Session 6: Citizen deliberation: bringing back the Athenian democracy
This article was written by Erina Ogata and Pénélope Caron
Introduction
Deliberative democracy finds its origins in Ancient Greece, where deliberation was central to decision-making and consensus in the Athenian society. In the late 1900s, the American political scientist Robert Dahl, suggested that the process to which authentic democratic associations satisfy equality, can be assessed by judging its adherence to five criterias: enlightened understanding, inclusion of all adults, effective participation, voting equality at the decisive stage, and control of the agenda. Today, our modern democracies are perceived as unfair, unrepresentative and inefficient by citizens. Countries experience more and more political polarization and declining voter turnout. Politicians and activists have been trying to use more innovative deliberative processes such as mini-publics, for including “demos: the people” in the decision-making processes.
Definitions
- Deliberation refers to public deliberation (as opposed to internal deliberation) and to group deliberation (as opposed to individual deliberation), which emphasises the need to find common ground.
- Deliberative democracy is the wider political theory that claims that political decisions should be a result of fair and reasonable discussion among citizens, leading to a common goal or consensus. The theory gained traction in academic literature in the 1980’s (e.g. Habermas.
- Deliberative processes randomly select citizens forming a mini-public representative of the larger population, giving them an active and responsible role in democracy. It creates spaces for learning, development of informed decision and participation. It allows to find and build consensus, providing legitimacy to decision-making.
Summary
The word deliberation, especially when it refers to the people or group, emphasizes the need to find common ground. This form of participation differs from debate and dialogue: the former aims to persuade others for certain decision-making in a win or lose situation, on the other hand, the latter pursues to share understanding and build (better) relationships.
Deliberation is the way to take advantage of both ways that participants try to find common ground to reach a group decision by considering various options for actions and the perspectives of other members of the society. In this way, deliberative democracy puts emphasis on following differences when it comes to the comparison with representative, direct and participatory democracies:
1) the number of participants is relatively small for a deep discussion,
2) selective participants should be well informed about a topic to consider various perspectives, and
3) they are representatives of the public.
So, why is deliberation important and how does it work? As mentioned at the beginning, we are facing plenty of complex challenges bunch of discussion points about democracy and political phenomena according to the rapid social change and which are too complicated to always respond by conventional participatory mechanisms. With this regard, deliberation allows citizens to support better policy and decision-making, provides legitimacy to that decision-making for a long-term, creates public trust in government and democratic institutions with trust among them.
In other words, it enables citizens to be effective, active and responsible in democracy through its unique process by random selection that lets normally ignored people (rural, young, women, minorities etc.) appear in the public sphere. As well as it works to repair the social division occurred by individual principle and position (ethnicity, religion, ideology etc.). Therefore, we can define deliberative democracy as a wider political theory that claims that political decisions should be a result of fair and reasonable discussion among citizens, as German philosopher J. Habermas suggests.
The following is the deliberation process. As you see, randomly selected citizens form mini-publics representative of the larger population. It creates spaces for learning, development of informed decision and participation. Finally, participants make a consensus and deliver this consensus as the collective recommendations to the public authority. During this process, randomly selected citizens can be more informed and participate in decision making that enhance civic capacities leading to the civic empowerment.
As a whole, the deliberative democracy model looks attractive, however, it’s not a one fits all model. It is said to be appropriate for the following 3 types. We should then think about the possibility of combination with other participatory mechanisms, such as referendum, online participation etc. , so that it can amplify the function along with the context.
1) Values-driven dilemmas (e.g. ethical questions such as abortion)
2) Complex policy problems with trade-offs (e.g. urban policies)
3) Long-term issues beyond electoral cycles (e.g. climate change)
For example, Ireland’s abortion referendum is regarded as an attempt of deliberation. It was achieved in 2018 with vigorous civic interaction through Citizens’ Assembly which provided a roadmap for recommendations on legislation and requested a call for a referendum to the Government; in order to repeal an amended article of the Constitution which actually prohibited the right of abortion. In France, “Grand débat” brought by the Yellow Vests movement in 2018 realized the online participation of citizens to express their opinions directly to the President and the Government.
Readings
Recently in Belgium, two regional governments are trying models of deliberative democracy based on sortition, a practice used in Athenian democracy to select citizens to participate in legislative citizen assemblies. The region of East Belgium launched in 2019 a permanent citizen assembly (The Ostbelgien model). The model was designed with the G1000, a civil society organization and the German-Speaking Parliament (PDG). It relies on two new types of bodies with rotating membership within the PDG: the Citizens’ Council and Citizens’ Assemblies. Participants are elected by sortition, and then selected respecting a representative sample of the population with regard to age, gender, place of residence, and level of education. They can be any resident of the German-speaking municipalities in East Belgium, aged 16 years old and who did not previously already participate in a Citizen Assembly.
The Citizens’ Council has 24 members in charge of collaborating in setting the legislative agenda. They select the topics that each citizens’ dialogue will cover once per year, by initiating a call for topic proposals, and they determine the size of each Citizen Assembly. They also approve the budget for the Citizen Dialogue process, including the compensation for the citizens who take part in the Citizens Council and other expenses. The Citizens’ Assembly has 25 to 50 members and is convened for each new topic selected by the Citizen Council. Once the dialogue is finished, they are in charge of formulating policy recommendations to the relevant parliamentary committee. In the case the Parliament will reject the suggestions made by the Citizen Assembly, they must provide a detailed justification. Finally, the Citizen’s Council is also responsible for monitoring the implementation of the recommendations within one year. In November 2020, the Council decided to convene the first Citizen Assembly on the topic of nursing care. The latest meetings had to be cancelled until further notice due to the pandemic.
The Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region will also implement the same model in 2020. Unlike the Ostbelgien Model, the Brussels model retains agenda-setting power in the hands of the parliament. Citizens can propose ideas via petitions and the Bureau of Parliament will select the topic and define the task of each assembly. The Parliament will choose the participants for the citizen assemblies through two rounds of sortition, as in the Ostbelgien model. They are first elected randomly, and then selected respecting a representative sample of the population with regard to age, gender, place of residence, and level of education. They must be residents of the Brussels Region, have at least 16 years old and not hold public office. The Citizen Assembly will hold 45 citizens, who will serve on a parliamentary committee together with 17 legislators and make recommendations. The Parliament plans to hold the first citizen assemblies by the end of 2020.
In Japan, deliberative democracy in the form of mini-publics has developed since the 2000s, mostly at the local government level. Citizen Deliberation Meetings (Shimin Gikai or Kaigi, citizen’s council), by workshop format, are now frequently held in municipalities that randomly selected citizens participate in the planning cell for urban planning (including environmental policy, health promotion policy etc.) (OECD, 2020).
As a non-Western country , Japanese social norms influenced by Confucian culture had limited active interactions and protest movements on social problems. Many scholars point out that Japanese citizens were not familiar with expressing their will actively due to high rigid hierarchies by individual socio-economic situations (gender, age, academic background etc.), even though they introduced western democratic mechanisms. Paradoxically, increasing the number of Citizen Deliberation meetings since the 2000s suggests that society has become too complicated so that the conventional way of thinking as well as the political system can not give proper solutions any more. At the same time, citizens have witnessed hidden distortions exposed in society that they should be conscious. For example, the Great East Japan Earthquake followed by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 aroused a great controversy on the existing power and environmental policy at both national and local levels. Increasing the hate speech against ethnic minorities on Social Media by the extreme right resulted in the promotion of the minority right. It is said that the emerging deliberative culture driven by these political conflicts backed by social movements has certain deliberative effects (Tang, Tamura and He, 2018). As a consequence, the rise of citizens’ consciousness on their social matters drove local governments to establish deliberative institutions inside their policy-making process, and ordinary citizens who were not interested either involved in any political process other than voting before got opportunities to participate in the process actively.
In terms of the implementation, however, we find even difficulties to be improved. Because of the above social norms, discomfortable discussions are not appreciated among participants during the meeting and deliberation tends to be superficial agreeable that may lead to a false unanimity in the end (Tang, Tamura and He, 2018). In this regard, as OECD (2020) points out, the role of facilitation is crucial to conduct the meeting to its success. In addition, monitoring and evaluation are also important to keep the meeting and its deliverable effective enough. As a result, the deliberative process develops differently in the context, thus continuous efforts would be required for both citizens and governments.
Conclusion:
More and more deliberative processes have been recently used internationally mostly due to civil society pressure and crisis of representative democracy. While the replication of deliberative processes are not evident as they have to adapt to geographic and demographic realities of countries, the OECD identified 12 models of representative deliberative processes, broken down by four types of purposes. Indeed, their widespread use indicates their universality and potential applicability in different national and local contexts (OECD, 2020) and can be used as a guide for former implementation.
Nevertheless, as we could see with the Japanese example, but also the Belgian model, and as the OECD highlights, there is not enough evaluation still to learn from these ongoing processes both in terms of their design and impact. While random sortition recruitment processes allow more diversity of participants and a representative sample to the larger population, there is as yet no evidence that this increases citizens’ confidence in politics or their political engagement. Moreover, it is difficult to find information or have an evaluation of the impact on the implementation of citizens recommendations put in place by governments. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has paused most of the deliberative processes (as the Brussels model in Belgium) which raises new questions, and will surely be followed by new deliberative experiments supported by digital tools, adding a new variable into the dynamic.
Today more than ever, democracy is being called into question. While some governments are using innovative mechanisms to regain citizens’ trust, others are opening the way for a total change of the system, to reinvent democratic politics for the twenty-first century and bring power back to the people. Helen Landemore, an associate professor of political science at Yale University ( 2017) proposes a new democratic system based on deliberative democracy. She argues that in order to retain political relevance, deliberative democracy should dissociate itself from representative democracy, which has been facing a lack of correlation between majority preferences and policy outcomes when elite preferences differ from those of the majority. She proposes a new more truly democratic paradigm which she calls “open democracy” based on deliberation, the majoritarian principle, complex representation, rotation, and openness.
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Bibliography
Ehs, Tamara., Molre, Monika (2020), “Deliberation against Participation? Yellow Vests and Grand Débat: A Perspective from Deliberative Theory”, Political studies review, 2020–08–27, pp. 1–6
Landemore, Hélène. (2017), “Deliberative democracy as open, not (just) representative democracy.” Daedalus 146.3, pp. 51–63
Mikami, N. (2015), “Public Participation in Decision-Making on Energy Policy: The Case of the National Discussion after the Fukushima Accident”, Technology and Society, pp. 87–122
OECD (2020), “Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Changing the Deliberative Wave”
Ostbelgien and Brussels sortition, GovLab Case Study. Parliament of the German-Speaking Community of Belgium (PDG); Parliament of the Brussels Region and Parliament of the French-Speaking Community (Cocof)
Suiter, Jane. (2018), “Deliberation in Action — Ireland’s Abortion Referendum”, Political insight, 2018–09, Vol.9 (3), pp.30–32
Tang, B., Tamura, T., He., B. (2018), “Deliberative Democracy in East Asia: Japan and China”, The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford University Press
