What was once a marginal proposal at democratic reform has now become a central part of the political process. Five political scientists investigate the case of the rise of minipublics in Belgium.

When the Journal of Public Deliberation was born 15 years ago, convening a randomly selected sample of citizens—or minipublic—to deliberate on policy recommendations was a strange idea. A handful of activists, practitioners and scholars put forward this vision, and they were often met with scepticism, if not disregard.

Things are different today. Deliberative minipublics are increasingly popular inside civil society, but also among traditional representative actors. This procedure is defended in an opinion piece of a mainstream newspaper and endorsed by prominent political figures. More and more countries have experienced structured deliberation on major political issues. The Icelandic government and the Irish Parliament have relied on such processes at the highest level of policy reform: constitutional revision. Federal entities of Belgium have even gone one step further by establishing permanent randomly selected bodies that will work in collaboration with elected parliaments in the long term.

How did we get to this position?

Investigating the Rise of Minipublics in Belgium

Our team of five political scientists has tried to answer this question by listing and analysing all the minipublics convened in Belgium. This contributes to understanding how marginal democratic reform proposals can enter traditional political institutions.

Graph 1. The evolution of minipublics in Belgium between 2001 and 2020

The figure above tells a story of how deliberative minipublics gained traction in Belgium. We stopped the count on November 14, 2020. We only counted minipublics that had effectively started. As a consequence, we did not count the minipublics that were delayed or postponed due to COVID-19.

The first phase of the evolution of minipublics in Belgium is the emergence of minipublics at the beginning of the 2000s. At that time, they were primarily organised by a specific ministry in collaboration with a civic foundation such as the King Baudouin Foundation or the Foundation for Future Generation. These foundations pushed for the selection of participants by lot in order to attract a more diversified sample of the population, compared to the roundtables of stakeholders usually convened by ministers. At that time, the media coverage of minipublics was relatively marginal. Political leaders considered them as a tool, among many others, to collect information from the field.

The second phase started in 2013. We observe an increase of minipublics, with a mean of 3.5 cases per year. This acceleration can notably be attributed to one event that attracted lots of attention: the G1000, which gathered more than 700 randomly selected people for a deliberation within a day.

The G1000 was a response to the political crisis that saw Belgium break the length record (541 days) of a state without a government. Political parties from the Dutchspeaking Flanders and those from the Frenchspeaking Wallonia could not find an agreement on the future federal architecture of the country.

Artists, public figures and academics initiated this grassroots minipublic. Thanks to an important communications campaign with famous public figures as spokespersons, the G1000 succeeded in attracting political and media attention on sortition and the virtues of citizens’ deliberation. This was helpful in shaping how the public viewed minipublics. Minipublics were conceived not only as a tool to increase the efficacy of public action, but also a mechanism to cure the democratic malaise experienced within representative democracies.

Prof. Peter Vermeersch and David Van Reybrouck tell the story behind G1000. Video courtesy of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

The G1000 also acted as a catalyst for a network of actors committed to the implementation of democratic innovations in Belgium. Although the network does not have a formal structure, they form a lobby in favour of opening the political system to new forms of citizen participation. As the informal network grew stronger and larger, their influence on public agenda also increased. They have succeeded in putting the issue of participatory and deliberative democracy into public agenda. The action of certain public personalities such as David Van Reybrouck—author of the book Against the Elections: The Case For Democracy and founder of the G1000—also reinforces the network’s visibility. In the wake of these developments, minipublics have mushroomed in Belgium and have become a widespread mechanism to involve ordinary citizens.

Graph 2 shows that minipublics are convened at all levels of governance, including high levels such as the federal or the European ones. Its initiators are also diverse, with a majority of cases initiated by the executive, and the rest by the civil society, parliaments and public administrations, as demonstrated in Graph 3.

Graphs 2: Convening minipublics in levels of governance

Since 2019, we can observe a rather exceptional third phase, namely the institutionalisation of deliberative instruments. Indeed, three federal entities in Belgium have established permanent bodies composed of randomly selected citizens. The German-speaking Community, the smallest entity of the country, has initiated the movement by creating a permanent citizens’ dialogue in 2019. This randomly selected assembly has the power to convene minipublics on specific policy issues and, most importantly, to work in collaboration with the parliament to guarantee that the citizens’ recommendations are taken into account by policymakers. The legislation indeed provides that meetings will be organised with members of a randomly selected assembly, members of the parliament and the executive. The latter must systematically explain how they implemented each recommendation or justify why they did not do so.

The Walloon and Brussels regions have thereafter transformed the functioning of their respective parliaments. Both regions have introduced mixed parliamentary committees, in which randomly selected citizens will serve alongside elected representatives. This will enable ordinary people to deliberate with members of parliament on preselected themes and to formulate recommendations.

At the local level, cities have also followed the movement by progressively institutionalising their own minipublics, often in the form of randomly selected neighbourhood councils. These small minipublics show innovative design features. They can be organised alongside participatory budgeting, like in the municipalities of Auderghem and the City of Brussels or in parallel with the city council like in Saint-Gilles and Mechelen. In the case of Brussels, these minipublics have mixed composition, with randomly selected ordinary citizens and representatives of civil society. In all these cases of institutionalisation, the minipublic percolated into the centre of representative systems. Contrary to the previous period when minipublics were mainly ad hoc experiments at the margin of the political system, randomly selected assemblies are now a component of the Belgian democratic structure.

Graph 3: The initiators of minipublics between 2001 and 2020

Factors For the Rise of Minipublics

Two elements might shed light on the rise of deliberative minipublics in Belgium.

First, the network of activists that emerged in the second phase played a crucial role. Its members succeeded in convincing some political leaders that the deliberative and random selection of an assembly is an appropriate solution to the malaise experienced by representative democracies. They popularised some international examples such as the Irish Citizens’ Assembly that have shown that randomly selected assemblies can be associated with public debates on urgent public problems. Consequently, political actors, even if they are usually cautious about such mechanisms, gradually let themselves be convinced by these activists in the implementation of deliberative minipublics in their own institutions. Additionally, they also helped political actors in the actual organisation of deliberative minipublics. For instance, several minipublics launched by ministers or public agencies were accompanied by practitioners and activists of the G1000 network or other organisations active in areas related to deliberative democracy.

In the wake of growing political dissatisfaction among the citizenry, the political leaders sought to restore political trust. The proliferation of deliberative solutions provided by activists converge into the growing use of minipublics at different levels of power in Belgium.

Second, the entry of the Green Party within the government coalition of the two regions out the of three has given a decisive push to vote for reforms and its implementation. Belgian green parties have been pioneers in the promotion of deliberative tools in order to cure the democratic malaise: They managed to convince their coalition partners to establish deliberative processes.

This short historical description shows how a marginal democratic innovation can, step-by-step, enter mainstream representative institutions. This can give hope to all democratic reformers that seek to reshape democracy. Reforms are possible.

However, we also want to remain cautious regarding the institutionalisation of deliberative instruments. Minipublics remain top-down processes. They are not related to popular movements that ask for the institutionalisation of citizen participation or random selection. On the contrary, citizens tend to be rather neutral toward sortition and are fragmented regarding the question of who should rule: between elites, experts and citizens. It will thus be crucial to scrutinise whether the broad public endorses these reforms and changes its attitudes toward politics.

About the Authors

Vincent Jacquet is a postdoctoral researcher (F.R.S.-FNRS) at the Université catholique de Louvain and invited lecturer the Université de Namur, Belgium. His main research interests are participatory governance, deliberative democracy, citizen participation and local politics.

David Talukder is a PhD candidate at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. He works for a research project on “Reforming Representative Democracy” and is writing a dissertation about the political representation of disadvantaged groups and their support for reforms. His main research interests are political representation, democratic reforms and deliberative democracy.

Sophie Devillers is a PhD researcher at the Université de Namur and Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her work focuses on deliberative and participatory democracy, and more specifically on the deliberative dynamics in mixed designs, involving both lay citizens and elected representatives.

Jehan Bottin is a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He works on democratic innovations and deliberative democracy, and more specifically on public servants involved in the institutionalisation of deliberative processes.

Julien Vrydagh is a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He is a research associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His research focuses on deliberative democracy, democratic innovations and the impact of citizen participation on public policy.