Citizen Autonomy and Its Limits in Deliberative Mini-Publics

• In Event: Citizens' Assemblies, Media, and Civil Society

Abstract

The deliberative mini-public is a framed and supervised device, subjected to a participatory division of labor and interactions of influence of various kinds. However, this does not mean that the randomly selected citizen-representatives have no room for maneuver, that their agency would be completely eliminated by the structure. The criterion of the level of autonomy of the participants is one of those recognized as relevant by democratic theorists (Böker and Elstub, 2015). Dahl (1989) proposes to consider five democratic values, which will be taken up by O'Flynn and Sood (2014) for the analysis of mini-publics: "inclusion", "effective participation", "voting equality at the decisive stage", "enlightened understanding" but also "control of the agenda". Indeed, on many occasions, the deliberators have shown a critical spirit regarding the provision, going as far as to modify it in part. However, it is necessary to avoid falling into the opposite excess by overvaluing the strategies and reappropriations of the participants. While their room for maneuvering does exist, it remains constrained by the organizers.

Should citizen-representatives be able to change the framework and criticize the organization of the mini-public? How do they try to do so in real-life cases? What are the counterstrategies implemented by the organizers, experts, and facilitators? In case of a conflict, who wins and why?

Drawing on an empirical comparative and qualitative analysis of several major cases in Western Europe, I will focus on two dimensions of this constitutive tension of contemporary randomly selected assemblies. Firstly, meta-deliberation actions on the part of citizens to criticize or even change their deliberative framework. Secondly, the various resistances on the participant's part, particularly concerning the relationship to knowledge.

Author

• Dimitri Courant, Harvard University