Representativity, Inclusion and Legitimacy of Minipublics: Issues and Solutions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In recent years, there has been a surge in interest surrounding sortition-based engagement systems, carefully designed to enrich inclusivity and representation within participatory and deliberative processes. This heightened interest is evidenced by the burgeoning landscape of citizens' assemblies, citizens' juries, deliberative polls, hybrid participatory budgeting initiatives (such as the Chinese model and the Italian Model), and monitoring processes, all of which leverage sortition engagement systems. This observable trend reflects a growing enthusiasm for democratic models advocating the random selection of participants engaged in various deliberative, participatory, or monitoring tasks. Advocates of these approaches emphasise the critical role of representativeness in the multifaceted advantages offered by sortition engagement systems.
Scholars identify a significant advantage of sortition based engagement and recruitment systems over their open to all counterparts – their distinctive blend of stratfied random selection and incentives, resulting in a public body deemed "representative of the public." This overarching argument resonates not only in academia, but it is also starting to permeate broader public discourse. For instance, an article in The Guardian depicts citizens' assemblies as "a group of people who are randomly selected and reflect the demographics of the population as a whole."
The superior capacity of these approaches to foster inclusion and representation is argued to yield various benefits, ranging from an enhanced quality of decision-making to heightened legitimacy, particularly when compared to more traditional open-to-all engagement systems.
However, the existing empirical research dedicated to scrutinizing these claims remains limited. And existing deliberative and participatory processes leveraging sortition based recruitment tend to have a small number of participants (25-100) that limits the credibility of claims of their representativity.
Additionally, apart from Deliberative Polls achieving acceptance rates of 80% and above due to their unique combination of incentives and short events that are less costly to participate in, existing censuses of deliberative processes leveraging sortition based engagement systems, such as the recently updated OECD census, reveal worryingly low acceptance rates (below 10%). This challenges even further the devices' claims to accurately represent the will of the population. If 90% of the invited participants refuse to participate there might be some important group of the population these processes fail to represent.
Some practitioners and advocates defend these devices' ability to represent the will of the population by introducing design elements, such as supermajority rules for decision-making, aiming to achieve a sufficient statistical level of representativity on critical decisions. However, these solutions primarily target output representativity, potentially sacrificing some of the benefits highlighted by the collective intelligence literature, emphasising the importance of input representativity and diversity to promote better decision-making.
Other practitioners have explored expanding the number of participants in these democratic innovations, with some pilots achieving several hundred participants to strengthen the representativity claims (such as the G1000 design). However, the increase in size generates established issues related to ensuring effective participation and inclusion, such as self-censoring and the replication of inequalities among participants, leading to differential levels of participation. Traditional methods to promote effective participation rely on capacity building and facilitation, which are most effective and cost-efficient in small to medium groups (50-200 participants).
This panel invites theoretical and empirical research contributions that explore the tension between the quality of deliberation/effective participation, and the imperative of representativity and legitimacy.
The following is a set of example research questions, but we invite scholars to propose other related questions:
1) What criteria should be used to establish the representativeness and inclusiveness of participatory and deliberative processes?
2) What is the level of representativeness and inclusiveness of current practices in sortition-based deliberative/participatory democracy?
3) What are potential strategies and technologies for enhancing representativeness and inclusiveness? What are their trade-offs?
4) What is the impact of representativity on legitimacy? What is the impact of less than perfect representativity? Does input representativity have an impact on legitimacy? Or the key driver of legitimacy is the representativity of the output?

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Democratic Innovations

Cosponsor

• Division 58: Civic Engagement

Individual Presentations

• A GOTP Experiment to Promote Inclusion in a Citizens' Assembly - Katy Tabero, Southampton University; Zohreh Khoban, University of Southampton; Matt Ryan, University of Southampton; Paolo Spada, University of Southampton

• Inviting to Represent: A Large-Scale RCT on Political Participation - Gerhard Riener, University of Southampton

• Gender and Inclusion in Deliberation: A Meta-Analysis - Masood Gheasi, University of Southampton; Jessica Cristina Smith, University of Southampton; Matt Ryan, University of Southampton; Rafael Mestre, University of Southampton

Chair

• Paolo Spada University of Southampton

Discussant

• Tiago Peixoto World Bank