Abstract
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’.
Highlights
Under what conditions can deliberative minipublics empower the macro-public of citzens? This is one of the issues that political theorist Cristina Lafont tackles in her book Democracy Without Shortcuts
Political theorists such as Lafont, Marit Hammond, Simone Chambers and John Parkinson prefer a participatory conception of deliberative democracy which eschews the minipublic shortcut, and instead emphasises the transformation of actual public opinion as a non-negotiable prerequisite for democratic self-government (Chambers 2009; Hammond 2019; Lafont 2019; Parkinson 2006)
These are all important questions and we have learned much over the years from the empirical experimentation with different institutional set-ups. These types of questions form only half the picture. They should be complemented by a ‘demand-driven approach’ to deliberative minipublics (Felicetti & della Porte 2019: 146), which extends the focus from the micro-deliberative specifics of this or that proposal to include the study of the macro-deliberative politics necessary to see these proposals realised in practice
Summary
This article shows how the principles of participatory deliberative democracy can serve as a guide for the institutional design of minipublics, while 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.
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