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.Functions
In general, the purpose is to have an influence on public decision making. The function of a citizens' assembly has no a priori limits. Though assemblies are sometimes limited in scope, the purpose of an assembly can vary widely. Modern assemblies have tended to propose rather than directly enact public policy changes due to constrictions in place by most constitutions. Assembly proposals in those systems are then enacted by the corresponding authority. Sometimes a proposal is sent to the general electorate as a referendum.Deliberation
A key component of assemblies is their deliberative nature. Deliberation allows members to reflect on their values and weigh new information in dialogue with subject-matter experts and their peers. By incorporating the views, information and arguments of experts and then asking the participants to engage in collaborative discussion, assemblies aim to enable the participants to educate themselves and produce a vote or result representative of the public interest. Chandler notes that while opinion polls can reveal what the public thinks more quickly and cheaply, citizens' assemblies can reveal "what they would reach after considered reflection."Parkinson argues that the intent of deliberation is to "replace power plays and political tantrums with 'the mild voice of reason. Deliberation attempts to marry procedural effectiveness with substantive outcomes. Parkinson continues that the process reframes "political legitimacy" as involving "not just doing things right, but doing the right things". This view contrasts with the purely procedural account of legitimacy, of which Rawls says "there is a correct or fair procedure such that the outcome is likewise correct or fair, whatever it is, provided the procedure has been followed properly." While deliberation is itself a procedure, it deliberately incorporates factual information, and thus broadens the consideration of legitimacy.
Agenda-setting
Agenda-setting refers to establishing a plan for the substantive issues that the assembly is to consider. In major examples of assemblies, such as those in British Columbia and Ontario, the legislature set the agenda before the assemblies were convened. However, Dahl asserts that final control over agendas is an essential component of an ideal democracy: "the body of citizens...should have the exclusive control to determine what matters are or are not to be decided." Today, agenda-setting is a component of the ongoing citizens' assemblies in Ostbelgien, Paris, and the Brussels Citizens' Assembly on Climate.Briefing materials
Briefing materials should be balanced, diverse and accurate. One approach is to have an advisory committee of randomly selected from the population to set the rules and procedures without undue influence by government officials.Guardrails
Especially when juries or assemblies have more than advisory powers, the checks and balances grow to ensure that those participating can't make unilateral decisions or concentrate power. In Athenian democracy, for example, this meant a complex array of carrots and sticks as guardrails that successfully blunted the temptation of corruption. Étienne Chouard argues that in large part because elected politicians wrote the constitutions, that governments that use elections have far fewer guardrails in place than those based largely on sortition.Some worry that assemblies might not provide the same accountability as elections to prevent members from engaging in inappropriate behavior. Pierre Étienne Vandamme points to other methods of accountability and the benefits of being able to vote one's conscience and not being subject to the same external pressures as elected politicians. Assemblies can also provide a check on elected officials by setting and enforcing the rules governing them, instead of politicians self-policing.
Decision
At some point, the assembly concludes its deliberations and offers conclusions and recommendations. This is typically done in a voting process such as through the use of secret ballots to help keep citizens from becoming public figures and able to vote their conscience.Application
Étienne Chouard argues that elected officials have a conflict of interest when it comes to creating the rules by which power is distributed in a democracy, such as in drafting constitutions. He argues for sortition as ideal for this type of decision-making. An OECD report also argues that issues whose benefits may not be felt before the next election cycle are especially suited for deliberative mini-publics.Andrew Anthony believes citizens' assemblies would be useful for specific cases, but worries that with more complex issues that juries would not outperform elected officials. Jamie Susskind disagrees, arguing that complex issues with real trade-offs are better for a deliberative body of citizens than leaving it to political or industrial elites. He also argues that values-driven dilemmas represent a particularly good opportunity for deliberative mini-publics.
Precursors
Several historical states are known to use sortition, though unlike the modern concept of a citizens' assembly in that it was principally used to determine offices, rather than policies.The most famous example is Athenian democracy, in which sortition was utilized to pick most of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries. Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office. According to the author Mogens Herman Hansen, the citizens' court was superior to the assembly because the allotted members swore an oath which ordinary citizens in the assembly did not; therefore, the court could annul the decisions of the assembly. Most Greek writers who mention democracy emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections.
From the 12th to the 18th century, Italian republics used sortition as part of their method of appointing political offices, including city states of Lombardy during the 12th and 13th centuries, Venice until the late 18th century, and Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries. As with Athenian democracy, it was used together with other methods such as voting to determine offices. Italy is not the only place where sortition is documented in the early modern period. Some parts of Switzerland used random selection during the years between 1640 and 1837 to prevent corruption.
Trial juries are another precursor to citizens' assemblies. Juries had been a standard feature of the English legal system since the mid-12th century, building on earlier traditions. Early juries differed from a modern trial jury on two counts: they were appointed by local sheriff rather than sortition and they were expected to investigate the facts before the trial. Over time, the jury developed its modern characteristics. In 1730, the British Parliament passed the Bill for Better Regulation of Juries which introduced sortition by lot as the method of selection, though full randomisation would not be secured until the 20th century.
During the Age of Enlightenment, many of the political ideals originally championed by the democratic city-states of ancient Greece were revisited. 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, and Harrington, for his ideal republic of Oceana. Rousseau argued for a mixed model of sortition and election, whereas Edmund Burke worried that those randomly selected to serve would be less effective and productive than self-selected politicians.
Despite this, there was almost no discussion of sortition during the formation of the American and French republics. Bernard Manin, a French political theorist, argues that this paradoxical lack of attention may have been because choosing rulers by lot may have been viewed as impractical on such a large scale as the modern state, or if elections were thought to give greater political consent than sortition. David Van Reybrouck instead argues that, besides their relatively limited knowledge about Athenian democracy, wealthy Enlightenment figures preferred using elections as it allowed them to retain more power as an aristocracy that was elected instead of hereditary.