Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship?

Abstract

Democracy asks its citizens to make informed judgments about collective matters. Given the scale and complexity of modern polities, however, even the most attentive citizens cannot engage knowledgeably with most of the collective decisions that affect them. For this reason, democratic theorists increasingly conceptualize democratic systems as requiring divisions of cognitive labor, in which citizens trust others to make decisions on their behalf. Modern democracies have long relied on such trustees, yet institutional supports for good trust decisions by citizens are often weak or missing. We argue that deliberative minipublics can serve as trusted information proxies that help citizens make the most of their scarce cognitive resources. These kinds of trustees cannot close the gap between the demands of complex societies and citizens’ capacities for informed judgment, but they may be able to narrow it.