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A Civil democracy paper by Hanno Scholtz
Large Scale Democratic Policy Design
Breaking down policy creation
into decision sequences
using Civil democracy
Hanno Scholtz
hanno.scholtz@civil-democracy.org
Abstract: As societies face increasingly complex issues, the need for inclusive,
large-scale citizen participation even in the policy design stage becomes ever
more urgent, but contemporary participatory policy design is tied to non-scala-
ble deliberative mini-publics, leading to reduced input, throughput, and output
legitimacy through barriers to equitable participation, the degradation of delib-
eration quality in larger groups, and the absence of a strong democratic man-
date for decisions made by smaller bodies. As a way out, this paper explores op-
tions for scaling policy design to large populations. We disaggregate delibera-
tion into its components of decisions, decision options, rankings, and argu-
ments, argue for returning to quantifiable measurement, derive from political
practice at party conventions a structured policy design framework that breaks
policy design processes into manageable steps, and demand the use of digital
platforms for individualized trust storage, which allows citizens to delegate de-
cisions to trusted actors, especially civil society organizations, in decision se-
quences. This “Civil Democracy” model provides a scalable solution that pre-
serves inclusivity, transparency, and accountability. It enables broad citizen par-
ticipation without overwhelming individuals, providing a more effective frame-
work for addressing complex societal challenges through democratic means.
1 Introduction
Large scale democratic policy design is a special
form of participatory policy design, aimed to be
applicable to the democratic participation of
large populations.
Inspired by the principles of deliberative democ-
racy, where dialogue, inclusivity, and public rea-
soning are central to achieving legitimate and
effective policy outcomes (Pateman 1970;
Fishkin 1991; Habermas 1996; Dryzek 2000), par-
ticipatory policy design (Schneider and Ingram
1997; van Buuren et al. 2020) represents a signif-
icant shift in governance. Unlike traditional top-
down approaches, where policy decisions are of-
ten made by a select group of elected officials or
bureaucrats, participatory policy design seeks
to democratize this process by actively involving
those who are affected by these decisions,
through integrating public participation into the
stages of policy formulation, implementation,
and evaluation.
However, despite experience and literature grow-
ing, contemporary participatory policy design
shares one core problem of deliberative democ-
racy: Its problems to scale to larger populations
to be included in the participatory process – at a
time when the need to design better policies is
felt on national and even supra-national and
global levels (Howlett 2014; Leong et al. 2022;
Saguin and Howlett 2022). The current paper ex-
plores the radical stance to detach participatory
policy design from its entrenched mini-public
form, keeping the analytical structure of deliber-
ation but turning to procedures that are fully
scalable to the integration of whole populations,
yet giving individuals as many options to partic-
ipate into policy design processes as they ever
aim for.
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 2
2 Scaling deliberation as
key challenge in
participatory policy
design
2.1 Participatory policy design:
High hopes…
Participatory policy design holds the promise of
transforming governance by making it more
democratic, inclusive, and responsive. It is a part
of participatory democracy encouraging citi-
zens to take active roles in decisions that affect
their lives, which should result in more equitable
and just policies (Pateman 1970), and seen as
essential to to foster more reasoned and inclu-
sive decision-making (Dryzek 2000) and the
democratic renewal towards a more vibrant and
participatory society (Barber 1984). Participatory
policy design is thought to integrate diverse per-
spectives and knowledge, making policymaking
more responsive and inclusive. Participatory
mechanisms are expected to correct the biases
and limitations of traditional governance mod-
els by crosscutting traditional cleavages and
aiming for public involvement and communica-
tive rationality (Schneider and Ingram 1997). De-
sign thinking, in particular, is seen as a powerful
tool for scaling deliberation and improving the
inclusiveness of public policy processes
(McGann et al. 2018; Blomkamp 2018; van
Buuren et al. 2020). Such frameworks are seen to
allow for more flexible, iterative, and citizen-cen-
tered policymaking that adapts to complex soci-
etal challenges (Klinke 2014; Howlett 2014).
These hopes have been long-lived especially in
using participatory governance to promote so-
cial justice and representation (Gupte 2004; Fan
and Sung 2022), constituting a trend growing
over a long time. (Roberts 2004)
2.2 …and recent disillusionment
However, in the broader discussion, these hopes
have given way to a certain disillusionment.
There was always some theoretical scepticism
with regard to the possibility of including citi-
zens into policy design. Sceptics argued with
egoistic ignorance or incentives to free-ride on
others’ engagement (Downs 1957; Olson 1965) or
saw socioeconomic disparities bias deliberation
(Verba et al. 1995). Mass participation would
overwhelm deliberative processes, leading to
inefficiencies and diminished decision-making
quality. (Rossi 1997) This longstanding theoreti-
cal scepticism has been more recently met with
renewed scrutiny in examination of growing par-
ticipatory practices, which saw critique in all
three legitimacy component of input, output,
and ‘throughput’ (Papadopoulos and Warin
2007):
In the input legitimacy perspective, the alleged
inclusiveness and representativeness of the
participation process is reduced by different
barriers to participation (Abel and Stephan
2000), elite epistemologies (Hendriks 2009),
failure to ensure broad and equitable participa-
tion (Dendler 2022), especially underrepresenta-
tion of relevant groups and interests (Michels
and De Graaf 2010), and the inadequacy of public
consultations to effectively address complex
and polarized issues. (Frelih-Larsen et al. 2023)
Focusing on output, effectiveness, and imple-
mentation of the policy-making process, actual
outputs have been found to fail to meet effec-
tiveness and implementation success goals
through institutional barriers and practical dif-
ficulties (Hoppe 2011; Rask 2013), or conflicting
goals and approaches (Saguin and Cashore
2022), and not in relation to cost and time in-
vested. (Rossi 1997; Irvin and Stansbury 2004)
Even throughput legitimacy, referring to the
quality of the deliberation process itself the le-
gitimacy aspect in which deliberative processes
are expected to have the largest advantages, is
restricted internally through inadequate infra-
structures, insufficient resources, and the lack
of skills needed for effective deliberation (Rask
2013), and externally through an unclear posi-
tion in the policy making process (Hoppe 2011;
Dendler 2022; Jacquet and van der Does 2021)
This disillusionment needs to be seen in the
broader context of high hopes and recent sober-
ing with regards to deliberative democracy. De-
liberative democracy, with its emphasisis on
reasoned debate among citizens, hearing di-
verse perspectives and making decisions based
on the strength of arguments (Dryzek 2000;
Fishkin 2009), has long been lauded as a prom-
ising framework for enhancing public participa-
tion and legitimacy in decision-making.
Practically, deliberative processes are seen to
work only in small to mid-sized groups where
face-to-face interaction is possible (Farrell et al.
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 3
2019; Giraudet et al. 2022), and the idea of par-
ticipatory policy design has indeed become tied
especially to these so-called deliberative mini-
publics (Michels and De Graaf 2010, Jacquet and
van der Does 2021), Dendler 2022), Frelih-Larsen
et al. 2023) In this small-to-mid-scale version,
deliberative democracy has gained momentum
with a visible expansion and institutionalization
(Farrell et al. 2019; Giraudet et al. 2022; Macq and
Jacquet 2023; Boswell et al. 2023; Dienel et al.
2024).
However, as in the more specific policy design
discussion, deliberative democracy at large has
recently been diagnosed with several practical
limitations. For instance, the assumption that
participants’ motivations and opinions can be
significantly changed through deliberation does
not always hold true (Strandberg et al. 2021; Már
and Gastil 2023). As in the policy design process,
outputs of minipublics need to be mediated by
elected representatives, which can dilute or
transform the original deliberative intentions
(Junius 2023). These limitations have given rise
to a certain sobering (Vrydagh 2023; Macq and
Jacquet 2023). They suggest the need for inno-
vative approaches that can retain the strengths
of deliberation while overcoming its practical
constraints.
2.3 The question of scaling
We want to argue that all three problem dimen-
sions of participatory policy design discussed
above can be related to the failure to scale delib-
eration to fully inclusive processes involving
whole populations into making binding deci-
sions.
This failure to scale hampers the input legiti-
macy of participatory policy design through the
trade-off between representation and barriers to
participation. Deliberate oversampling hampers
input legitimacy through biased representation,
while the lack of it may exclude minority per-
spectives from participation (Junius 2023;
Vrydagh 2023; Luskin et al. 2022).
The necessary small sizes of deliberative groups
hamper throughput legitimacy through a lack
of clarity about the relative weigth and im-
portance of arguments (Boker 2017; Luskin et al.
2022), and the reliance of information provided
by administrative support creates the consider-
ation that arguments available in the larger
population may not have found their way into
the negotiations (Gunn 2017; Vrydagh 2023)
And, probably the largest problem of participa-
tory policy design in the mini-publics form, poli-
cies found do not have a democratic mandate on
their own, giving them a diminished weight in
the political process and bringing the whole pro-
cess in the danger of tokenism and façade delib-
eration, thus damaging output legitimacy. and
the ability to make a difference at all in facing
bureaucratic administrations. (Boker 2017;
Drake 2021; Lewis 2021; Junius 2023; Vrydagh
2023).
Based on this view, we ask whether it may be
possible to make the central components of de-
liberative participatory policy design available
to interactions not confined to physical face-to-
face interactions, but scalable to whole popula-
tions up to national and supra-national levels.
On lower levels of amibition, this question has
already attracted some attention (see, e.g.,
Aichholzer and Strauss 2016; Velikanov and
Prosser 2017; Itten and Mouter 2022; Coelho et al.
2022; Shin et al. 2024). However, none of the at-
tempts so far has combined three things that we
see as necessary for a successful scaling of de-
liberation for participatory policy design: (1)
Building on a systematic understanding of de-
liberation, and, within it, (2) on a systematic un-
derstanding of policy design, and (3) addressing
the participation obstacle of rational ignorance
and what we will call ‘cognitemporal scarcity’. In
the systematic of participatory policymaking
(Blomkamp 2022): To include whole populations
(Who) on large sub-national, national, and su-
pranational levels (Where), we structure policy
design as a sequence of decisions (How) and ap-
ply specific tools to be described (What).
3 Discussion: Scaling
deliberation
3.1 Scalable information retrieval
Deliberation is a “thick” process that, in order to
allow for scaling, has to be “thinned” out appro-
priately, concentrating on central and abstract-
ing from less relevant aspects. There are differ-
ent ways to do so (for differing approaches see,
e.g., Hangartner et al. 2007; Bächtiger and
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 4
Hangartner 2010), but we start from seeing de-
liberation as part of the political process and
hence of making collectively binding decisions
(Easton 1965), based on in the individual agency
and responsibility of individual decisions.
Making collective decisions implies to have de-
cision options and to single out one (or, in some
cases, some) of these options as the base for
collective action, in the form of a final collective
ranking of these options. In order to arrive at
such a final collective ranking, participants ex-
change utterances which mainly consist of
three types: Adding new options, communi-
cating their individual rankings among the ex-
isting options, and providing arguments for
such rankings. Deliberation assumes that par-
ticipants are aware of initially incomplete infor-
mation and take the “better argument” (Haber-
mas 1984) as an updating of their information
that can contribute to influencing their individ-
ual ranking of the available options. Deliberation
is insofar a process of information retrieval and
information exchange that can as such be
scaled through standardization.
Deliberative mini-publics are information rich
among few participants because every partici-
pant frames the information they provide in
their own way, in framing decisions, presenting
decision options, ranking these decision op-
tions, and providing arguments for specific
rankings. To scale deliberation, it is necessary to
codify the four elements. That is the equivalent
of changing from a qualitative interview to a
structured survey, a problem discussed in social
science methodologies (Creswell and Creswell
2018). The general problem in switching from a
hermeneutical to a quantifiable information
generation is always the adequacy of framed
categories presented, which directly relates to
the deliberative ideal: How can one make sure
that individuals feel cognitively represented by
the items provided to them? The immediate way
to do so is to allow them to choose. To stay with
the deliberative ideal requires to give each par-
ticipant the opportunity to add their own input
in all four categories of decisions, decision op-
tions, rankings, and arguments, and to subsume
to already-given categories only if they see them
as fitting themselves. These inputs are the ex-
pressions of individual agency and responsibil-
ity on which collectively binding decisions can
be based.
3.2 Scalable policy design:
Adapting insights from
traditional medium-level
experience
This systematic of decisions made based on op-
tions, rankings, and arguments can be used for
policy design, too. Policy design can be broken
down into a series of decisions. That can be
studied in the practice of traditional democracy
on party conferences and conventions. Here, me-
dium-level numbers of individuals are at times
included in policy design processes. Such con-
ferences and conventions individuals ranging
up to several thousand voting members in the
U.S. National Conventions, up from some hun-
dred members in national party conventions in
smaller societies as the Nordic countries, and
lower numbers on subnational levels. Policy for-
mation is part of their function, although that
function that has been challenged for long
(Kirchheimer 1966; Gauja and Haute 2015;
Wuttke et al. 2019; Deseriis 2020; Scarrow et al.
2022)
The policy design part is very under-researched
(even Braunthal 1977 and Faucher-King 2005
mention it only in passing), but participant ob-
servation gives insights in how positions got
democratically developed on delegates’ confer-
ences. Observation took place in the German
SPD in the 1990s, where procedures have
changes since (Grabow 2001; Michels and
Borucki 2021), but while the process described
here has lost in importance, it presents a way
how numbers beyond the size of regular deliber-
ative mini-publics are included into more formal
policy design processes that can serve as a
starting point.
All such negotiations begin with deciding about
an agenda or decision schedule. Within the sin-
gle topics in such a schedule, discussions gen-
erally start with a baseline text either been writ-
ten by one or (more rarely) several authors ap-
pointed to do so by the respective board or by a
group of delegates outside the established elites
that had been able to get the conference to vote
to discuss an own proposal.
Based on this baseline text, delegates could
make proposals for text changes. These pro-
posals were debated per proposal, and decided
about by vote, and after all individual changes
the resulting text was finally decided about – not
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 5
a trivial last step, as it sometimes happened
that different change proposals had alienated
specific groups so much that their combined re-
fusal bunked the complete text in the final vote.
The process of deciding about text changes is al-
ways a demanding and intense process made in
a continuous time window that contributes a lot
to creates a sense of community among party
delegates.
In its initial parts, this process reflects a tradi-
tional top-down approach inconsistent with the
power of democracy to motivate large groups to
contribute ideas to collective processes. It is,
however, a useful starting point.
Additional to the initial step of deciding on a de-
cision sequence, we can distill from this process
the three steps of deciding about drafts,
changes, and final texts. Per developing a posi-
tion, deciding about draft and final text are each
one single decision while there may be many de-
manded changes.
In the context of an evolving movement that
aims to base its decisions as much as possible
on general participation, these four steps have
to be augmented by four plus two others:
First, in the growth process it may be helpful
to ask, not so much in making a fixed deci-
sion but to sample ideas for extending the
network, possible open actors who would be
able to add expertise to the proposal to be de-
veloped.
Second, defining goals before deciding about
the ways to reach them has a number of ad-
vantages, just to mention as: (1) Transpar-
ency and clarity of purpose, (2) alignment of
efforts, (3) measures for objectives and re-
source allocation, (4) stakeholder buy-in, and
(5) base for accountability and evaluation.
Third, it may be useful to decide on a com-
mon ground of information. Despite every-
one having their own sources of information,
deciding to develop an authoritative reading
list prior to a policy development process is a
helpful step to avoid separated echo cham-
bers. (In cases of policy fields clearly defined
from the outset, that may take place before
goal definition.)
Fourth, prior to writing drafts, an idea gener-
ation process should take place to gather
creative inputs into draft text versions. Ideas
play a pivotal role in motivating collective
action (Bradford 2016)
These eight steps create a democratic process of
developing positions together. To broaden the
applicability of the scheme to fit not only top-
down initiatives but also social movements
growing from initially small numbers to aiming
for larger political relevance, they have to be
supplemented in two ways:
It may be helpful to have executive persons
or teams defined for specific tasks, both
within the process (for example, gathering in-
formation or writing a draft) and for monitor-
ing and reporting what happens after a final
decision.
On the other hand, growth processes in
movements from initially small numbers in-
volve that decisions made once will have to
be reconsidered once the movement has
grown far beyond the number at the time of
the initial decision. Earlier decisions are not
rendered useless, as they set agenda and
tone for further steps. But as a movement of
some thousands cannot fully anticipate po-
sitions to be developed among millions and
among hundreds of millions, iterations of
decisions will be necessary.
3.3 Coping with cognitemporal
scarcity
Retrieving options, rankings, and arguments for
the ten steps of the policy design scheme de-
scribed above would technically be feasible – if
participants had infinite time and infinite un-
derstanding of the options, rankings, and argu-
ments provided by others, which is obviously not
the case. Anthony Downs coined the famous “ra-
tional ignorance” argument as base of political
representation: People may want to participate,
but surely not all people in every question. But at
the same time, people do not want to be ignored
in the questions on which they do not invest in
forming or inputting an opinion. (Downs 1957) To
work, scaled deliberation must cope with this
tension between the goal to be part of the final
decision made and the temporal and cognitive
human capacity constraints of actual participa-
tion – I coined the neologism “cognitemporal” to
put both under a common bracket.
We have become used to cognitemporal things
beyond human capacity being done by
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 6
computers in many areas of our life. But apply-
ing that in the context of political decision-mak-
ing would exclude the element of individual
agency and responsibility, which excludes this
way to reduce complexity.
A first step to do so is to reduce the number of
dimensions by two: (A) Deciding on how deci-
sions are selected and framed is just another
form of decisions. At every meeting, the first par-
ticipants do is to agree on their agenda. Deliber-
ative standards demand that this is done with
considerable discussion, but technically, it still
does only add a number of other items to the
agenda, not a completely new dimension. (B)
Rankings are inputs to the system, not, or more
precisely almost not, things participants have to
bother with. The “almost” refers to the fact that
participants may want to know how others have
ranked options, both in the aggregate, to know
which options are likely to win, but also more
specifically with regard to specific other partici-
pants. But no one is required to observe the
rankings of others.
The human demand to look upon others does,
however, already hint to how the complexity of
the remaining two dimensions of options and
arguments can be reduced: By trusting others. In
order to solve the scaling problem without over-
whelming participants, we need to include as-
pects of representation. Representation allows
to create indirect individual option rankings. If
there are political actors an individual trusts
and the counting system knows both trust rela-
tionships and the option rankings of the trusted
actors, indirect individual option rankings can
be formed – in case of only one trusted actor, as
identity with their rankings, in the case of more
than one trusted actor, as average of the rank-
ings. Doing so requires individualized trust stor-
age: to enter (from the individual side) and store
(on the side of the system) trust relationships in
an individualized trust storage system.
Representative democracy was built on trust
storage in the collective, easing voters’ lives by
reducing the complexity of all decisions to be
made and arguments to be considered into stor-
ing trust into one vote on the ballot. The deliber-
ative critique began in the 1980s because earlier
representative democracy understood itself and
was widely seen as a government “by the peo-
ple” because voters were understood to give
clear mandates to elected politicians, based on
the option rankings and arguments these politi-
cians communicated prior to the elections, and
based on the homogeneity of classes and geo-
graphical entities prior to the social processes
of individualization, mediatiation, and globali-
zation since (Scholtz 2024).
Turning from collective to individualized trust
storage using digital technologies allows for
some important differences that bring such a
system of scaled deliberation a long way from
scalable but overly thin traditional democracy
towards to the information-richness of unscala-
ble mini-public deliberations:
Combining individualized trust storage with de-
manding political actors to disclose their option
rankings allows to calculate indirect individual
option rankings based on trusted actors as
proxies for their own ranking decisions. Political
actors have the knowledge, the resources, and
the motivation to rank available options. We
speak in the following of ‘open actors’ to de-
scribe actors who disclose rankings of decision
options to attract trust for the function of deci-
sion support and representation. That does not
only allow for the basic function of representa-
tion, using the indirect option ranking as repre-
sentation for the individual’s position, but also
for what one may call meta-decision freedom
and decision ease: On the one hand, the freedom
of the meta-decision whether to be represented
by the indirect ranking created by trusted open
actors or reconsidering it and independently
creating an own direct ranking, considering ar-
guments provided. Stored trust eases to judge
which arguments are more important than oth-
ers. More important, stored trust eases the op-
tion evaluation especially in complex situations
with many available options. Such direct partic-
ipation taps into the agency and argument con-
sideration of direct-democratic participation
whenever the resources allow it, while for all
other cases creates an individualized represen-
tation.
Individualized trust storage system allows vot-
ers to enter trust in as many open actors they
know and trust, and it allows open actors to ab-
stain from decisions, in turn allowing them to fo-
cus on decisions that fit their specific expertise
and profile. This allows for an actor openness,
an openness for all open actors, regardless how
few questions they may be engaged in. It allows
individuals as open actors. Many voters are
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 7
eager to do that, serving as open actors for their
immediate social network. For larger audiences,
individual politicans do the same. It does espe-
cially draw into democratic responsibility the
specialized advocacy organizations of civil soci-
ety. Their limited scope allows them to keep a
clear and largely unambiguous profile, resulting
in high value-based trust today (Chapman et al.
2021). So far, specialized advocacy organizations
have not been included in formal decision mak-
ing and political responsibility.
With actor-openness and meta-decision free-
dom, an individualized trust storage system al-
lows for deliberative democracy on scale to cre-
ate the motivation and information needed for
coordinating, implementing, and upgrading pol-
icies to combat climate change and more gener-
ally environmental destruction. As the term de-
liberative democracy is so much identified with
unscalable mini-publics and past political sys-
tems have been described based on the actors
they assign responsibility to, it has been seen as
more appropriate to descibe such a system, for
assigning responsibility to citizens and civil so-
ciety, as a “Civil democracy”. (Scholtz 2024; for a
platform with a workable demo-model, see
https://civil-democracy.org)
4 New Recommendations
To enhance citizen participation through large-
scale democratic policy design, we recommend
to address several key areas:
1. Structured Policy Design: The policy design
process can be broken into manageable, clearly
defined steps. This involves starting with deci-
sion schedules, followed by network expansion,
goal definition, information gathering, and
drafting, ultimately leading to changes, final
texts, and iterations as required. Ensuring that
these steps are transparent and inclusive will
enhance legitimacy and effectiveness.
2. Scalability of Deliberation: The challenge of
scaling deliberative processes beyond small or
mid-sized groups must be tackled by adopting a
systematic approach to information exchange.
Standardizing decision-making processes and
codifying the decision options, rankings, and ar-
guments will enable broader participation. It is
essential to maintain the opportunity for indi-
viduals to input their perspectives while
providing predefined categories to streamline
deliberation.
3. Integration of Digital Tools to Mitigate Cog-
nitive and Temporal Constraints: To address
the limits of participants' time and cognitive re-
sources, digital platforms need to be applied to
integrate representation mechanisms that sim-
plify decision-making through individualized
trust storage is necessary. These allow citizens
to delegate decisions to trusted actors (e.g., ex-
perts or advocacy groups), bridging the gap be-
tween scalability and meaningful participation.
Such tools should enable users to either defer to
trusted actors or engage directly in the decision-
making process when they have the time and in-
terest.
By focusing on these areas, participatory policy
design can move closer to realizing its potential
in large-scale democratic processes. The inte-
gration of digital platforms, structured delibera-
tion, and mechanisms to manage cognitive and
temporal limitations will help overcome the cur-
rent disillusionment with participatory govern-
ance and provide a more inclusive, effective
model for policy design.
5 Conclusion
This paper explored the challenges and potential
of large-scale democratic policy design, offering
a way to overcome the limitations of traditional
deliberative models. The promise of participa-
tory policy design lies in its ability to democra-
tize governance by involving citizens in the deci-
sion-making process. However, the inability to
usefully scale such processes to large popula-
tions presents significant hurdles. Traditional
deliberation models tend to work only in small
groups, becoming unwieldy and inefficient when
expanded to larger populations. But the neces-
sity of smallness compromises input, through-
put, and output legitimacy and has led to disil-
lusionment with participatory policy design.
Against this backdrop, this paper argues that
scaling deliberation is both necessary and
achievable. Through structured decision-mak-
ing sequences, codified information exchange,
and the integration of digital tools, the chal-
lenges of scaling participatory policy design can
be addressed.
Scholtz: Large Scale Democratic Participatory Policy Design 8
The proposed model introduces critical innova-
tions, breaking policy design into clearly defined
steps—such as decision scheduling, network ex-
pansion, and idea generation—the process be-
comes more transparent, inclusive, and man-
ageable at scale. Central, however, is the usage
of digital individualized trust storage, which al-
lows citizens to delegate decisions to trusted ac-
tors while preserving their agency. This ap-
proach mitigates cognitive and temporal limita-
tions while enhancing the legitimacy of deci-
sion-making processes by enabling broader and
more meaningful participation.
Ultimately, the key to successful large-scale par-
ticipatory policy design lies in balancing inclu-
sivity with practicality. By leveraging digital
platforms, structured deliberation, reduced cog-
nitive load through individualized representa-
tion, and maintaining the flexibility for citizens
to engage meaningfully when they choose, this
model offers a pathway to more democratic, re-
sponsive governance. The vision of “Civil Democ-
racy” presented here provides a framework for
ensuring that large populations can be genu-
inely included in policy-making, paving the way
for a more engaged and empowered citizenry in
addressing today’s complex societal challenges.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Scaling deliberation as key challenge in
participatory policy design
2.1 Participatory policy design: High
hopes…
2.2 …and recent disillusionment
2.3 The question of scaling
3 Discussion: Scaling deliberation
3.1 Scalable information retrieval
3.2 Scalable policy design: Adapting
insights from traditional medium-level
experience
3.3 Coping with cognitemporal scarcity
4 New Recommendations
5 Conclusion
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