Are deliberative minipublics acceptable democratic shortcuts in building a participatory deliberative democracy? Here’s a roundup of this debate.

The Journal of Deliberative Democracy published a special issue entitled Democracy without Shortcuts. The special issue is based on political philosopher Cristina Lafont’s recently published book of the same title. For many scholars, Lafont offers some of the sharpest yet nuanced critiques on the theory and practice of deliberative minipublics. We challenged 10 scholars to engage with Lafont’s work to provoke a focused and thoughtful conversation.

Here’s the roundup of the special issue’s highlights.

Should Minipublics Have the Authority to Make Binding Decisions?

In the past few years, there have been growing calls to give minipublics more power. Most minipublics are consultative. Policymakers can cherry-pick minipublics’ recommendations that fit their own political agenda and disregard those that do not. After all, many politicians still operate on short-term thinking, partisan politics or populist rhetoric. Therefore, empowering minipublics gives the political system a chance to craft and adopt better laws.

Lafont argues against empowering minipublics to make binding decisions. Her reasoning starts with the assumption that people trust minipublics because their participants are ordinary citizens like them. Indeed, this theoretical claim is confirmed by an empirical piece in the special issue by James Pow, Lisa van Dijk and Sofie Marien, who find that the wider public trusts minipublics because these forums are composed of people who are just like them. For Lafont, however, the problem does not lie in the minipublics’ composition. The problem is with what happens once the microcosm of society deliberates together. Participants change after deliberation. They are much better informed than ordinary citizens. They had the unique experience of deliberating with a diverse group of citizens and crafting recommendations together.

Can the rest of the population still consider the minipublic to be like them? Should we expect the wider public to blindly defer to the minipublic’s decision in the hope that their opinions were well taken into account during the process?

Political theorists Robert E. Goodin and Jane Mansbridge engage with these questions in the special issue in various ways. For Lafont, however, deferring to minipublics is dangerous for the political system. Minipublics may begin by representing the microcosm of society, but they do not end up being accountable to them. If minipublics aim to generate legitimate laws and to curb the citizen distrust towards politics, empowering minipublics is not the right solution.

Participants change after deliberation. They are much better informed than ordinary citizens. They had the unique experience of deliberating with a diverse group of citizens and crafting recommendations together. Can the rest of the population still consider the minipublic to be like them?

Should Minipublics Primarily Address People, and Not Politicians?

If minipublics should not be empowered to make binding decisions, then what is its purpose? Lafont argues that minipublics should be used as resource for the whole population: They should be used to contribute in building a deliberative and participatory democracy.

Currently, minipublic recommendations are aimed at providing input to politicians’ decision-making. This, if at all, is a narrow way of widening the practice of citizen participation. Only a small proportion of the population are selected to join minipublics. They only help decisionmakers reach considered judgment and not the wider citizenry.

This is why Lafont argues that minipublics should aim at engaging the broader public. They can help the population to filter the mass of information, to spot the fake news and populist arguments or to highlight a public problem’s value tradeoffs. Moreover, minipublics can send trustworthy signals to the population when they take notice that current laws and policies are not in the interests of the citizenry. The population can use these signals and information to question or put pressure on their elected representatives. Implemented in that way, minipublics enable the population to better understand public issues and thereby augment their capacity to influence the public debate and public opinions, which ultimately shape politicians’ decisions.

Minipublics should aim at engaging the broader public.

How exactly does this look like in practice? Contributors in the special issue put forward various options. Mark E. Warren suggests organising many minipublics on different public issues. People could then follow more closely the ones on the public issues they find important, while wilfully trusting the ones on matters that are secondary to them. James Fishkin proposes a Deliberation Day, that is, a national holiday during which many minipublics on a public issue are convened. This addresses the issue of scale. For Ronald van Crombrugge, redesigning existing political institutions is necessary. He draws on the case of a citizen-initiated citizens’ assembly which combines petitions, minipublic deliberations, public consultation and parliamentary deliberation as a way of realising Lafont’s vision of a participatory and deliberative democracy.

Ensuring more people participate in more minipublics, however, is not the only way of promoting minipublics to the wider public. André Bächtiger and Saskia Goldberg’s contribution in the special issue adds further nuance to this argument. They remind us that even when citizens do not take part in minipublics themselves, they can still trust the recommendations of minipublics. We must realise that citizens are not homogenous actors. Different citizens will have different appraisals of minipublics’ recommendations, depending on the nature of the issue and the strength of their views on the issue, among others. We cannot, in other words, assume that minipublics are bad shortcuts in all instances.

A minipublic’s recommendations should not be a green light for political agenda.

Should Minipublics be Less Ambitious in their Political Agenda?

Some activists see in minipublics, particularly citizens’ assemblies, a mechanism to advance an ambitious political agenda. Lafont strongly argues against this for it erodes the legitimacy of the political system. As she puts it, ‘there are no shortcuts to make a political community better than its members, nor can a community achieve faster progress by leaving their citizens behind.’ A minipublic’s recommendations should not be a green light for political agenda. Their richness lies in the picture they produce. Activists should thus use the minipublic’s recommendations to estimate how much of their political agenda could receive the support of the public if they are given the opportunity to reach considered judgment.

There are many more facets of this debate presented in the special issue, which is available for everyone to read. Ultimately, as Simone Chambers, Jürgen Habermas and Tetsuki Tamura remind us in their contributions to the special issue, we must not lose sight of deliberative democracy’s vision as a shared project of empowerment and self-government. The debate on how to realise such vision continues.

About the Author

Julien Vrydagh is a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Together with Nicole Curato and André Bächtiger, he coedited the Journal of Deliberative Democracy’s special issue on Democracy without Shortcuts (Volume 16, Issue 2).