Reconceptualizing and Improving Member Participation in Large Cooperatives: Insights from Deliberative Democracy and Deliberative Mini-Publics

Abstract

Member control is a central cooperative value that depends on members having sufficient opportunities to participate in decision-making. Most members of large cooperatives participate in decision-making through non-candidacy participation, which entails responsibilities including electing and monitoring their elected representatives and ratifying resolutions and reports. Non-candidacy participation is crucial to ensure that collective decisions and the conduct of representatives are aligned with the interests of the broader membership. However, prior research points to concerns about the level and quality of non-candidacy participation. In this essay, I draw on research on deliberative democracy to propose a novel solution to address these concerns. I begin by disentangling two commonly conflated forms of non-candidacy participation: aggregative and deliberative. I then argue that large cooperatives could improve both forms of participation through the targeted use of deliberative mini-publics. In doing so, I contribute to research on large cooperatives by advancing a novel solution to im-proving non-candidacy participation and cooperative governance more broadly, articulating a more fine-grained conception of participation to inform future research, and identifying a novel way of conceptualizing and enacting expertise in these organizations.