In most of the world, democracy involves voting every few years, with little participation outside of elections. In light of new challenges to democracy and government effectiveness, citizens assemblies or “minipublics” – where members are selected randomly by lot – have emerged as a potential alternative to current democratic institutions. In new research, Saskia Goldberg, Marina Lindell and André Bächtiger look at citizens‘ attitudes towards “lottocracy”, finding that people do not want to replace representative democracy, but may wish to see smart combinations of electoral institutions and minipublics like citizens’ assemblies. 

A “deliberative wave” is sweeping the globe. An increasing number of citizen assemblies, which are also known as deliberative minipublics – consisting of citizens randomly selected by the lot like in Ancient Athens and in jury duty today- provide considered and reasoned input into pressing policy issues ranging from climate change to disinformation and local planning projects. Since current representative systems are confronted with a wave of citizen disaffection and are failing to solve existential policy problems such as climate change, minipublic advocates argue that citizens might be better and more trusted decisionmakers than elected representatives. Therefore, they call for a bigger role and a stronger empowerment of minipublics. As Claudia Chwalisz, the founder of DemocracyNext (an organization promoting the use minipublics worldwide, has put it:

“While citizens’ assemblies today are largely advisory and complementary to our existing electoral institutions, it is not impossible to imagine a future where binding powers shift to these institutions—or where they perhaps even replace established governing bodies in the longer term”.

But such calls for minipublic empowerment have met with staunch criticism from some political philosophers. In their new book The Lottocratic Mentality, Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati argue that the very large bulk of citizens who cannot participate in a minipublic – a constitutive feature of any institution based on random selection (known as “lottocratic”) – cannot expect that their deliberating fellow citizens share their policy views and visions. If minipublics were allowed to making binding decisions for the citizenry, then non-participating citizens would “blindly” defer to their deliberating fellow citizens who may not think like them, especially when the latter have transformed their minds.

But how do citizens see the role of minipublics in democratic systems? Big or small, empowered or just advisory?

In new research, we analyze citizen support for minipublics and their design features in three different country contexts, the United States, Ireland and Finland. In a nutshell, we find a stark reluctance of citizens in all three countries to grant minipublics empowerment and autonomy. But we also find important nuances: concrete experience with and trust in minipublics makes citizens more open to minipublic empowerment and autonomy.

A look into the crystal ball and comparative perspectives 

To date, empirical research on citizens’ views of minipublics has been sparse, scattered and limited to specific country contexts. Some studies found that citizens have some sympathy for minipublics, whereas others found that citizens are reluctant to give minipublics strong empowerment as well as ask for additional provisions such as large size or clear majorities for recommendations. Besides, existing empirical findings might also be fraught with a “conservative” bias. Minipublic activists correctly argue that research has exclusively focused on those citizens who know nothing about minipublics and have never had concrete experiences with them. But had citizens participated in minipublics and learned how well they function in practice – so the advocates´ argument – then they would be much more open to a bigger and more empowered role of minipublics in politics.

We tried to overcome these deficiencies by taking a crystal ball view, exploring how citizens who have had concrete experiences with minipublics think about the latter´s empowerment and autonomy. Moreover, we also took a broader and comparative perspective, focusing on citizens´ perceptions of minipublics in three countries: the United States, representing a polarized political system with low levels of political trust; Ireland, a country with a lot of minipublic experience; and Finland representing a high trust society.

Citizens think minipublics can be useful – but only alongside existing institutions

Using both survey data and scenario experiments with large representative samples in the three countries, we first find that citizens indeed view minipublics as attractive institutional innovations but at the same time want them to be advisory only as well as tightly coupled with representative institutions. It is intriguing that these results are identical in three different country contexts; especially in Ireland with a lot of minipublic events we would have expected a stronger preference for minipublics making binding decisions.

“Presenting an outline: layers of the Cit” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by nhscitizen

The seemingly contradictory finding – attraction for minipublics but simultaneous reluctance for empowerment and autonomy – can be explained by innovation theories. Innovation theorists argue that adoption and resistance tendencies may simultaneously exist in peoples´ minds. It is a bit like electric cars ten years ago: you might have liked the idea of having an electric car for ecological reasons but then ask how far you can travel with it or where you can recharge the batteries. This makes you reluctant to buy an electric car even if you like its concept. At the same time, innovation theories also predict that the more experience you have with an innovation, and the more you trust it to serve you well, increases your willingness to adopt it.

Indeed, looking into the crystal ball, we find that familiarity and especially actual participation in minipublics produce more support for them to make binding decisions and acting autonomously. This is also true for people who have trust in other citizens as political decision-makers as well as low trust in politics and political institutions and low democratic satisfaction. Yet this does not imply that such citizens are in favor of empowered and autonomous minipublics; rather, our results indicate that they are just more open to this. At the end of the day, even those citizens who have participated in minipublics and trust other citizens to be good policymakers do not prefer empowered minipublics over advisory ones.

Lessons for institutional reform 

These findings carry some important – albeit ambivalent – lessons for institutional reformers and designers. One possible take from our results is that – in line with lottocratic critics such as Lafont and Urbinati – there is no clear citizen demand for a bigger and more empowered role for minipublics in the makeup of current and future democracies. Minipublics may have advisory functions for politics and the broader public, such as anticipating public opinion or checking against political capture; but there is no empirical support for radical proposals to replace existing institutions with minipublics.

A different reading of our results starts from the finding that familiarity and experience with minipublics makes citizens more open to empowerment and autonomy – which might signal an openness for a new complementary role of minipublics, especially when the latter become more widely-used. While this may not imply a desire to replace legacy institutions, it may imply a desire for new forms of co-existence where minipublics are “blended” with representative institutions in smart ways. The political philosopher Arash Abizadeh has proposed hybrid forms of bicameralism, combining partisan and chambers selected by lot. He argues that the two might complement each other: “elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition [selection by lot] is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable.”

What might sound like utopian design thinking is already an institutional reality. In Ostbelgien and Paris, the representative system was complemented with permanent citizen assemblies. Even though these assemblies only have purely advisory functions at the moment, it seems that we are entering an age of “differentiated” lottocracy where lottocratic elements are combined with electoral institutions. Not to replace the existing representative system and not as a copy-paste of Ancient Athens, but to enrich legacy institutions with a stronger citizen voice. As our work shows, this is what citizens who have made experiences with minipublics and are disaffected with the functioning of representative democracy seem to want from future democratic governance.

• This article is based on the paper “Empowered Minipublics for Democratic Renewal? Evidence from Three Conjoint Experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland” in American Political Science Review.
• Subscribe to LSE USAPP’s email newsletter to receive a weekly article roundup.
• Please read our comments policy before commenting. 
• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.