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The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in South...
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Citations
... 17 Indeed, as the growing list of climate CAs indicates, there is a definite trend towards the use of CAs by national and local governments. 18 Empirical research has been undertaken on CAs in Canada (Warren and Pearse 2008; Pal 2012; Fournier et al. 2011), Ireland (Carolan 2018), Australia (Carson 2007), France (Giraudet et al. 2021), the UK (Flinders et al. 2016;Wells et al. 2021), and the Netherlands (Boogard and Binnema 2017). This body of research has produced mixed conclusions. ...
Stymied by preoccupation with short-term interests of individualist consumers, democratic institutions seem unable to generate sustained political commitment for tackling climate change. The citizens’ assembly (CA) is promoted as an important tool in combatting this “democratic myopia.” The aim of a CA is to bring together a representative group of citizens and experts from diverse backgrounds to exchange their different insights and perspectives on a complex issue. By providing the opportunity for inclusive democratic deliberation, the CA is expected to educate citizens, stimulate awareness of complex issues, and produce enlightened and legitimate policy recommendations. However, critical voices warn about the simplified and celebratory commentary surrounding the CA. Informed by agonistic and radical democratic theory, this paper elaborates on a particular concern, which is the orientation toward consensus in the CA. The paper points to the importance of disagreement in the form of both agony (from inside) and rupture (from outside) that, it is argued, is crucial for a democratic, engaging, passionate, creative, and representative sustainability politics.
... Impartiality entails participants to look for common interests and use 'public' rather than 'private reasoning' (Bohman, 1998). It is somewhat doubtful whether politicians can stay impartial during deliberation or whether they rather use the deliberative processes to promote their partisan interests (Flinders et al., 2016). Politicians might seek to establish rules of procedure that resemble parliamentary styles of operation rather than deliberative processes (Farrell et al., 2018). ...
... This process enabled politicians to successfully persuade participating citizens, which may be seen as problematic if the politicians used their superior knowledge and skills to swing opinions in their favour. Similarly, in Citizens' Assembly pilots in Southampton and Sheffield in the United Kingdom, mixed-member and citizens-only assemblies were formed (Flinders et al., 2016). While the presence of politicians did not seem to influence attitudes towards politicians, political institutions, or participants' political efficacy, a significant minority of citizen participants had negative attitudes towards the fact that politicians took part. ...
... Although some of the politicians were considerably more active during the discussions than other participants, only 10 out of 84 citizens in the Mixed groups considered discussions too partisan and eight out of 84 felt that the discussion would have been better without politicians. Our observations from a controlled experiment are therefore in line with previous studies, in which no indications of politicians' domination have been seen (Farrell et al., 2020;Sørensen & Torfing, 2019), whereas Flinders et al.'s (2016) observations about politicians' domination were not replicated in our study. ...
In a deliberative mini‐public, a representative number of citizens receive information and discuss given policy topics in facilitated small groups. Typically, mini‐publics are most effective politically and can have the most impact on policy‐making when they are connected to democratic decision‐making processes. Theorists have put forward possible mechanisms that may enhance this linkage, one of which is involving politicians within mini‐publics with citizens. However, although much research to date has focussed on mini‐publics with many citizen participants, there is little analysis of mini‐publics with politicians as coparticipants. In this study, we ask how involving politicians in mini‐publics influences both participating citizens' opinions and citizens' and politicians' perceptions of the quality of the mini‐public deliberations. We organised an online mini‐public, together with the City of Turku, Finland, on the topic of transport planning. The participants (n = 171) were recruited from a random sample and discussed the topic in facilitated small groups (n = 21). Pre‐ and postdeliberation surveys were collected. The effect of politicians on mini‐publics was studied using an experimental intervention: in half of the groups, local politicians (two per group) participated, whereas in the other half, citizens deliberated among themselves. Although we found that the participating citizens' opinions changed, no trace of differences between the two treatment groups was reported. We conclude that politicians, at least when they are in a clear minority in the deliberating small groups, can deliberate with citizens without negatively affecting internal inclusion and the quality of deliberation within mini‐publics.
... This type of co-creation involves political leaders, and it could mean that individuals or organized groups of citizens provide inputs to the design of new tasks and solutions through crowdsourcing, focus-group interviews, written consultations, and public hearings that allow input (type B). However, this could also take a more radical and interactive form (type A), where public and private actors engage in a mutual and balanced dialog aimed at designing new and better solutions and coordinating their implementation (Flinders et al., 2016;Torfing et al., 2019). ...
The aim of the article is to discuss how and to what extent co-creation
has the capacity to strengthen democratic legitimacy. By distinguishing between output-based and input-based co-creation, and by discussing types of legitimacy in relation to deliberative, participatory, and representative conceptions of democracy, the article points to potentials and pitfalls inherent in the idea of co-creation. Four examples from Denmark and Norway are used to illustrate the argument. In conclusion, the article points to main challenges associated with co-creation which deserves more research—particularly inequality of individual resources and the clash with
the party-political system.
... The process entailed three stages: information, deliberation and voting. Citizens' assemblies have been used in many other contexts, including Iceland (as noted above) and, more recently, in testing arguments for devolution to English city regions (Flinders et al., 2016). Adversarial agonistic institutions could draw from both referenda and citizens' assemblies to promote a passionate arena of contest in which opposing citizens learn to perceive one another as legitimate adversaries. ...
One of the main criticisms of agonistic democracy (and of post-structuralism more generally) is that it fails to get beyond a purely negative assessment of alternative theories. The article takes up this challenge. First, it seeks to specify the core commitments of agonistic democracy, focusing on the concepts of contestation, contingency and interdependence. Second, it analyses how these commitments might be institutionalised through models of perfectionism, adversarialism and inclusivism. Third, it considers how agonistic principles can suffuse broader processes of democratic design, drawing on insights from critical institutionalism. The article argues that agonism can become more than a thought experiment or critique. An agonistic design process is possible. Such a process has five key characteristics: it is processual, collective, contextual, contestable and always provisional.
... In this article we introduce an innovative method for attitudes research: democratic forums. Although commonly used in other fields such as political science (see e.g., Flinders et al., 2016;Warren & Pearse, 2008), this approach is yet to be used on a large scale in the field of social policy research. This article shows how this method can help contribute to understanding welfare state attitudes of the population in a different light. ...
This article introduces democratic forums as a method of studying attitudes towards the welfare state, and sets out briefly its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with existing methods. This is done by reporting the findings of a 2015 two‐day forum based in the United Kingdom, in which the future of the welfare state was discussed by a largely representative sample of participants. The results show that participants linked both moral and economic arguments to come to two major framings that could encompass the debates surrounding the future of welfare states. One focuses on the inefficiencies of the welfare state, which found that welfare resources were largely misdirected and unsustainable. The other focuses on the possibilities for improving it via social investment, for example providing individuals with better training and education opportunities. The democratic forum method is helpful in allowing researchers to investigate the conceptual framings people use when thinking about the welfare state, and to see how people link different concepts and justifications together to argue their position. We argue that such framing can be distinct from that used and understood by policymakers and academics, and those applied in the more commonly used large scale surveys.
... This contrasts with the English emphasis on consumer choice and competition". In the following section, this article will shed light on the diverse city-regional political responses (Morgan, 1999;Giordano and Roller, 2003;Agnew, 2016;Flinders et al., 2016;Harris and Moffat, 2016;Scottish Government, 2016;Casebourne, 2017) that have flourished as a consequence of the political re-scaling of the nation-state and the way these responses have been embodied in two opposite versions of "nationalism" (Anderson, 1991;Hutchinson and Smith, 1994): "ethnic" versus "civic". ...
In recent years, two apparently contradictory but, in fact, complementary socio-political phenomena have reinforced each other in the European urban realm: the re-scaling of nation-states through “devolution” and the emergence of two opposed versions of “nationalism” (i.e., ethnic, non-metropolitanised, state-centric, exclusive, and right-wing populist nationalism and civic, metropolitanised, stateless, inclusive and progressivist-emancipatory-social democratic nationalism). In light of these intertwined phenomena, this paper shows how an ongoing, pervasive, and uneven “metropolitanisation effect” is increasingly shaping city-regional political responses by overlapping metropolitan, city-regional, and national political scales and agendas. This effect is clear in three European cases driven by “civic nationalism” that are altering their referential nation-states’ uniformity through “devolution”. This paper compares three metropolitan (and city-regional) cases in the UK and in Spain, namely, Glasgow (Scotland), Barcelona (Catalonia), and Bilbao (Basque Country), by benchmarking their policy implementation and the tensions produced in reference to their nation-states. Fieldwork was conducted from January 2015 to June 2017 through in-depth interviews with stakeholders in the three locations. Despite the so-called pluri-national and federal dilemmas, this paper contributes to the examination of the side effects of “metropolitanisation” by considering three arguments based on geo-economics (“prosperous competitiveness”), geo-politics (“smart devolution”), and geo-democratics (“right to decide”). Finally, this paper adds to the existing research on metropolitan and city-regional politics by demonstrating why “devolution” matters and why it must be considered seriously. The “metropolitanisation effect” is key to understanding and transforming the current configurations of nation-states, such as the UK and Spain (as we currently know them), beyond internal discord around pluri-nationality and quasi-federalism. This paper concludes by suggesting the term “smart devolution” to promote more imaginative and entrepreneurial approaches to metropolitan and city-regional politics, policies, and experimental democracy within these nation-states. These approaches can identify and pursue “smart” avenues of timely, subtle, and innovative political strategies for change in the ongoing re-scaling devolution processes occurring in the UK and in Spain and in the consequent changes in the prospects for the refoundational momentum in the EU.
... Before the Irish Convention, there were concerns that politicians would dominate discussions and intimidate the deliberating citizens. According to some observations, it appears that these concerns did not materialise and the procedures used in mini-publics helped balance discussions ( Suiter et al. 2016; for a somewhat different experience from a similar design, see Flinders et al. 2016). In the Irish case, the proposals for constitutional amendments have to be submitted to constitutional referendums after they have received support from the government. ...
Despite some prominent critics, deliberative democrats tend to be optimistic about the potential of deliberative mini-publics. However, the problem with current practices is that mini-publics are typically used by officials on an ad hoc basis and that their policy impacts remain vague. Mini-publics seem especially hard to integrate into representative decision making. There are a number of reasons for this, especially prevailing ideas of representation and accountability as well as the contestatory character of representative politics. This article argues that deliberative mini-publics should be regarded as one possible way of improving the epistemic quality of representative decision making and explores different institutional designs through which deliberative mini-publics could be better integrated into representative institutions. The article considers arrangements which institutionalise the use of mini-publics; involve representatives in deliberations; motivate public interactions between mini-publics and representatives; and provide opportunities to ex post scrutiny or suspensive veto powers for mini-publics. The article analyses prospects and problems of these measures, and considers their applicability in different contexts of representative politics.
The discussion and empirical analysis of the increasing citizen dissatisfaction with existing representative institutions have become a central concern for political science in recent decades. Political theory has also contributed to this debate by focusing increasingly on non-elective forms of participation and representation. Paradoxically, there has not been a significant dialogue between political theory and empirical research that would aim to understand whether these non-elective forms of participation and representation are to be conceived as a complement, a diversion or even a full-blown alternative to electoral representation. Is representation dispensable? What are the alternatives to existing institutions? How are existing institutions and their alternatives perceived by citizens, parties and elected representatives? The aim of the present collection of articles was precisely to address these questions by means of a dialogue between political theory and empirical work on actors’ perceptions.
In representative democracies, large segments of society are often under-represented in politics. In theory, deliberative procedures enhance the chances for such groups to be heard, understood, and taken into consideration in political decisions. So far, research has mostly focused on the recruitment stage and found random selection of participants as the best way to prevent exclusion. Less attention has been paid to the two following stages of deliberation: the event itself and its outcome. This special issue provides theoretical and empirical contributions to the burgeoning literature about deliberative democracy by focusing on group inclusiveness. The contributions approach inclusiveness in deliberative practices from several perspectives and brings together substantive empirical evidence about its functioning and main challenges in European countries.
Highlights
Citizen assemblies and juries (CAJs) must meet generally accepted standards and be citizen-led to genuinely and credibly engage citizens. Agreed implementation and follow-up procedures should be established to ensure CAJs legitimately inform policymaking. CAJs are not a panacea to public participation on climate change and much more needs to be done beyond them.
