The Legitimacy of Citizen-led Deliberative Democracy: The G1000 in Belgium
... To this day, if the benefits and difficulties of deliberative democracy have been largely discussed in the literature [12][13][14], there are no systematic analyses on the effect of using several languages in deliberative randomly selected assemblies (also called deliberative mini-publics). The overwhelming majority of such assemblies are monolingual, or in the best of cases, have only two or three different languages [15,16] and the study of the use of sortition for political deliberation purposes is still relatively recent, since the first randomly selected assemblies at the level of an entire State exist in the contemporary era, only dating back to the late 2000s. As Lisa Verhasselt recently stated [17], while multilingualism and its effects have been studied for liberal representative democracies, there is a real gap in the academic literature concerning deliberative democracy as many democratic theorists seem to be trapped in a linguistically homogenous narrative. ...
... The absolute equality of European languages may even be perceived, consciously or unconsciously, as outdated by participants, who ask experts, for example, "how to better disseminate English" 14 , or even propose the adoption of English as a common EU language 15 . In the final results of the CoFoE's recommendations, proposal 48 of the "Culture and Exchanges" plenary assembly, while insisting on the promotion of multilingualism in measure 2, explicitly mentions only one language of which learning should also be encouraged: English [39]. ...
... 14 Observation in Strasbourg on 25 September 2021; Plenary session, questions to the invited experts. 15 Observation in Florence on 11 December 2021; General workshop on propositions 16 Focus Group conducted online on 18 July 2023 for the EUComMeet Project ...
This article examines the linguistic and political dimensions of deliberation at a transnational level, using the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) as a case study. The CoFoE, held from 2021 to 2022, involved European citizens deliberating in 24 official languages of the European Union. This multilingual setting provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of fostering a multilingual continental democracy. While the European Parliament’s translation services were largely effective, the study reveals how linguistic diversity can both enhance and impede deliberative processes. By comparing the CoFoE with other multilingual forums such as the European Social Forum and traditional European Parliament deliberations, this paper explores the implications of multilingualism on participatory mechanisms and democratic engagement in the EU. This research employs an ethnographic methodology grounded in non-participant observations conducted during Panel 2 of the Conference on the Future of Europe, focusing on field notes, video recordings, and a live interpretation to document the dynamics of deliberative exchanges. The approach aimed to capture the diversity of interactions in plenary sessions and smaller discussion groups. The findings highlight the complex interplay between language use, political representation, and social inclusion, and suggest that true multilingual deliberation requires more than just technical translation services; it demands a commitment to linguistic equity and the accommodation of diverse voices.
... The empirical studies that have covered the agenda have focused on the agenda setting agents. This work has found that agenda setting is inherently political and typically reflects the priorities of the commissioning body [29][30][31][32][33][34]. For Richardson [27] (p. ...
... For example, the so-called 'Ostbelgien model' provides an opportunity for citizens to create the agenda; in this case, a permanent Citizens' Council is given the power to commission a citizens' assembly on a topic of the Council's choice [33]. In a similar manner, the issues considered during the G1000 were drawn from proposals by the public through an online consultation [34]. ...
... In CAUK, as with many previous cases [29][30][31][32][33][34], the determination of the focus of each topic group was done in a top-down manner; the parliamentary committees set the agenda and insisted on all dimensions being given equal treatment. To allay a lot of the concerns of assembly members about having more input into the process, thought should be given to introducing more democratic procedures into the assembly agenda and design. ...
In recent times we have seen a spate of climate assemblies across Europe as the climate emergency gains increasing prominence in the political agenda and as the citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement gains popularity. However, there has been little empirical research on how the scope of citizens’ assemblies affects the internal logic of the assembly process and its impacts on external policy actors. This is a significant oversight given the power of agenda setting. It is also of particular importance for climate assemblies given the exceptional scale and complexity of climate change, as well as the need for co-ordination across all policy areas and types of governance to address it. In this paper, we start to address this gap through an in-depth case analysis of the Climate Assembly UK. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining surveys of the assembly members and witnesses, interviews with the assembly members, organisers, MPs, parliamentary staff, and government civil servants, and non-participant observation of the process. We find that attempts to adapt the assembly’s scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations, and the extent of their impact on parliament and government. We argue that more democratization in setting the agenda could help combat these issues.
... Ideally, deliberative forms of democracy should come with active participation of stakeholders, and it may be necessary to include possible underrepresented groups in a decision-making process [66]. Stoiciu and Gherghina [25] analyze the role of deliberation for underrepresentation problems, finding that it promotes inclusion of opinions from women, various social strata, and ethnic and other minorities [67,68]. However, another group of studies points out that deliberation may not be sufficient to resolve underrepresentation of some groups, especially young and uneducated people [20,22,[59][60][61][62][69][70][71]. ...
... However, another group of studies points out that deliberation may not be sufficient to resolve underrepresentation of some groups, especially young and uneducated people [20,22,[59][60][61][62][69][70][71]. Specifically, Caluwaerts and Reuchamps [67] and Harris [68] discuss and highlight the importance of representing children, young people, and future generations in deliberation, arguing that some mechanisms, such as citizens' assemblies, are necessary not only for developing a future-oriented democracy, but also for determining its legitimacy. ...
... For examples, countries (e.g., Ireland and Iceland), political parties (e.g., Alternativet Party of Denmark, Czech Pirate Party of Czech and Demos Party of Romania), country representatives (e.g., UN), and officials follow deliberation and/or voting for making decisions whose influence affect future generations in the long run [23,60,[88][89][90]. In summary, not only the literature, but also real-world social movements reveal that underrepresentation of future generations is considered a fundamental problem for democracy and IS [3,11,67,68]. ...
Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining the potential interests and concerns of future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms of democracy with majority voting helps support at maintaining IS by representing future generations' potential interests and concerns. We institute IS dilemma game with three forms of decision-making models with majority voting and examine how they maintain IS in laboratory experiments. In the IS dilemma game, a sequence of six generations is prepared where each generation consisting of three subjects is asked to choose either maintaining IS (sustainable option) or maximizing their own generation's payoff by irreversibly costing the subsequent generations (unsustainable option) with anonymous voting systems: (1) majority voting (MV), (2) deliberative majority voting (DMV) and (3) majority voting with deliberative accountability (MVDA). In MV and DMV, generations vote for their choices without and with deliberation, respectively. In MVDA, generations are asked to be possibly accountable for their choices to the subsequent generations during deliberation, and then vote. Our analysis shows that decision-making models with only majority voting generally does not address IS, while DMV and MVDA treatments induce more and much more generations to choose a sustainable option than MV, respectively. Overall, the results demonstrate that deliberation and accountability along with majority voting shall be necessary in models of decision-making at resolving IS problems and representing future generations' potential interests and concerns.
... In the perspective of 'exceptionality', the role of democratic innovations is to deal with an exceptional issue or rare situation, outside of the ordinary day-to-day politics, in a context of crisis or after a major change. Such tasks are, for instance, electoral reform after a historic change of majority, as in Canada and the Netherlands (Warren and Pearse 2008;Fournier et al. 2011); constitution making in an economic crisis context, as in Iceland (Bergmann 2016); and bottom-up consultation during a long period without government, as in Belgium (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018). Those democratic innovations are 'temporary institutions', as they will not serve any purpose once their single task is fulfilled, but they can be understood in two ways. ...
... This model was also implemented in Belgium for the G1000, whereby the maxi-public set up the agenda through an online platform and the mini-public deliberated on it afterwards. Here, the elected officials mainly ignored the recommendation of the DMP as this experience was not embedded in the political system (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018). Similarly, the We The Citizens project developed its agenda through seven open participatory meetings across Ireland; then a panel of 100 randomly selected citizens deliberated on it for a weekend, but without seeing their recommendations implemented by the elected officials (Courant 2021). ...
Randomly selected deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are on the rise globally. However, they remain ad hoc, opening the door to arbitrary manoeuvre and triggering a debate on their future institutionalization. What are the competing proposals aiming at institutionalizing DMPs within political systems? I suggest three ways for thinking about institutionalization: in terms of temporality, of legitimacy and support, and of power and role within a system. First, I analyze the dimension of time and how this affect DMP institutional designs. Second, I argue that because sortition produces ‘weak representatives’ with ‘humility-legitimacy’, mini-publics hardly ever make binding decisions and need to rely on external sources of legitimacies. Third, I identify four institutional models, relying on opposing views of legitimacy and politics: tamed consultation, radical democracy, representative klerocracy and hybrid polyarchy. They differ in whether mini-publics are interpreted as tools: for legitimizing elected officials; to give power to the people; or as a mean to suppress voting .
... The literature has made progress in ascertaining the basis of minipublics' legitimacy among participants. Perceived diversity and effectiveness in providing a forum for a deliberative exchange of ideas tend to be viewed as legitimate justifications for their recommendations to weigh on public decisions (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps 2018;Vrydagh et al. 2020). However, securing legitimacy among the panel of participants is insufficient. ...
... Achieving these conditions poses a challenge for deliberative democrats. Indeed, minipublics often fail to go beyond the enclosed space of their deliberations and reach out to the wider citizenry (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps 2018;Fournier et al. 2011). There are, of course, exceptions, as in the case of the Oregon Citizens' Initiative, which has been made visible to the voting population (Gastil et al. 2018). ...
Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.
... Finally, in 2011-2012, Belgium witnessed a randomly selected assembly: the G1000, which remained completely citizen-led and extra-institutional. Hence, its political effects remained marginal in terms of concrete reform, even though its media coverage and quality made it a relative success (Jacquet et al., 2016;Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018). ...
... This change suppressed an opportunity for deliberation between the maxi-and mini-publics. The consultations in Canada and the Netherlands (Fournier et al., 2011), the online participation in Iceland (Bergmann, 2016), and the bottom-up agenda setting in Australia (Carson et al., 2013) and Belgium (Jacquet et al., 2016;Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018) were important elements of democratization. The Irish case displayed a tendency toward reducing public input. ...
Among democratic innovations, deliberative mini-publics, that is panels of randomly selected citizens tasked to make recommendations about public policies, have been increasingly used. In this regard, Ireland stands out as a truly unique case because, on the one hand, it held four consecutive randomly selected citizens' assemblies, and on the other hand, some of those processes produced major political outcomes through three successful referendums; no other country shows such as record. This led many actors to claim that the “Irish model” was replicable in other countries and that it should lead to political “success.” But is this true? Relying on a qualitative empirical case-study, this article analyses different aspects to answer this question: First, the international context in which the Irish deliberative process took place; second, the differences between the various Irish citizens' assemblies; third, their limitations and issues linked to a contrasted institutionalization; and finally, what “institutional model” emerges from Ireland and whether it can be transferred elsewhere.
--
Frontiers in Political Science
--
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2020.591983/full
... Even though this discussion on the different implementations of "deliberation" in the included studies seems conceptual and methodological, they greatly impact the overall effects we find as they reflect various conceptualizations of deliberation, as discussed above. After all, previous studies have highlighted that deliberation can only unleash its full potential when properly and carefully designed, i.e., when a diverse subsample of participants have had the opportunity to thoroughly and publicly argue their position and to listen to each other (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018). Any interpretation of the substantive findings on deliberation and polarization should therefore be closely linked to the conceptual discussion on how deliberation was implemented. ...
In recent years, deliberative democracy has drawn attention as a potential way of fighting polarization. Allowing citizens to exchange arguments and viewpoints on political issues in group, can have strong conflict-mitigating effects: it can foster opinion changes (thereby overcoming idea-based polarization), and improve relations between diametrically opposed groups (thereby tackling affective forms of polarization, such as affective polarization). However, these results conflict with social psychological and communication studies which find that communicative encounters between groups can lead to further polarization and even group think. The question therefore arises under which conditions deliberative interactions between citizens can decrease polarization. Based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of the literature, which includes a wide diversity of communicative encounters ranging from short classroom discussions to multi-weekend citizen assemblies, this paper reports several findings. First, we argue that the effects of communicative encounters on polarization are conditional on how those types of communication were conceptualized across disciplines. More precisely, we find depolarizing effects when group discussions adhere to a deliberative democracy framework, and polarizing effects when they do not. Second we find that the depolarizing effects depend on several design factors that are often implemented in deliberative democracy studies. Finally, our analysis shows that that much more work needs to be done to unravel and test the exact causal mechanism(s) underlying the polarization-reducing effects of deliberation. Many potential causal mechanisms were identified, but few studies were able to adjudicate how deliberation affects polarization.
... Some democratic innovations have sought to create conditions that strengthen the connection between citizens and representatives. These take the form of citizens' assemblies (Farrell and Suiter, 2019), deliberative minipublics adjacent to legislative committees (Hendriks, 2016), and a permanent citizens' assembly to parallel the parliament (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018). Other proposals seek to 'bring the citizen back in' to the formal arenas of decision-making as part of participatory policymaking and interactive governance (Michels, 2011), co-governance (Geissel, 2012), collaborative governance (Torfing and Ansell, 2017), and plebiscitary and cooperative governance (Hendriks, 2019). ...
Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond ‘minimalist’ notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for ‘recursive representation’, which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system.
... Some respondents also argued that the views of the participant group may not be consistent with those of non-participants: In a deliberative setting, those who help with the implementation must be impartial and carefully facilitate the discussions. The quality of the deliberation rests in the ability to allow all participants to express themselves freely and to have their views taken into consideration (Reuchamps and Caluwaerts, 2018). Some MPs expressed concerns over these issues: 'I think the experience with deliberative practices is that a certain group-think emerges in the deliberation, and it matters who is leading the work and executing it' (MP8); and 'My feeling is that there will always be someone leading in the group, leading the group discussion in a certain way' (MP21). ...
Politicians are expressing increasing support for deliberative practices around the world. However, knowledge about their actions beyond expressing support is scarce. To address this gap in the literature, this article aims to explain why politicians do not pick up the results arising from deliberative practices and integrate them into their policies. Our analysis focuses on the 2019 deliberation in Iceland as the most likely case in which we would expect such a process to occur. We use original data from 25 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 with Icelandic MPs elected at the national level, which also cover all the party leaders of the eight parliamentary parties in the 2017–2021 term in office. The reflexive thematic analysis finds that, irrespective of their ideological affiliation, politicians are critical of deliberative practices both in procedural and substantive terms. They display a strong belief that political representation achieved through elections must be the rule of the democratic game. As such, deliberation is considered redundant since citizens already have many ways to participate in representative democracy.
... In that respect, the evidence is in line with key expectations derived from the group hypothesis (E2 in Table 7.1). But why then did we not observe the same 113 In their study of the G1000 in Belgium, a civil-society led deliberative mini-public, Caluwaerts and Reuchamps (2018) demonstrate, however, that deliberation was higher in linguistically mixed small group discussions than in their linguistically homogenous equivalents. As language is an important identity marker in Belgium, this could count as evidence against the (social) group hypothesis, provided that this cue of group membership indeed was more important than the social identities created during deliberation (on this point, see Myers, 2022). ...
[Full text: http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/277762
Data, and R scripts: https://osf.io/2xuha/]
Many political theorists and pundits deplore the way we talk politics. Conversations among elites and ordinary citizens alike arguably often show a lack of argumentation and mutual respect. This has spurred widespread interest in finding new ways to stimulate deliberation, that is, respectful political talk marked by a give-and-take of reasons.
A fundamental critique is that deliberation goes against human nature. This view of deliberation and human nature has so far received little scrutiny but has had major implications for how we think about what deliberation requires. Some maintain that interventions to promote deliberation are futile and others that deliberation requires substantial institutional tinkering and corrective pedagogy. In this dissertation, I critically engage with this commonly held pessimistic view on human nature and deliberation from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective.
Theoretically, I ground our understanding of deliberation and human nature in the existing literature on human evolution, in particular work in the field of evolutionary psychology. Doing so allows me to advance an alternative view on deliberation: human nature dictates that deliberation under certain conditions will feel intuitive to most people. I put forward what I call the ‘group hypothesis’ of deliberation, which holds that deliberation formed an adaptive response to the problem of intra-group political disagreements, a problem recurrently encountered by our distant ancestors who used to live as (semi-)nomadic hunter-gatherers. Based on broader insights from evolutionary psychology, I expect that when people today disagree about politics with others from their ingroup (i.e. the group to which they (feel they) belong), they will still be inclined to deliberate. Conversely, disagreements with others from an outgroup should reduce people’s propensity to deliberate.
Empirically, the dissertation relies on diverse sources of data to test these expectations: ethnographic evidence on political decision-making in historic hunter-gatherer societies; longitudinal-cross-sectional data on the propensity of political representatives to deliberate in mass societies; and experimental data on the drivers of deliberation in informal talk among citizens. While I find little support for the expectations derived from the group hypothesis, the findings provide relevant insights for future work to start building a research program on human nature and deliberation.
The dissertation makes three key contributions to the literature on deliberation:
1. It grounds discussions about human nature and deliberation in the literature on evolutionary psychology, moving past mere philosophical speculation;
2. It shows how an evolutionary perspective can help to integrate research in the field of deliberation and incorporate insights from diverse disciplines such as anthropology and biology; and
3. It engages in theory-building based on existing evolutionary insights and novel empirics in an attempt to kickstart a research program on deliberation and human nature.
... A oferta de informações variadas sobre a temática em debate, antes e durante a realização desses experimentos -por meio de cartilhas, vídeos e folhetos, bem como palestras com especialistas nos temas em tela -é condição indispensável para que eles ocorram. E, ao lado da oportunidade de cidadãos terem voz e serem ouvidos, contribuem para que processos de debate e reflexividade ocorram (Niemeyer & Jennstål, 2018;Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2018). O mesmo cuidado para o provimento de informações que contextualizam participantes sobre as temáticas que motivam os encontros é visto em inovações democráticas realizadas no Brasil, como conferências de políticas públicas e ciclos de orçamento participativo. ...
Introduction
We examine how informational asymmetry can be a disruptive factor to deliberative proceedings, as it severely compromises the capacity of the actors involved and the prospects and limits for good decision-making in deliberative systems.
Materials and methods
Through an interpretative approach, we examined the informational constraints and asymmetries in mining-related environmental disputes in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We conducted a systematic monitoring of institutional participation arenas (public policy councils) and civil society activism (Movement for the Mountains and Waters of Minas). Through 45 semi-structured interviews, we spoke to members of civil society affected by mining, bureaucrats, and employees of mining companies, among other actors.
Results
The analysis enumerates a series of critical issues, such as: the risk of market actors monopolizing the production of information about public affairs; suppressing or spreading fragmented information to prevent opponents from taking an informed stance on new mining initiatives or regulation changes; the use of technical and scientific terminology which hinders the participation of civil society.
Discussion
Two layers of epistemic injustices constrain the debate and involve informational asymmetry: i) structural elements such as the provision of information and the regulations/formats of participation arenas; and ii) more contingent factors related to strategic actions, ranging from premeditated content manipulation to the strategic use of existing rules. In our conclusion, we suggest ways to promote different perspectives in the discussion surrounding this matter.
Keywords
deliberation; informational asymmetry; mining; environmental conflicts; participation
... Seminal contributions determine levels of legitimacy via the mere observed presence of certain procedures, such as accountability mechanisms and transparent procedures (Weatherford, 1992). Other studies rely on objective or factual data on, for instance, (voter) turnout or diversity of participants (Binnema & Michels, 2021;Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2018). But most research tries to determine levels of legitimacy by measuring perceptions via surveys with democratic stakeholders, mostly citizens. ...
Policy decision‐making modes in governance contexts have become increasingly participatory. This raises questions about legitimacy, and how to measure this concept. The current article advances a multifaceted measurement of perceived legitimacy of policy decision‐making modes in participatory governance, capturing the three components of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output) with two items each. This six‐item measure was tested in a vignette survey (total N = 4583), which was administered among four types of democratic stakeholders: politicians, civil servants, civil society, and citizens. Respondents completed the scale for four different policy decision‐making modes (representative, consultative, co‐decisive, and decisive). Our six‐item scale shows excellent internal consistency as an encompassing measure, while at the same time also allowing for fine‐grained analyses on difference patterns in the input, throughput, and output components of legitimacy. As such, it provides a relevant and parsimonious tool for future research that requires a multifaceted measurement of the perceived legitimacy of participatory governance.
... La délibération entre citoyens a beaucoup gagné en crédibilité à petite échelle, dans le cadre d'assemblées, de jurys, de conventions, de panels citoyens, généralement peuplés de 20 à 150 participants. Certaines expériences ont été plus loin, en cherchant à se rapprocher d'un échantillon véritablement représentatif, à l'instar du G1000 en Belgique (Caluwaerts, Reuchamps, 2018). Mais toutes ces initiatives se sont toujours heurtées au problème suivant : est-il acceptable qu'une infime minorité, qui n'a pas été élue, s'exprime au nom de toute la population, l'écrasante majorité demeurant silencieuse (Parkinson, 2006 ;Lafont, 2015) ? ...
Doit-on renoncer à l’idéal d’une grande délibération structurée incluant l’ensemble des membres d’une communauté politique ? Pas forcément. La délibération échelonnée, étudiée dans cet article, consiste à multiplier les délibérations par groupes de 20 personnes et à en faire remonter les conclusions provisoires, à la façon d’une pyramide, par le biais de représentant·es des délibérations antérieures. Étant donné le caractère exponentiel de la réduction du nombre de participant·es entre les échelons de délibération, il ne faudrait que six étapes pour arriver à la délibération finale. Cet article explore la plausibilité théorique d’un tel modèle et examine les principales objections qu’on pourrait lui adresser.
... In fact, many such innovations draw in only a fraction of the public (e.g. Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2018;Coleman & Cardoso Sampaio, 2017;van der Does & Bos, 2021). Why? ...
Public administrations increasingly try to find new ways to involve citizens in policy‐making. However, many democratic innovations draw in only a fraction of the public. Why? I hypothesize that we observe such low participation rates because there is often not enough at stake for citizens. I test this with a pre‐registered survey experiment on citizens’ intentions to participate in participatory budgets in the Netherlands. I fielded the experiment among a sample of citizens that had just experienced a participatory budget (N = 225) and among a population‐based sample (N = 1,369). I operationalized the stakes as the amount of public money about which citizens can decide. The results show that more money generally does not increase citizens’ intention to participate. Supplementary analyses confirm the experimental findings and provide reasons how and why the stakes involved (do not) matter for citizens’ involvement. Overheden proberen steeds vaker nieuwe manieren te vinden om burgers bij beleidsvorming te betrekken. Desalniettemin nemen doorgaans maar weinig burgers deel aan deze innovatieve manieren van participatie. Waarom? Ik veronderstel dat participatie veelal uitblijft omdat er voor burgers niet genoeg op het spel staat. Ik test dit met een vooraf geregistreerd survey‐experiment over de intentie van burgers om deel te nemen aan wijkbudgetten in Nederland. Het experiment vond plaats onder burgers die net een wijkbudget hadden ervaren (N = 225) en onder een steekproef van de Nederlandse bevolking (N = 1.369). ‘Wat er op het spel staat’ operationaliseerde ik als de hoeveelheid publiek geld waarover burgers kunnen beslissen. De resultaten tonen aan dat meer geld in het algemeen de intentie om te participeren niet verhoogt. Aanvullende analyses bevestigen dit en geven aan hoe en waarom wat er op het spel staat voor burgers (niet) van belang is voor hun betrokkenheid. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
... Earlier research has provided arguments for public participation in general (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018;Fung 2007;Geissel-Joas 2013;Smith 2009) and there is an account of purposes and values associated with participatory governance (Elstub and Escobar 2019;Sintomer et al. 2016;Wampler 2012). However, in order to highlight why political leaders may or may not prefer sharing power with ordinary people, there is a need for shifting attention from citizens' and experts' attitudes on participatory decision-making toward the attitudes of political leaders. ...
As deliberative and participatory practices play a greater role in political decision-making of democratic political systems in many parts of the world, political parties must adapt to demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry. While there is a growing body of literature about the functioning of such procedures in different social and political contexts, little is known about politicians' reasons behind introducing them. Based on qualitative data collected among Hungarian politicians, this paper brings evidence to empirically assess why local politicians introduced Participatory Budgeting in Budapest, Hungary. Our findings suggest that politicians accept theoretical arguments for promoting citizens' participation, newly elected local politicians expect to increase their party's local embeddedness by creating new contact opportunities and emphasize that the introduction of Participatory Budgeting is a ground for experimentation. The article ends with a discussion about arguments that are put forth in the literature on European Participatory Budgeting but missing from the views of politicians, and concludes by highlighting the risks of institutionalizing Participatory Budgeting.
... Theories of deliberative democracy, though not universally uniform in methods and evaluation criteria, provide clear guidance for conceptualizing the scope and quality of deliberation aiming to influence policy-making (cf. Goold et al. 2012;Reuchamps and Caluwaerts 2018). Many researchers hold that high-quality deliberation serves as a direct indicator of citizen-oriented and accountable democratic outputs (cf. ...
Many democratic countries around the globe guarantee some type of representation for various groups of recognized minorities and to various extents. Those governments enable and/or incentivize their deliberative performances through various participatory democratic instruments, either within the official institutions, or in online platforms, or by partaking in different governance and budgeting processes. Diaspora communities, though do not share most of the characteristics commonly attributed to ‘minorities’, could be theoretically considered as an ‘ex-territorialized minority’ in terms of access to decision-making processes and overall democratic participation. However, diaspora groups functionally appear to be often marginalized in democratic deliberation in the countries of their origin, and only a handful of countries have put in place official policies that address this matter. In this article, we aim to analyse how foreign governments and their aid agencies operating in BiH have contributed to the development of diaspora-friendly democratic deliberation fora for enhanced (handson) practices of localized Bosnian diaspora's engagement in their country of origin. We analyse and compare six selected local communities (municipalities and cities) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, examine the externally-driven municipal institutional restructuring and explore what motivates locals to adopt and accept diaspora as a component of their own local deliberation frameworks.
... Extensive research is devoted to what happens once people participate in deliberation. Known as input legitimacy, the idea behind who participates in deliberation has been often analyzed along the lines of inclusive or representative participation (Smith 2009;Geissel and Gherghina 2016;Reuchamps and Caluwaerts 2018). ...
In 2019, the French Government organized a wide public consultation named the Great Debate. Promoted as a deliberative practice that could bring together various segments of society, it was characterized by feeble involvement of the people living in the banlieues – densely populated, economically marginalized, socially deprived and ethno-culturally different peripheral areas of large cities. This article aims to explain the reasons for which people in the banlieues of Paris did not participate in the Great Debate. Drawing on in-depth interviews and one focus group conducted in the spring of 2019, we distinguish between four main causes of non-participation: the re-legitimation function of the debate, its lack of inclusiveness, mismatch of demands, and format of the deliberative setting.
... They can be traced back to the notions of John Rawls on "public reason" and Jürgen Habermas on "communicative action," which refer to a form of deliberation in which participants as agents can freely communicate and debate so as to reach a consensus by way of increased mutual understanding (Bächtiger et al., 2018;Fearon, 1998;Habermas, 1994Habermas, , 1998McAfee, 2004;Mouffe, 2000;Smith, 2009). Deliberative democracy features community-based communication which emphasizes equality, transparency, reciprocity, freedom from power, considered debate, accountability, and a focus on consensus or common good (Fishkin, 2011;Reuchamps and Caluwaerts, 2018;Walsh, 2007). For Sanders (1997), deliberative advocacy typically entails rationality, reserve, cautiousness, quietude, community, altruism, and universalism. ...
To explore the mechanisms that foster rational, communicative, and actionable citizenship, this research proposes a mediation as well as moderation research framework that links deliberative thinking, political self-efficacy, social capital, and civic participation. Data from 865 Taiwanese university students are analyzed with structural equation modeling, showing a positive association of deliberative thinking to political self-efficacy and civic participation, as well as a positive association between them. Moreover, the association between deliberative thinking and civic participation is significantly and positively mediated by political self-efficacy. When background factors are controlled, only social capital is identified to be moderating any associations between variables in this study. The established association between deliberative thinking and political self-efficacy and that between deliberative thinking and the non-electoral, as well as community-based dimensions of civic participation, are significantly weaker among those possessing less social capital, while such differences are not significant in the case of gender and household income. Based on these findings, the relative roles of deliberative thinking, political self-efficacy, and social capital in promoting effective deliberative democracy will be discussed.
... PVDA voters also score as high on populist attitudes as well as VB voters (Elchardus and Spruyt, 2016). The substantial 'supply' and 'demand' of right-and left-wing populism also led to intense public debates concerning representation and the working of democracy, leading, for example, to mediatised deliberative initiatives such as the G1000 in 2011 (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018). The preceding elements render Flanders a suitable test case to study the attitudinal embeddedness of populist attitudes among voters. ...
Scholars who study populism from an ‘ideational approach’ consider populism as a set of ideas based on a moralised anti-establishment thinking and a strong people-centrist view of politics. From this perspective, at a theoretical level, populist attitudes have the following two main contrasts: pluralism and elitism. In this article, we investigate the ideological consistency of the populism-pluralism-elitism set of attitudes among voters. Analysing data from Flanders (N = 1444), we make three main contributions. First, we show that there indeed exists an internally consistent relationship between populism, elitism, and pluralism among voters. Second, we demonstrate that this consistency only holds for the most politically sophisticated citizens. And third, we show that the relationship between populist and elitist attitudes is much more nuanced than often assumed. We show that it is possible to empirically distinguish between ‘expertise elitism’ and ‘anti-populist elitism’, two forms of elitism which relate differently to populist attitudes.
... 6 These problems concerned the sorting procedure, which led to a low response rate; and to the launch of a governmental Master Plan on Early Childhood in the middle of the deliberative process. 7 He was one of the founders of the G1000, a large grassroots' citizens' assembly that attracted lots of national and international attention (Caluwaerts andReuchamps, 2018). This assembly succeeded to put on Belgian agenda the notion of democratic innovation and deliberative democracy. ...
... Besides authorization mechanisms, deliberative forums have additional institutional design features (for a recent overview see Farrell et al. 2019) that may affect nonparticipants' legitimacy perceptions. Caluwaerts and Reuchamps (2018), for instance, find for a deliberative forum in Belgium that non-participating citizens do not automatically endorse decisions of the forum. Much depends on the design of the deliberative forum, e.g., who participated and how participants interacted in the forum. ...
Citizen involvement in deliberative forums is frequently discussed with an eye to boosting the legitimacy of decision-making. However, this idea has been radically challenged by Cristina Lafont (2015, 2017, 2019), who argues that deliberative forums may decrease rather than increase legitimacy. Yet Lafont’s legitimacy challenge has been primarily discussed at a theoretical level without taking the perceptions of citizens into account. Referring to an explorative student conjoint experiment this article examines how non-participants assess deliberative forums. It focuses on different authorization mechanisms and a set of institutional design features and combines them with non-participants’ substantive considerations and their awareness of such forums. Empirical findings of the student sample confirm Lafont’s critique, as they suggest that respondents want the authority of deliberative forums to be clearly circumscribed and minimal but also maximally representative and inclusive. Moreover, legitimacy perceptions are closely tied to substantive considerations and awareness of such novel and unfamiliar institutions.
... Even though mini-publics have many uses, ranging from individual will formation (e.g. Bächtiger, Setälä, & Grönlund, 2014;Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2018;Fishkin, 2011;Knobloch & Gastil, 2015) to contributing to the epistemic and democratic quality of the deliberative system (Curato & Böker, 2016;Niemeyer, 2014), deliberative practices are most commonly used to shape public policy. They can directly determine public policy by making binding recommendations, but examples thereof are extremely rare (Goodin & Dryzek, 2006) and are often criticised because mini-publics lack a relation of accountability and authorisation mechanisms between its participants and the rest of the population that remains excluded from the decision-making (Böker, 2017;Lafont, 2015). ...
Several studies have investigated the impact of mini-publics on public policy. These works do not however integrate the fact that decision-makers have preferences before a minipublic, and that these preferences affect the way a mini-public can impact public policy. The article develops a model to measure the influence of mini-publics on public policy, called the Sequential Impact Matrixes (SIM). This framework distinguishes multiple types of influences that a mini-public can exert on decision-makers following the latter’s initial sets of policy preferences. The model suggests that a minipublic can exert five different kinds of influences on decision-makers, namely a continuous, enriching, innovating, shifting, or an inhibiting influence. The framework is applied on the Citizens’ Panel ‘Make Your Brussels Mobility’ and it shows that most of the Panel’s recommendations were in line with the decision-makers’ initial preferences, whereas influences altering these preferences are rarer.
... The organising committee behind the G1000 which consisted of artists, academics and public intellectuals continued to convene after the G1000 itself was concluded. This became a platform to campaign for more deliberative democracy in Belgium, which was one of the driving forces behind the implementation of a system of citizens' assemblies in the small German-speaking community of Belgium, the so-called 'Ostbelgien Model' (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps 2018). Indeed, institutionalising minipublics demands ' a political movement composed of committed democrats who understand themselves to have an interest in [its realisation]' (Barber 1984: 263). ...
This article shows how the principles of participatory deliberative democracy can serve as a guide for the institutional design of minipublics, while also discussing the obstacles such proposals are likely to face in becoming realised in practice. It does so by discussing the case of citizen-initiated citizens’ assemblies in Flanders, Belgium. This case represents an ambitious proposal that combined elements of petition, deliberation, public consultation and parliamentary deliberation to generate a robust deliberative system. Yet in the end it was soundly defeated in parliament. By studying the institutional specifics of this proposal as well as the macro-deliberative circumstances that led to its failure, this article presents a nuanced picture of the promises and pitfalls of institutionalising deliberative minipublics. It concludes with a call to ‘deliberative activism’.
... 1.2.1 Political process Several experiences outside of Ostbelgien have inspired its parliamentarians: the G1000, a Belgium-wide deliberative experiment in 2011 in which several German-speakers were involved (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018) and a study tour of the community parliament in 2016 to visit model experiences of participatory democracy in Herrenberg (Germany), Bregenz (Austria) and Freiburg (Switzerland). On this background, in 2017, the extended bureau of the parliament initiated a first 'citizens' dialogue', made of 20 randomly selected citizens, on measures to be taken in the field of early childhood policy. ...
In recent years, an increasing number of scholars and politicians have called for institutionalising deliberative citizen participation within Parliaments. The Parliament of the German-speaking Community of Belgium has paved the way in this direction by institutionalising a permanent deliberative citizen assembly that is directly linked to the parliamentary process. It consists in a permanent Citizens’ Council drawn by lot, which can initiate Citizens’ Assemblies, also drawn by lot, whose mission is to deliberate and formulate recommendations on the subject that the Citizens’ Council had submitted to them. At the end of the deliberations, the recommendations are discussed in a joint committee between the members of the Citizens’ Assembly, elected representatives and the minister in charge. The latter two then need to indicate whether and how the recommendations will be implemented by parliamentary or governmental measures—with rejections requiring specific justification. This article analyses how such a far-reaching process of citizen participation and deliberation became introduced at the core of the parliamentary institution and what are its features.
... Yet, as a way to cope with its structural divisions, Belgium was one of the first countries to introduce the secret election ballot and the principle of compulsory voting in general elections. In the 21 st century, Belgium is back at the forefront of democratic innovation when after organizing several citizen panels in the 2000s, the country saw one of the largest citizen-led deliberative experiments worldwide organized in reaction to the government crisis of 2010-2011: the G1000 (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018;Jacquet and Reuchamps, 2017). In the wake of these developments, the idea of deliberative democracy has grown within society. ...
The article explores the prospects of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. While this idea is advocated by political theorists and politicians in favour of participatory and deliberative democracy, the article investigates to which extent citizens and MPs actually endorse different variants of 'sortition'. Thereby, we test for differences among respondents' social status, disaffection with elections and political ideology. Our findings suggest that MPs appear currently largely opposed to sortitioning political offices when their decisions-making power is more than consultative, although leftist MPs tend to be in favour of mixed assemblies (involving elected and sortitioned members). Among citizens, random selection seems to appeal above all to disaffected individuals with a lower social status. If sortition was hence to be introduced in politics, a possible reform pattern would consist in a minority of politicians advocating for a reform that passes should sufficient civil society support be gained.
Belgium is at the forefront of democratic innovations involving the use of random selection, with the sortition-based Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue, institutionalized by the parliament of the German-speaking community, and the deliberative committees mixing elected politicians and randomly selected citizens in the parliaments of Brussels and Wallonia. This article traces the evolution of the public debates that led to this situation and explores the potential sources of legitimacy for this new form of democratic representation.
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
This timely and compelling volume offers new, empirical evidence on the state of trust, democracy and representation in Belgium; it further introduces an innovative methodological and conceptual framework to study this ‘crisis’, specifically by developing the concept of political resentment. The essays in this collection span diverse topics, from citizens’ conceptions of democracy itself and the expression of political resentment among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, to the influence of different emotional dimensions of resentment on protest behaviours. By adopting a distinctive affective lens and by building upon the specific case of Belgium, this volume contributes to the broader conversation on political resentment and the critical role of emotions in contemporary politics.
Bitter-Sweet Democracy will be invaluable for scholars researching the relationship between emotions and politics, political representation and democracy, and citizen-led conceptualizations of politics. It will also appeal to decision-makers and citizens seeking to understand the challenges facing democracy, as well as a wider audience of academics and students in the fields of political science, political psychology and sociology.
El análisis comparado de las instituciones publica brinda la oportunidad de revisar aquellas estructuras o normas puestas en marcha en otros sistemas jurídicos que pueden ser incorporadas a otros para mejorar las ya existentes o bien con la creación de nuevas figuras. El análisis comparado dentro del Poder legislativo puede ampliar el panorama y mejorar los procedimientos internos que se tienen en distintos países, como es el caso del Senado francés y el Senado mexicano, pues además de la creación de leyes los Congresos desarrollan en su interior otras actividades
This article explores how citizens’ legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini‐public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens’ legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this – meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them – legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability.
In the present article, I offer a theoretical and explorative overview of the relationship between deliberative democracy and multilingualism to claim that multilingualism is an asset for deliberative democracy. I argue that the traditional approaches to deliberative democracy have often overlooked the importance of linguistic diversity, partially due to the dominant narrative of the prerequisite of a common language for–deliberative–democracy. This paper examines why it is worthwhile to reconcile democratic deliberation and multilingualism, exploring the benefits and challenges of integrating linguistic pluralism into deliberative democracy. By unpacking the positive impacts of embracing multilingualism and providing insights into suggestive possibilities on how deliberative mini-publics can best accommodate multilingualism, I advocate for a more robust and inclusive deliberative democratic framework.
Many citizens are frustrated with their democracy, particularly with elected representatives and political parties. In some contexts, citizens have taken steps to disrupt the status quo and push forward their own novel democratic reforms. Research on these ‘citizen-led democratic innovations’ has focused primarily on how political crises mobilise citizens to form social movements that then go on to devise or co-produce novel participatory institutions. This article expands these existing understandings in two novel directions. First, it challenges the assumption that for citizens to lead democratic reform they first need to mobilise a large protest movement. Second, it expands procedural understandings of ‘democratic innovation’ by considering how citizens are innovating in and around the core institutions of representative democracy. The article draws empirical insights from extensive qualitative research into Australia’s Community Independents Movement, which reveals a place-based, locally led political movement pursuing democratic change to improve local representation in national politics.
Concerns about widespread democratic dissatisfaction have prompted a search for remedies, such as increasing citizens’ role in politics. While the public seems supportive, it remains unclear whether such newly introduced procedures can effectively tackle citizens’ dissatisfaction with present‐day politics. This paper develops a problem‐solving approach to studying this question. It proposes that combining insights on what ‘pushes’ and ‘pulls’ people to support procedural reform is crucial: Only then can we uncover if and how people consider procedural reform as addressing the problem(s) they see in the representative system today. Using the example of deliberative minipublics and original, pre‐registered survey data from Belgium (n = 1,579), we find that respondents generally think of minipublics as problem‐solvers rather than problem‐creators, albeit to different degrees. For instance, this perceived problem‐solving potential is more pronounced among discontent citizens. This study sheds new light on the importance of studying citizens’ reasoning about the roots and remedies for political dissatisfaction.
Un nombre croissant de parlements expérimentent des modèles délibératifs permettant aux citoyennes et citoyens de participer activement à la prise de décision parlementaire. Leur institutionnalisation est particulièrement visible en Belgique, où quatre parlements ont instauré de manière permanente la démocratie délibérative. Nous étudions les raisons derrière cette institutionnalisation en utilisant une méthode mixte pour établir, quantitativement d’abord, si une différence de soutien peut être observée entre les parlements ayant institutionnalisé ou non de tels dispositifs. Puis nous analysons qualitativement comment les parlementaires conçoivent ces dispositifs délibératifs et pourquoi elles et ils optent pour un modèle spécifique.
Le processus de recrutement (le « tirage au sort ») d’un mini-public conduit à sélectionner des volontaires motivé·es et disponibles pour participer à l’assemblée. Cependant, leurs dispositions pour la délibération ne se révèlent qu’en situation et dépendent largement du déroulement même du processus délibératif. L’analyse des réponses des volontaires participant à la Convention citoyenne pour le climat à des questionnaires portant sur la qualité délibérative des échanges, ainsi que leur comparaison avec celles données par les participant·es aux conférences citoyennes régionales du Grand débat national (France, 2019) et du G1000 (Belgique, 2011), permettent de saisir l’expression de dispositions relationnelles dans les interactions qui font d’une situation délibérative une expérience partagée. Nous employons l’expression « citoyennes délibératives et citoyens délibératifs » pour qualifier les interactions entre dispositions individuelles et dispositif délibératif, constitutives de l’expérience partagée. L’écoute et le respect entre participant·es, la sincérité des prises de parole et leur orientation vers le bien commun, le goût pour l’expression du désaccord politique en face à face forment la confiance des citoyennes délibératives et des citoyens délibératifs dans leur capacité collective à produire des propositions efficaces et justes. Un programme comparatif international permettrait de documenter leur expérience en saisissant plus finement les dispositions individuelles favorables à la délibération, leur formation et leur dynamique, en interrogeant les comportements qui les manifestent selon les motifs de participation.
In response to the limitations of elite-driven democratic innovations, social movements have proposed democratic innovations that are democracy-driven. They claim that democracy-driven governance generates legitimacy by better responding to citizens’ demands. However, whether participating citizens support this claim remains unclear. Under what conditions do participants accept the legitimacy of a mini-public that has been set up by a social movement party? We examine this question by conducting an in-depth case study of the Brussels Citizens’ Assembly organized by the Agora movement party throughout its entire process. Adopting mixed-methods, we find that participants’ perceived legitimacy is shaped by a process-long, dynamic interaction between organizers and participants. Legitimacy is enhanced when organizers grant participants authorship over the BCA’s procedural design and breaks down when they fail to do so.
What makes politically dissatisfied citizens enthusiastic about deliberation? And what makes them hate it instead? Based on a picture task embedded in a series of focus groups conducted in Belgium, we argue that differences in sense-making help to explain why dissatisfied citizens (do not) support deliberation. We focus on two groups of dissatisfied citizens: non-partisan activists and politically disadvantaged citizens. For both groups, we find that when they thought of deliberation as low-key, informal discussion, they linked it to respectful communication and beneficial outcomes; when they thought of it as formalized, structured discussion, their appraisals became much more negative. For researchers of deliberation, our results make clear that we should be careful in asking citizens what they think about 'deliberation' without inquiring into the way they interpret it. For deliberation practitioners, our findings underline the relevance of integrating informal interactions into the design of deliberative institutions.
Deliberative mini-publics are increasingly used to try to tackle public discontent with the functioning of democracy. However, the ability of mini-publics to increase perceptions of legitimate decision-making among citizens at large remains unclear, given especially that existing studies have not considered the potentially damaging effects of mini-public recommendations not being followed. We designed, pre-registered, and ran a survey experiment in Ireland to test the effects of mini-publics on legitimacy perceptions conditional on whether or not their non-binding policy recommendations are honored ( N = 1309). We find that mini-publics increase legitimacy perceptions among the broader citizenry; however, these beneficial effects are largely limited to situations in which their recommendations are honored. Additional results suggest that it makes no difference whether mini-public recommendations are overturned by elected representatives or by citizens in a referendum. Finally, we find that the legitimacy-enhancing effects of participatory processes are driven by citizens with low political trust.
Si l'actualité des assemblées citoyennes est relativement récente en France, avec la Convention citoyenne pour le climat, cette technique s'appuie sur de nombreuses et anciennes expériences dans d'autres États. L'étude de ces assemblées a également fait l'objet de nombreux travaux issus de la science politique en France comme à l'étranger. Les juristes demeurent, encore aujourd'hui, largement étrangers à cette réflexion, aussi bien dans sa dimension pratique, l'étude de la pratique des assemblées citoyennes, que dans sa dimension théorique, sous l'angle de l'étude des concepts de démocratie délibérative et de démocratie participative. Dans un tel contexte, le présent ouvrage, Les assemblées citoyennes : nouvelle utopie démocratique ?, résultat d'un colloque international pluridisciplinaire, permet de dresser un état des lieux, sous un angle critique, de ce qu'il convient de penser des assemblées citoyennes. Les assemblées citoyennes constituent-elles le remède miracle à la crise du régime représentatif ? Tel est, sans doute le fil rouge de toutes les questions soulevées au cours de cette journée d'études. Quel est le sens des « assemblées citoyennes » ? À quelle théorie politique est-il possible de les rattacher ? Quelles en sont les expressions concrètes et les différentes expériences pratiques ? Telles sont les différentes questions sur lesquelles les contributions de cet ouvrage ont apporté un éclairage pluridisciplinaire, contemporain et critique. La multiplication des regards disciplinaires, science politique et droit pour l'essentiel, permet ainsi de croiser les regards sur cet objet d'études, de déplacer, parfois, les frontières et, surtout, de penser de manière globale le phénomène des assemblées citoyennes.
Academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in deliberative minipublics and whether these can address widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary politics. While optimism seems to prevail, there is also talk that the use of minipublics may backfire. When the government disregards a minipublic's recommendations, this could lead to more dissatisfaction than not asking for its advice in the first place. Using an online survey experiment in Belgium (n = 3,102), we find that, compared to a representative decision‐making process, a minipublic tends to bring about higher political support when its recommendations are fully adopted by the government, whereas it generates lower political support when its recommendations are not adopted. This study presents novel insights into whether and when the use of minipublics may alleviate or aggravate political dissatisfaction among the public at large. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
The development of deliberative procedures raises a series of challenges for political parties. Despite the recent development of fruitful theoretical insights and empirical research, to date, the analytical dimensions have not been put together to facilitate the study of the interaction between parties and deliberation. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and proposes a framework that can explain why parties use deliberative democracy. It connects three bodies of literature: intra-party democracy, parliamentary activity, and connection with the citizenry. The article proposes an analytical framework that differentiates between issues (people and policies) and the goals (strategic objectives and normative goals). This framework brings relevant theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the broader field of the study.
Theoretically federations are meant to divide and decentralise power with sub-national governments that are closer to the people, which can better accommodate diversity with policies best suited to each community. However, such differences may be inequitable and counter-productive rivalries among multiple governments can emerge. Thus the relationship between federalism and democracy is neither clearly beneficial nor non-existent. If federalism does enhance representative democracy, then the process of federalisation should strengthen it, with the comparatively younger Belgian federation providing a valuable case to interrogate this premise. In recent decades Belgium has been transformed from a unitary state into an intricate asymmetrical federation where power is primarily shared between the Dutch and French language groups. Several new sub-state polities have been created and empowered and minorities have been guaranteed political representation, but arguably they are not as locally oriented as they could be, and the executives are relatively powerful. The process of federalisation has been most concerned with holding the country together than advancing principles of good governance either at the federal level or through maximising decentralisation. Yet the Belgian federation has succeeded in improving representation compared to the previous unitary state and maintaining peace.
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.
The key principles of democratic deliberation are the considered judgement and inclusion. However, research shows that not all categories are involved in this process. In particular, the groups that are under-represented in day-today politics are also less likely to make their voice heard in deliberation. So far, we know little about if and how deliberation fosters the involvement of under-represented groups. This symposium aims to address this gap in the literature and seeks to generate new ideas on the topic. It brings two contributions to the debate about the involvement of under-represented groups in deliberation: it identifies the means through which various deliberative practices can involve members of under-represented groups and explains how and why members of under-represented groups participate or refuse/are refused participation in deliberation.
Still Consociational? Belgian Democracy, 50 Years After ‘The Politics of Accommodation’
Despite the enduring importance of Lijphart’s work for understanding democracy in Belgium, the consociational model has come under increasing threat. Owing to deep political crises, decreasing levels of trust in elites, increasing levels of ethnic outbidding and rising demands for democratic reform, it seems as if Lijphart’s model is under siege. Even though the consociational solution proved to be very capable of transforming conflict into cooperation in Belgian politics in the past, the question we raise in this article is whether and to what extent the ‘politics of accommodation’ is still applicable to Belgian democracy. Based on an in-depth analysis of the four institutional (grand coalition, proportionality, mutual veto rights and segmental autonomy) and one cultural (public passivity) criteria, we argue that consociational democracy’s very nature and institutional set-up has largely hollowed out its potential for future conflict management.
Even though culture is seen as an important aspect of deliberation, empirical research on culture’s effects on deliberation is almost completely absent. This paper offers one of the first systematic empirical studies of cultural underpinnings on deliberation. It explores two conceptions of culture, namely ‘holistic’ vs. ‘contextual’. In the ‘holistic’ approach, culture is assumed to be a constant, while the ‘contextual’ approach assumes adaptive rationality of actors to different contexts. As an extension of the ‘contextual’ approach, this paper also explores the effects of different compositions of cultural groups on the quality of deliberation. The effects of the two approaches are evaluated by linking linguistic groups in the committee and plenary debates of the Swiss parliament to a broad variety of deliberative standards. The findings reveal that linguistic groups do not differ much in their deliberative behaviour, which defies ‘holistic’ approaches to culture. Rather, the results underline that speech culture is highly context-driven, which is indicative of a ‘contextual’ approach to culture. However, culture still plays a role, but mainly in the context of group composition: the proportion of minority-language speakers affects several deliberative indicators such as respect, common good orientation and clarifying questions.
This chapter takes three conceptions of deliberative democracy and lines them up against three conceptions of constitutions in order to make sense of what we mean when we say "constitutional deliberative democracy". It argues that only some of those intersections imply a direct role for citizen engagement, but it is those specific modes that democrats ought to celebrate, and that empirical scholars ought to focus attention on.
The idea of a hybrid bicameral system combining election and sortition is investigated. More precisely, the article imagines how an elected and a sortition chamber would interact, taking into account their public perception and their competing legitimacies. The article draws on a survey of a representative sample of the Belgian population and Belgian members of parliament assessing their views about sortition in political representation. Findings are combined with theoretical reflections on election’s and sortition’s respective sources of legitimacy. The possibility of conflicting legitimacies and mutually detrimental interactions leads to considerations of the effects of different possible distributions of power between the chambers as a crucial determinant of their interactions and perceived legitimacy.
Résumé
Il est un paradoxe démocratique régulièrement mis en avant : les peuples qui ne connaissent pas la démocratie l'appellent de leurs vœux, alors que, là où elle existe, la démocratie est fortement critiquée. Cela ne signifie pas que les citoyens qui vivent sous la démocratie veulent s'en débarrasser, mais que leur confiance dans le fonctionnement du système démocratique est fortement érodée. Cet article étudie le soutien démocratique en s'interrogeant sur sa mesure, à partir d'une enquête sur un échantillon représentatif de la population wallonne en Belgique. Pour ce faire, il compare deux méthodes de classification des citoyens : la méthode dite « a priori », classiquement utilisée dans la littérature, et une méthode dite « inductive », inspirée de la psychologie sociale. Trois profils, dont les contours varient partiellement selon la méthode, émergent –les « non-démocrates », les « démocrates satisfaits » et les « démocrates insatisfaits »– et sont analysés au travers de quatre approches théoriques : les ressources, la modernisation, l'idéologie et l'identification nationale.
Citizens increasingly obtained the opportunity of consultation and input during the constitutional reform. The variety of these consultation processes leads to several inter-connected question: How did these consultation processes work? What are the effects of these deliberative processes in comparative perspective? Do these effects match with findings on participatory innovations in general? This chapter seeks to provide some answers by embedding constitution reforms through popular involvement in the broader topic of democratic innovations. We start with a discussion of frameworks for the analysis and explain our decision to suggest a new framework. Then we comparatively evaluate the three case studies on constitutional deliberative procedures (Belgium, Iceland, Ireland) referring to input legitimacy, throughput legitimacy and output legitimacy. Finally, we embed the findings into the debate about the effects of democratic innovations in general.
Democratic deliberation is claimed to improve the legitimacy of democratic decision making. However, deliberation’s beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative innovations want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. In this paper, we set out to assess the input and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, and determine which are the favourable conditions for their legitimacy. Based on a comparison of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, the Belgian G1000, the Dutch Burgerforum, and the Irish We The Citizens, we argue that the institutional embeddedness of deliberative innovations strongly affect their claims to legitimacy, but also that their disruptive potential is unrelated to legitimacy.
Political disagreement is the basic democratic condition in most Western societies, and few will deny that a diversity of perspectives and opinions is the driving force behind any democracy. However, there is a point beyond which the diversity might become too great to allow for any meaningful public debate. When identities oppose and interests collide, democracies will have a hard time avoiding civil strife and political breakdown. This is often true in deeply divided societies, such as Belgium, where citizens and elites refuse to engage in a meaningful dialogue with members of the other side. ‘[S]uch societies’, Dryzek (2005, p. 230) contends, ‘are divided into blocs with dense within-bloc communication but little across-bloc communication’, and this leads more often than not to a situation where citizens and elites stand firm on their initial position even if it leads to a complete political and social deadlock (Caluwaerts, 2012).
Since 1993, Belgium is officially a federal state, composed of three communities and three regions, as the first-new at the time-article of the Constitution proclaims. The history of federalism in Belgium is therefore quite recent. Nevertheless, the story is-much-longer since it starts with the independence of Belgium from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830. The inception of a state and the underlying causes of its creation, as well as its place on the map, the timing of its creation and the characteristics of the elites who take the lead and define the new state's nature are of crucial importance and these elements shape the country's political development for centuries. Nonetheless, although the beginning of any state sets up a path of dependency, there are also critical junctures along its political development that in turn influences the course of history. This is especially true for Belgium. Here, history and politics are intrinsically interrelated. Indeed, the current challenges on the Belgian federalism find their roots in the country's history. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights are reserved.
The first comprehensive study of the implications of deliberative democracy for divided societies.
Though deliberative theory has a bias toward rigorous argument and democratic social relations, it presumes that an ideal discursive process otherwise has a neutral stance with respect to particular ideologies and cultural values. This essay provides a preliminary test of that assumption by examining attitude change across a wide range of Deliberation Polls held across the globe. We analyzed 65 questionnaire statements on which Poll participants significantly changed their views on a wide variety of issues. By coding each of these survey items on various value dimensions, we were able to look for any obvious patterns of attitude change. Despite its small size and the exclusion of items showing no attitude change, this sample showed that Poll respondents tend to move toward more cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and collectivist value orientations. Further analysis showed the strongest value-laden shifts were on empirical statements, with public opinion on such questions shifting moderately toward cosmopolitan and collectivist beliefs. The conclusion considers the implications of these findings for deliberative theory, research, and practice.
Discussion groups are a promising tool for bridging the divide between former conflict antagonists. However, such groups do not always produce the desired outcome of improved attitudes, even when they meet the conditions generally seen as favoring positive interaction. In this article, we examine specific discussion protocols that mitigate polarization risks while fostering reconciliation. Using a randomized, controlled design, we formed a pool of 429 ex-combatants and members of conflict-affected communities in Colombia. Participants were asked to join heterogeneous groups and discuss their proposals for the future of Colombia. Overall, community members improved their attitudes towards ex-combatants significantly, while ex-combatants’ attitudes toward community members do not tend to polarize. Those participants who were randomly assigned to a perspective-giving treatment protocol (where they were asked to refer to their personal experience and perspective) consistently improved their inter-group attitudes towards ex-combatants, and by a proportionally higher percentage than those taking part under argumentation and no-treatment control conditions.
Working paper version: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2613944
Belgian consociational federalism is often praised for its ability to deal peacefully with the country's internal divisions. Nevertheless, recent political stalemates raise the question: Is Belgian consociational federalism digging its own grave? This article argues that granting segmental autonomy effectively accommodates political conflicts that are currently on the agenda, but renders the process of intersegmental conflict accommodation increasingly more difficult in the long run. More specifically, federalism undermines the problem-solving capacity of the other power-sharing mechanisms in three ways: (1) it increases demands for more autonomy, (2) it decreases the potential for package deals and (3) it lowers the costs of non-agreements which induce a political stalemate. These evolutions are often overlooked, but go to the heart of the impasse Belgian politics has recently experienced.
Deliberative democracy is now an influential approach to the study of democracy and political behaviour. Its key proposition is that, in politics, it is not only power that counts, but good discussions and arguments too. This book examines the interplay between the normative and empirical aspects of the deliberative model of democracy. Jürg Steiner presents the main normative controversies in the literature on deliberation, including self-interest, civility and truthfulness. He then summarizes the empirical literature on deliberation and proposes methods by which the level of deliberation can be measured rather than just assumed. Steiner's empirical research is based in the work of various research groups, including experiments with ordinary citizens in the deeply divided societies of Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Belgium, as well as Finland and the European Union. Steiner draws normative implications from a combination of both normative controversies and empirical findings.
Governing divided Belgium is not an easy affair. Traditional tools of political research have provided insights about the dynamics of Belgian federalism but they have fallen short in exploring the territorial dimension of the conflict and its political representations within the population. Mental maps, scarcely used hitherto by political scientists, offer an innovative research tool to dig into territorial conflict dynamics since they aim at capturing the mental representation an individual has of a given object or space through the materialization of their representation with a drawing. This article discusses drawings of Belgium made by over 5000 first year higher education students in this country. The drawings confirm the importance of the two most prominent—and thus symbolic—elements of the territorial conflict in Belgium: the internal language border and the position of Brussels. In triangulation with responses to a questionnaire collected simultaneously, the analyses show that differences between the two language groups in Belgium are not very high, but that opposed visions on the country are reflected by those who exclusively identify themselves with Belgium or with Flanders. We state that if used with caution to ensure both internal and external validity, mental maps can prove to be an innovative but robust research tool for the study of territorial conflict broadly speaking. Because of their flexibility and their openness, mental maps capture the shortcuts citizens use to forge their political and territorial representation of their country.
Recent scholarship claims that citizen deliberation can contribute to the quality of democracy and to the legitimacy of political decision making. By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the values a polity should promote. However, if deliberative democracy wants to contribute to the legitimacy of the political system, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative processes have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this article, we set out to refine the theory on deliberative legitimacy and to determine the legitimacy of one particularly interesting deliberative event, namely the Belgian G1000. We will argue that it is very difficult for deliberative processes to be high on all dimensions of legitimacy and that there is a trade-off between input and output legitimacy. Moreover, we find that design characteristics to a large extent determine the legitimacy of deliberative processes.
Le Premier Ministre éventuellement excepté, le Conseil des Ministres compte autant de ministres d'expression française que d'expression néerlandaise. De Eerste Minister eventueel uitgezonderd, telt de Ministerraad evenveel Nederlandstalige als Franstalige ministers.
It is sometimes assumed that voting is the central mechanism for political decision-making. The contributors to this volume focus on an alternative mechanism, that is decision by discussion or deliberation. The original contributions include case studies based on historical and current instances of deliberative democracy, normative discussion of the merits of deliberation compared to other models of collective decision-making, and studies of the conditions under which it tends to improve the quality of decisions. This volume is characterized by a realistic approach to the issue of deliberative democracy. Rather than assuming that deliberative democracy is always ideal, the authors critically probe its limits and weaknesses as well as its strengths.
We lack systematic comparative analysis that helps us understand why some public authorities have chosen to promote participatory processes while others have not. Which contextual factors (if any) contribute to the development of participatory reforms? What is the role played by factors such as relative affluence, societal demand, intense electoral competition and national culture?
The analysis is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from Spanish and Italian municipalities.
The interpretation resulting from this analysis could be called “politics into resources”. That is, politics (political choices, conflicts and
priorities) and the resources it creates are more important than social and economic determinants in understanding participatory policies. The role of politics follows two stages. First, there is the immediate or short-term impact of political choices. Looking to reinforce political allies, to rebuild political identities or to express political priorities, some elected governments choose to use participatory processes. Secondly, these choices also have an effect in the medium-term: they
result in new resources, such as a participation plan, a participation department or devoting more local government personnel to participatory tasks. This set of resources becomes an asset for
future participatory opportunities, as well as a set of practices and expectations.
In practical terms, we could argue that context is not crucial. Choices matter more than contex and this is probably good news since it means that these processes can be developed in (almost?) any kind of municipality if there is the political will to do so.
What could deliberative politics offer a society that needs to strengthen its political regime and bring decades of violent confrontation to an end? By way of a preliminary answer, we argue that institutions and citizens that are more deliberative should reinforce each other, and reduce the impact of some of the factors that lead to violence. In this chapter, we first briefly outline the origins of the democracy deficit and the violence associated with the armed conflict, and also the current situation. The following two sections detail experiences of civic and institutional deliberation, and these provide an initial insight into what can generally be expected in terms of people’s behavior and disposition. Finally, we conclude with an idea of what a realistic deliberative democracy might look like in Colombia.
Des démocrates athéniens à Montesquieu, d'Aristote à Rousseau, personne ne songeait à faire de l'élection l'instrument démocratique par excellence. Démocratie n'équivalait alors pas à gouvernement représentatif, et c'est le tirage au sort qui paraissait le mieux apte à respecter l'égalité stricte des candidats. Que s'est-il donc passé au tournant du XVIIIe siècle, en Europe et aux États-Unis, pour que se renverse cette conception multiséculaire, et pour qu'advienne l'idée qu'une démocratie est, par essence, un gouvernement représentatif ? Ce livre, devenu un classique et augmenté d'une postface inédite de l'auteur, présente une théorie du gouvernement représentatif en s'attachant aussi bien à la tradition européenne qu'aux débats américains.
Post-conflict societies invariably experience great difficulty in making their new democratic power-sharing institutions work. In Northern Ireland, the system for power sharing prescribed in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has repeatedly broken down. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the system prescribed under the Dayton Accord of 1995 depends for its survival on the presence of a substantial international peacekeeping force. From Power Sharing to Democracy examines the theoretical underpinnings of power sharing as a means of achieving sustainable democratic governance. Contributors examine key areas, including Afghanistan, Cyprus, Kosovo, Macedonia, and South Africa, where power-sharing constitutions and political institutions have been employed or proposed. They provide an in-depth exploration of consociationalism, under which the previously warring ethnic communities are guaranteed a proportionate share of political offices and protection of their vital interests, and federalism, which provides for substantial territorial autonomy in cases where the communities are territorially segregated.
The European Union's motto ‘United in Diversity’ contrasts with the cultural standardization entailed in the formation of nation-states and the forging of political identities in Europe. So what does being ‘united in diversity’ mean? Focusing on language politics and policies, this book offers a thorough assessment of the implications of cultural and linguistic diversity for the process of constructing a European polity. It sheds light on some of the most pressing problems associated with contemporary identity politics. It is often claimed that the recurrent celebration of diversity in Europe's programmatic declarations has an effective political impact. Kraus offers a critical analysis of how the EU has responded to the normative challenge of creating an institutional frame for integration which allows cultural differences to be transcended without ignoring them.
Democracy harbors within it fundamental tensions between the ideal of giving everyone equal consideration and the reality of having to make legitimate, binding collective decisions. Democracies have granted political rights to more groups of people, but formal rights have not always guaranteed equal consideration or democratic legitimacy. It is Michael Morrell's argument in this book that empathy plays a crucial role in enabling democratic deliberation to function the way it should. Drawing on empirical studies of empathy, including his own, Morrell offers a "process model of empathy" that incorporates both affect and cognition. He shows how this model can help democratic theorists who emphasize the importance of deliberation answer their critics.
Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province’s electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitutionmaking and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens’ assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens’ assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice. © Cambridge University Press 2008 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This book attempts to solve two problems in deliberative democratic theory and practice: How can agreements reached inside deliberative forums be legitimate for those who did not take part? And why should people with strongly-held views participate in the first place? The solution involves rethinking deliberative theory, but also draws on lessons from practical experience with deliberative forums in Britain's National Health Service. The book discusses the competing representation claims that different participants make, the pros and cons of different approaches to democratic accountability, and different conceptions of rationality and public reasoning. It concludes by rejecting the idea that we can have authentic, legitimate deliberation in any one forum. Instead, authentic, legitimate deliberation can only result from linkages between different kinds of institutions, drawing on different kinds of participants, at different points of a decision-making cycle. That is, it promotes a macro, society-wide view of deliberative democracy quite different from the micro, deliberative-forum view which dominates thinking on the subject in the UK. The book sketches the outline of such a deliberative system, suggesting how various institutions in civil society and elected government might link together to create public decisions, which are both more rational and more democratic.
Three unprecedented large-scale democratic experiments have recently taken place. Citizen assemblies on electoral reform were conducted in British Columbia, the Netherlands, and Ontario. Groups of randomly selected citizens were asked to design the next electoral system. In each case, the participants spent almost an entire year learning about electoral systems, consulting the public, deliberating, debating, and ultimately deciding what specific institution should be adopted. In this book, these unique cases are used to examine claims about citizens' capacity for democratic deliberation and active engagement in policymaking. Empirical insight is offered to numerous debates: Are ordinary citizens able to decide about a complex issue? Are their decisions reasonable? Who takes part in such proceedings? Are they dominated by people dissatisfied by the status quo? Do some citizens play a more prominent role than others? Are decisions driven by the most vocal or most informed members? Did the participants decide by themselves? Were they influenced by staff, political parties, interest groups, or the public hearings? Does participation in a deliberative process foster citizenship? Did participants become more trusting, tolerant, open-minded, civic-minded, interested in politics, and active in politics? How do the other political actors react? Can the electorate accept policy proposals made by a group of ordinary citizens? The lessons drawn from this research are relevant for those interested in political participation, public opinion, deliberation, public policy, and democracy. © Patrick Fournier, Henk van der Kolk, R. Kenneth Carty, André Blais, and Jonathan Rose 2011. All rights reserved.
Recent experimental research suggests that ordinary citizens are capable of behaving in a democratic and deliberative way in controversial political debates, given the right instructions. In this study, we test the potential of such instructions in contexts where polarization, conflict and social marginalization levels are high. Using a randomized, controlled experimental design, we test the effect of encouraging members of marginalized and conflict-affected communities in Colombia to live up to the deliberative ideal, including free participation, respect, justification of arguments and orientation toward the common good. Results indicate that deliberative instructions have a positive effect on intervention levels, but fail to increase discourse quality. Moving beyond the experimental conditions, we find that socio-economic differences (especially education and gender), as well as inter-group trust and discussion dynamics, explain much of the variation in discourse quality. Promoting a deliberative democracy under unfavorable conditions might thus require a combination of short-term policy measures aimed at increasing communal trust, long-term efforts to improve schooling levels, and a proper institutional design that ensures constraint-free participation. However, there is no pill yet for deliberation.
Political parties are often thought of as unitary actors that have consistent preferences. This ‘hidden assumption’ means that heterogeneity within parties, and therefore intra-party dynamics, are overlooked in explaining attitudes. When it comes to devolution and federalisation, parties or MPs belonging to the same region are also often implicitly considered to have homogeneous viewpoints and attitudes. Relying on an original survey of MPs carried out during the Belgian political gridlock of 2010–2011, this article uncovers some of the key dimensions of the intra-party dynamics through analysis of MPs’ preferences towards institutional reform in Belgium. Far from being explained along party or community lines, our results demonstrate how MPs’ political and sociological background, national/regional identity, political career, and inter-community relations strongly shape their preferences.
The aim of this study is to provide The Power Inquiry with details and assessments of democratic innovations that might increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process. The study analyses fifty-seven different innovations – eleven of these are considered in more depth in case studies.
Abstract Deliberative democratic theory has moved beyond the “theoretical statement” stage and into the “working theory” stage. Although this essay revisits some of the main theoretical debates, this is done via a survey and evaluation of the state of deliberative democratic theory as it is being applied in a number of research areas and as it intersects with related normative debates. Five research areas are covered: public law, international relations, policy studies, empirical research, and identity politics.
Work in progress – Please do not cite The European Convention brought together representatives of 28 different state nationalities (from the current 15 member states and the 13 candidate states), along with delegations from the European Parliament and Commission. With its origins in the Laeken Declaration of December 2001 the Convention was mandated to, "consider the key issues arising for the Union's future development and to try to identify various possible responses". This was to be done "as broadly and openly as possible". Emphasis is given to a broadly based debate, involving all citizens, with mechanisms for civil society to provide input and for the Convention itself to facilitate debate through the provision of regular information on the Convention's proceedings. The Convention aimed to be an open, deliberative forum, which from an early stage sought to draft a Constitutional Treaty, a fitting response to the Laeken Declaration's statement that Europe is facing a defining moment in its existence. Drawing on the experience of the workings of the Convention of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms the Convention method was seen as a means of democratising and legitimising treaty reform in the EU by adding a more public component to the more secretive and closed IGC method. The framework for the Convention stressed openness, inclusiveness, deliberation, and communication. This paper seeks to assess how far these aims were met in terms of linguistic practices in the Convention and to determine whether any of these ideals were compromised by the language regime adopted, or by language practices that evolved during the 16 months of deliberation and debate.