Fusing representative and deliberative democracy: A dispatch from Brussels

The year 2019 marked a milestone for advocates of democratic innovation in Belgium. It was the year that Deliberative Committees were institutionalised in the Parliaments of Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) and of the French Community Commission (COCOF).

Deliberative Committees gather 36 to 45 lay citizens alongside 12 to 15 Members of Parliament (MPs) to, together, deliberate and formulate recommendations on an issue that needs to be addressed by the Parliament. Citizens are selected via civic lottery, while politicians come from the parliamentary committee in-charge of the policy issue being discussed. Over four days, these committees hear from different experts, deliberate and develop recommendations on a specific issue that are, in turn, transmitted to the responsible minister(s).

An update

Five Deliberative Committees have been implemented so far: the roll out of the 5G network, homelessness, the role of citizens in times of crisis, biodiversity and block release training. All of these created a space of dialogue between MPs and ordinary citizens that generated a new type of input to policymaking.

The Deliberative Committee is an initiative of the French-speaking Green political party, Ecolo, which wanted to renew democracy and tackle citizens’ disillusionment with representative democracy. Inspired by the Irish Constitutional Convention of 2013 and its mixed deliberation, Ecolo first tried to institutionalise Deliberative Committees in the Walloon Region and the COCOF, but their proposals were rejected by the majority.

The context changed after the 2019 regional elections: the German-Speaking Community institutionalised its permanent citizen dialogue, the so-called Ostbelgien Model, and Ecolo also joined the governing coalitions of BCR and COCOF.

Not only did the institutionalisation of a minipublic mark a breakthrough, Ecolo was now also in position of power to do it. They just needed to clear an obstacle—Article 33 of the Belgian Constitution, which only allows MPs to sit in the plenary meetings of a parliament. Ecolo therefore had to change the internal rules of the parliaments to institutionalise the Deliberative Committees. This constitutional article also explains why MPs and citizens do not vote together on final recommendations, as citizens’ vote is secret and consultative, whereas the MPs’ vote is public and binding.

It has been four years since Deliberative Committees first started. Over this period, we interviewed two public officials, eight MPs, two practitioners, one warrantor and one expert to take stock of the achievements, challenges and potential of this unique democratic innovation. Here’s what we found.

Deliberative Committees served as a space for meaningful dialogue between MPs and ordinary citizens.

Demystifying parliamentary work
First, we found that Deliberative Committees served as a space for meaningful dialogue between MPs and ordinary citizens, which, in turn, helped demystify parliamentary work.

One MP explained: ‘It can help citizens to understand that although MPs maybe earn high salaries, they maybe don’t work enough, and they are privileged; it is not easy to adopt a law’.

MPs, for their part, obtained valuable public input as part of committee deliberations. It allowed them to engage with citizens in a different context than electoral meetings often framed in adversarial terms.

As one MP told us, ‘When we work with citizens, altogether, majority and opposition, we are all on the same level’.

We are not here to waste our time; we are here to test and experiment with a new mechanism of democratic renewal.

A second important merit is that the adventurous model of Deliberative Committees works overall. Public officials and practitioners highlight this achievement: institutionalizing mixed deliberation and closely embedding citizens in the Parliament entailed important risks of failure in terms of design and political backlash.

Yet, no interviewees claimed that Deliberative Committees were a failure. One MP explained: ‘We are not here to waste our time; we are here to test and experiment with a new mechanism of democratic renewal’. Another MP accentuated that mixed deliberation allowed for ‘a new, oxygenated look at politics, which is extremely interesting’.

Of course, the model showed some flaws and needs some adjustments, but the Deliberative Committees show that it is possible to create a productive dialogue between MPs and ordinary citizens. Practitioners and public officials point out two elements that enable this ‘world premier’ model to function: the permanent self-examination of the Parliament and practitioners and the latitude they had to adjust the design.

Like most minipublics, Deliberative Committees are poorly connected with the broader population.

Disconnection with the wider population

Together with the early successes of Deliberative Committees are obstacles from realising their full potential.

First, like most minipublics, Deliberative Committees are poorly connected with the broader population. Media coverage remains low and so is public awareness. An online platform was created for citizens to set the agenda of a Deliberative Committee through a petition system.

Yet, the petition system drew criticisms due to the Parliament’s decision to reformulate two of the submitted demands without consulting the citizens who originally submitted them. As a result, these citizens disavowed the Deliberative Committee on homelessness and biodiversity. Additionally, there are two other problematic elements in the selection of topics.

Firstly, when the COCOF Parliament mandated a Deliberative Committee, its limited competencies resulted in a technical and inconspicuous policy of dual learning, which did not receive much attention from the public.

Secondly, its second Deliberative Committee led to an incongruent question about the role of citizens in the crisis. This was, however, a broad and important issue from which Dutch-speaking citizens were excluded and on which COCOF could actually do little.

Criticisms also emerge from the media and politicians about the first Deliberative Committee on the implementation of 5G. They reproach Ecolo for using the participatory process as a political strategy to clear themselves of the responsibility of implementing 5G, an unpopular policy among their constituents.

The biggest challenge lies in the delineation of politicians’ role in the committees.

MPs dominating the conversation

The biggest challenge lies in the delineation of politicians’ role in the committees. A practitioner pointed out the lack of a definition in the Vande-mecum or the document stipulating the rules and process of a Deliberative Committee.

Our observation, moreover, reveals that MPs possess an advantage over citizens as they have greater knowledge on the issue and experience in political debate. As a result, some of them exerted disproportionate influence on the deliberation.

MPs often found difficult to know which stance to adopt in the deliberation: should they direct the discussion based on their expertise or should they listen to citizens?

An MP explained: ‘It’s at the beginning that the atmosphere was a bit tense because everyone had to understand the role of the other, the presence of the parliamentarians, and so on’.

Power politics is durable.

Most MPs tried to strike a balance and played the game of citizen deliberation. Nonetheless, power asymmetries clearly remained despite the facilitation, the hearing of experts and the MPs’ good intentions; it is unclear to which extent we can consider the recommendations as citizens’ ideas due to politicians’ considerable weight on the discussion.

Power politics is durable. While deliberating on biodiversity, citizens formulated a recommendation on a sensitive political issue, the safeguard of the natural space ‘la Friche de Josaphat’, which upset MPs from the French-speaking Socialist Party, Parti Socialiste, and caused them to pressure the head of the practitioners to inform the participants that the Friche issue was not to be discussed in the Deliberative Committee and no recommendations mentioning the Friche was permitted, which they refused to do. This incident unmasked the fragility of Deliberative Committees: their embeddedness in the Parliament makes them vulnerable to ‘back-door politics’ as MPs can take alternative routes to steer the process outside the room where they deliberate with citizens.

These challenges highlight the fundamental difficulty of combining the logic of representative and deliberative democracy. The Parliament is based on the majority-opposition divide, party discipline and electoral accountability, while citizen deliberation strives for reciprocity, open-mindedness and opinion changes.
One public official noted: ‘MPs need to get used to this exercise of co-construction with citizens, because they are now essentially elected based on a manifesto that they must defend with the game of majority rule’.

This difference becomes clear when MPs leave the deliberation tables to vote on the recommendations in the plenary room: the co-construction then disappears as MPs vote according to the party line and discuss extensively the wording of each recommendation, boring citizens to death.

Shouldn’t politicians leave their comfort zone and deliberate with citizens in a more neutral setting?

Can politicians deliberate with citizens?

To conclude, while many challenges stem from the specific institutional context of Belgium, the Deliberative Committees highlight the need to consider thoroughly the adequacy between the problems the model is supposed to solve and its design. Consider the need to create more space for dialogue between citizens and politicians: Why are citizens invited in the imposing building of the Parliament? Shouldn’t politicians leave their comfort zone and deliberate with citizens in a more neutral setting?

In a similar vein, mixed deliberation is supposed to tackle the lack of impact of minipublics, as recommendations become more aligned with the political reality and MPs can own them. While it is too early to evaluate the impact, the experience of Deliberative Committees suggests that the recommendations may be more the MPs’ than citizens’, thus raising the question: Should politicians directly participate in the deliberation, or could they be involved in other ways that do not compromise the quality and neutrality of citizen deliberation, such as intervening in the expert hearing and be part of the organizing committee?

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