Case study: How did the Irish Citizen Assembly strengthened democracy?
This article was written by Thaiane Pereira.
Introduction
In 2016 Ireland established one of the most innovative forms of citizen participation in recent years. The “Irish Citizens’ Assembly” was empowered by the government and from 2016 to 2018 reunited 100 members representing the Irish population to deliberate about specific topics. The purpose was to make recommendations and reports to the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature) about five policy issues: the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (about abortion); fixed term parliaments, referendums, population ageing, and climate change.
This type of democratic innovation is part of the broader move towards deliberative democracy. The OECD (2020) defines a representative deliberative process as when a randomly selected group of people who are broadly representative of a community spending significant time learning and collaborating through facilitated deliberation to form collective recommendations to policy makers.
The Assembly was in fact, the result of a successful experience on deliberative participation, held in 2011, called “We the Citizens”, a pilot project to enhance citizens’ participation in democracy, in which one of the outcomes was a recommendation to “adopt deliberative democracy processes to ‘complement and enhance’ representative democracy” (We the Citizens, 2011). Thus, the Assembly was established through a resolution in July of 2016 and the first mandate (from 2016 to 2018) was so well conducted that a second one started in June of 2019, this time regarding how to improve gender equality in the country.
The Irish experience
The Irish experience is a clear example on how governments can increase citizens’ participation through direct and deliberative forms of democracy. So, in this article I will discuss about some concrete examples to try to explain why the Assembly helped to strengthen democracy, the processes behind it and how it increased people’s participation in the public sphere, focusing on its first mandate.
One of the most important mechanisms behind it is the way in which members were selected. First of all, the Assembly did not take direct applications from any citizen, it rater selected its members through sortition in a completely random way, in order to broadly represent society and avoid biased approaches. Besides, during the recruitment process, families and friends were not admitted together even if they were randomly selected in first place. The process had two stages of verification, to ensure that people who were not eligible (such as politicians) were not recruited. The selection process used the census data to include geographic stratification to ensure that all regions were be represented and demographic quotas were assigned, based in gender, age and region. The last and third step after selecting the members based on all criteria was an interview with households to capture contacts and details for verification. The following figure summarizes it.
Besides the selection process, transparence was also practiced during the meetings. Firstly, the members of the Assembly had a clear mandate: to make recommendations and produce reports that would inform policy-makers decisions at the Houses of the Oireachtas in the five related topics. For that, the Assembly worked for 19 months and held 12 weekend meetings that were all live streamed and then archived online. Besides, involving the general public was always a matter and all the papers and documents presented in the Assembly were shared with them. In addition, public consultations and submissions were put in place before the final reports and resulted in approximately 15,000 submissions in total considering other citizens’ contributions to the debate.
During the meetings, the members discussed their opinions about the topics and how it could be improved in Ireland. The meetings were conducted by the Chairperson, with the help of a “Steering Group”, responsible to support the Assembly in the conduction of their work. Members were also advised by an “Expert Advisory Group”, who was responsible to prepare information to subsidize decisions and advise them, helping also to construct the work program for the Assembly on each topic. With all this apparatus put in place, members voted on recommendations, that based the reports submitted to the Parliament.
As an example of a practical result of the Assembly, the final report and recommendations on the Eight Amendment of the Irish constitution were considered by a Joint Committee of the Houses of the Oireachtas and anchored many debates of the parliament to change the constitution. After all the legal inside processes, a referendum was proposed to know wheatear the population was in favor to regulate termination of pregnancy and it passed by a majority of 66.4% in favor, on May of 2018, which lead into the change in the Constitution.
Another practical example is about climate change recommendations and its outcomes. Bringing the topic to public debate increased media coverage in the country about it and a study conducted analyzing the main national media sources found out that “climate related reporting became more neutral in tone and more divergent in its relationship to evidence” (McGovern, 2020), which evidences the important role of the Assembly in qualifying the debate. Nevertheless, the report and recommendations were also appreciated by the Government’s Committee on Climate Action.
The process and the format used for this Assembly were considered a success, which led to the creation of second Assembly. This success can be also explained by the key principles governing this deliberative process; openness, fairness, equality of voice, efficiency, respect and collegiality. Indeed, those principles were strictly related to transparency and the desire of the government to be more inclusive, listening to the citizens and increase their trust in the democratic process.
Conclusion
The relevance of this initiative can be also explained by two factors: random selection of participants which gave all citizens the right to participate, and the fact that meetings were lively broadcasted and the population could also give their contributions, widening participation and awareness of the process.
So, in a world where democracy is in crisis, perceived as damaged and where people no longer trust their governments, the example of the Irish Citizen Assembly looks like a light and a possible solution. In fact, deliberative democracy practices are becoming well-known worldwide, such as in the UK and France that have already used citizen assemblies to propose solutions to climate change crisis.
The rise of populism and radical speeches have made clear that democratic institutions as we know are eroding and we need to find ways to build consensus and modernize our institutions with innovation, transparency, accountability and increased citizens’ participation. The Irish example is for sure one of the best examples to illustrate how it is possible to “update democracy” and how it could be successful, allowing profound changes in policy discussions and having tangible impacts, even in the skeptical context that we live nowadays.
This article has been published as per submission by the student (the author) and based on the lecture given by the professor in the context of an assignment, for comments or edits please contact the author : name.lastname@sciencespo.fr
References:
CitizenLab, Are citizens’ assemblies the future of participation?. 2020. Available at: https://www.citizenlab.co/blog/civic-engagement/are-citizens-assemblies-the-future-of-participation/
David M. Farrell, Eoin O’Malley & Jane Suiter. Deliberative Democracy in Action Irish-style: The 2011 We the Citizens Pilot Citizens’ Assembly. 2020. Irish Political Studies, 28:1, 99–113, Available at: https://www-tandfonline-com.acces-distant.sciencespo.fr/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2012.745274
McGovern, T. Citizens assemble: a study on the impact of climate reporting in the Irish media ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ the Citizens’ Assembly on ‘how the state can make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change. 2020. Irish political studies. 1–21. Available at:
https://www-tandfonline-com.acces-distant.sciencespo.fr/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2020.1811970
OECD, The Irish Citizens’ Assembly, 2016. Available at: https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/the-irish-citizens-assembly/
Suiter, F. When do deliberative citizens change their opinions? Evidence from the Irish Citizens’ Assembly. International political science review. 2014. 37 (2), 198–212. Available at:
https://journals-sagepub-com.acces-distant.sciencespo.fr/doi/pdf/10.1177/0192512114544068
The Citizens’ Assembly, 2020. Available at:
https://www.citizensassembly.ie/en/
The Citizens’ Assembly, 2016–2018. Available at:
