DUBLIN — Put 100 ordinary citizens in a room and together they will solve the most intractable political problems of our time and save democracy in the process. If only things were so simple.
Citizens’ assemblies, in which ordinary people are entrusted to carefully consider evidence on an issue and deliver policy recommendations, are the flavor of the month among political geeks across the world.
Rory Stewart, one of the Tories vying to be the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, is proposing one to solve Brexit. President Emmanuel Macron has promised a grand débat national to involve the public directly in his efforts to reform France through citizens’ assemblies, online consultations and local meetups. The parliament of Belgium’s German-speaking community has set up a structure to include citizens’ assemblies in its decision-making on a permanent basis. Similar efforts are popping up everywhere from Sydney to Madrid to Gdańsk.
The enthusiasm is the largely the result of the model’s widely publicized success in Ireland in helping achieve breakthroughs in legalizing abortion and gay marriage. The political scientists who designed the process are being flown all over the world to share their experience.
The legitimacy of citizens’ assemblies rests on the idea that a small group of citizens randomly selected to reflect the age, education level, wealth and gender makeup of the general population does indeed represent the public as a whole
“I’m like a mad fly at present,” said University College Dublin politics professor David Farrell, one of the small group of academics who successfully lobbied the Irish government to adopt citizens’ assemblies.
“There’s no end of countries, it’s almost daily we’re getting emails or contacts from people from Latin America, Australia, North America, all across Europe,” he added.
Behind the headlines and widespread enthusiasm, however, lies a more complicated story that suggests citizens’ assemblies are no simple panacea, but a complex and limited democratic tool that can be used well — or badly.
The Irish case
The momentum behind citizens’ assemblies in Ireland was in large part driven by the profound economic crisis that brought the country to its knees a decade ago.
Many thought the political system had failed. In response, Farrell and other political scientists founded We the Citizens, a civil group that promoted deliberative democracy, ran a test-case citizens’ assembly and used it to convince politicians to commit to bringing the public directly into the political process.
We don’t want it to be that it’s just the usual suspects who take part in all the other aspects of the political process who turn up and have a very nice deliberative time.” — Will Jennings, Southampton University professor
The group’s first experiment was the Constitutional Convention in 2012, when 33 politicians and 66 citizens were charged with recommending how to overhaul Ireland’s constitution. Then came the Citizens’ Assembly: Ninety-nine citizens asked to deliberate on the conundrums of abortion, fixed-term parliaments, referendums, population aging and climate change.
Both experiments had striking successes. The Constitutional Convention recommended legalizing gay marriage, which was introduced by public referendum in 2015 in a world first. In 2017, the Citizens’ Assembly recommended ending a constitutional ban on abortion and allowing terminations without restriction until up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. This too is now law.
The full story is more mixed. Legalizing gay marriage was just one of nine reports the Constitutional Convention delivered to the government. Its other recommendations have had lesser amounts of luck: A proposal to lower the voting age to 16 was nixed by the government; removing a constitutional reference to “women’s place in the home” is stuck in legislative quagmire; and a call to reduce the minimum age of presidential candidates was rejected by the public.
Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, meanwhile, is synonymous with its work on abortion. Less well known is the fact that it examined a portfolio of issues, including voting reform and climate change. Many of its recommendations on these have gone nowhere yet.
These mixed results illustrate a number of limitations and perils inherent in deliberative democracy, and throw up a set of important questions about how these assemblies work. Who sets the topics to be discussed, and how? What experts are picked to speak to the group? What ensures the ultimate recommendations are put into effect?
Limitations
The legitimacy of citizens’ assemblies rests on the idea that a small group of citizens randomly selected to reflect the age, education level, wealth and gender makeup of the general population does indeed represent the public as a whole. But do they?
The members of Ireland’s assemblies were unpaid, and had to dedicate 10 weekends (in the case of the Constitutional Convention), or 12 weekends over 18 months (in the case of the Citizens’ Assembly) to the exercise, not including significant reading requirements during the week.
This time commitment excluded people who work weekends or have care responsibilities, and tends to filter out all but those with an unusually high sense of civic duty or who are already politically engaged.
It can also be expensive. Although travel was covered, the Constitutional Convention did not offer reimbursement for child care costs, and so it struggled to retain women aged between 25 and 40.
If it is ultimately up to the government to choose whether or not to follow their recommendations, are they wasting their time?
Both assemblies also suffered straightforward recruitment flaws: The “random” selection for the Constitutional Convention managed to pick a husband and wife and two next-door neighbors; and seven members had to be removed from the Citizens’ Assembly as it was discovered they were not randomly recruited.
The Citizens’ Assembly also suffered from a retention problem, according to Farrell. Just 61 members out of 99 saw out the full 18-month deliberations, with only 26 attending every meeting.
More funding to pay participants could help. “It’s one of the really big concerns,” said Will Jennings, a Southampton University professor who has designed similar assemblies in the U.K. “We don’t want it to be that it’s just the usual suspects who take part in all the other aspects of the political process who turn up and have a very nice deliberative time.”
What works
The biggest question, for people involved in designing and participating in these assemblies, is what kind of power they have. If it is ultimately up to the government to choose whether or not to follow their recommendations, are they wasting their time?
In Ireland, a particular set of circumstances helped the assemblies achieve the change they did. It helped that the initiative had cross-party support, that the proceedings were live-streamed and that materials were made available to the public, with rolling news coverage helping broaden out the proceedings into a national debate. It was essential, too, that it was set out in advance what the next steps would be, and that the government had agreed to respond.
But ultimately — and particularly in the case of abortion — the citizens’ assembly worked because it suited politicians. They could delay action on the issue, and outsource to an unelected body a decision they knew would have alienated a segment of their voters either way. Those who did not like its conclusions could, and did, dismiss the process as illegitimate.
Some political scientists have argued the greatest effect of the citizens’ assembly was not on the Irish public, but on politicians. It convinced them that what had previously been seen as unthinkably liberal might in fact win public support.
“For me, a citizens’ assembly to participate in democracy would be like … nirvana” — Margaret Kiernan, a retiree who took part in Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly
“Such a view of the Assembly as a high-profile focus group is quite far from the more idealized visions apparent in some commentary,” wrote UCD professor Eoin Carolan.
The growth in popularity of the model may be helped by the fact that many people who participate are exhilarated by the process and emerge as deliberative democracy evangelists.
Citizen members feel honored to be consulted, and sometimes liken the expert presentations and challenging reading requirements to receiving a free third-level education. Observers are inspired to witness participants carefully weigh evidence, change prior convictions and work together for compromise.
Margaret Kiernan, a retiree who took part in Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, said banter with younger women members about going on to study law began to turn serious as they realized they were able to grapple with complex legal matters.
“My experiences of the assembly are all very positive,” Kiernan said, adding that “family things sometimes had to take a back seat, so in that way I could be fully committed to the process.”
“For me, a citizens’ assembly to participate in democracy would be like … nirvana,” she said.
Deadlock
Unless future citizens’ assemblies are well designed, the success of Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on abortion may well be an outlier. What’s more common is that political momentum dissipates and the conclusions drafted by citizens’ assemblies fail to have an effect.
Electoral reform proposed by the pioneering 2004 citizens assembly in Canada was not passed by the public, for example. Similarly, the electoral reform recommendations of a 2006 Dutch citizens’ assembly were first ignored, and then rejected by the government. A citizens’ assembly to solve Brexit run by academics in 2017 backed “a bespoke UK/EU trade deal and a customs union that would allow the UK to conduct its own international trade policy while maintaining a frictionless UK/EU border” — a conclusion that does not solve any of the ways in which Brexit is deadlocked politically.
The starkest example of the limits of what the model can achieve is perhaps a recent experiment in Northern Ireland, where an assembly set up by a team of democracy charities and trusts was tasked with considering the future of the social care system.
“You wouldn’t want to fly an airplane by citizens’ assembly” — David Farrell, University College Dublin politics professor
The assembly recommended that there be more funding for the care of the elderly and that care workers be better trained and better paid. But as Northern Ireland’s ruling assembly and executive have been collapsed for two and a half years, there was no minister of health to receive the report. Neither could it solve the fundamental issue of lack of funding.
Without a government, assembly members wondered if their recommendations would simply “just sit on a desk gathering dust,” said Eugene Reid, a participant who, partly inspired by his experience, has since become a local councilor for the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “These are the proposals that any politician worth their salt should be coming up with.”
The design of the tool has yet to be perfected. How to make assemblies truly representative and ensure their conclusions truly have impact are perhaps the toughest questions to solve.
“You wouldn’t want to fly an airplane by citizens’ assembly,” said Farrell, the politics professor. “This tool should be used wisely. You shouldn’t use them as a magic bullet to try to solve any problem you have.”
But, he added, with plenty of pessimists “saying that democracy is in its death throes,” it’s worth remembering that democracies survive by experimenting.
Citizens’ assemblies, he added, are an example of that. “[Democracy] is in danger, it’s going through a challenge, but this is not the first time it’s been challenged,” he said. “What a lot of doom merchants are underplaying is the fact that democracies innovate.”
This article is part of “Democracy Fix,” a series looking at efforts to counter rising illiberalism, digital disruption and dropping confidence in institutions of the Western world.