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.. Section 1.2. 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.Pimbert, M. (eds) and Wakeford, T. (eds) (2001). PLA Notes 40 Deliberative Democracy and Citizen Empowerment. IIED.
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 international organization 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 (often around 10,000–30,000). The principle is that everybody should have an equal chance of being selected in the first place. Amongst those who respond positively to this invitation, there is a second lottery process, this time ensuring that the final group broadly reflects the community with regard to certain criteria such as gender, age, geographic, and socioeconomic status, amongst others. This is called stratification – a technique that is also used in opinion polls.
Random selection in governance (known as sortition) 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 (or not) 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 (the German-Speaking Community of Belgium), 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 cannot 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.Mark Warren, "Citizen Representative" in M. E. Warren et H. Pearse, (eds), Designing Deliberative Democracy, The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 50-69 (p. 59) Pierre Étienne Vandamme points to other methods of accountability (including from separate citizens' assemblies) 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 (e.g. citizens' assemblies) 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 (or in this case assemblies) 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 (typically of 501 men). Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) 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 (including Aristotle,Aristotle, Politics 1301a28-35Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be Plato,Plato, Republic VIII, 557a Herodotus,Herodotus The Histories 3.80.6 and PericlesThucydides, The Peloponnesian War. The Funeral Oration of Pericles.) emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections (which were seen as oligarchic).
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.W. L. Warren, Henry II, University of California Press, 1973Daniel Klerman, "Was the Jury Every Self-Informing" Southern California Law Review 77: (2003), 123. 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.W. L. Warren, Henry II, University of California Press, 1973, p.358 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