Contribution short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the future of citizens' assemblies. I argue that their "top-down" design prioritizes efficiency and functionality over bottom-up empowerment. Consensus is mostly shaped by process design, raising concerns about technocratic management over deliberative democracy ideals.

Contribution long abstract:

In recent years, citizens’ assemblies (mini-publics) have emerged and become established as new formats for public participation worldwide. This presentation approaches this phenomenon from a practice-theoretical and ethnographic perspective, examining the translocal network of experts who design and promote these formats, as well as the temporal and socio-material structures of the procedural format themselves. Two key questions guide this analysis: What type of citizen participation is being promoted here, and how is consensus achieved within these processes?

In addressing these questions, the argument is made that citizens’ assemblies are increasingly being designed and implemented in a top-down manner to guarantee outcome generation within temporal and material constraints. Through this focus on effectivity and functionality, top-down governability is enhanced rather than empowering marginalized groups from the bottom-up. Consensus generation, rather than arising from the “unforced force of the better argument” as the ideal of deliberative democracy would have it (Habermas, 1981), is instead shaped through the procedural design and the use of specific facilitation and voting techniques. As a result, the citizens’ assembly, as a governance technology, is evolving into a form of technocratic and neoliberal population management rather than a means of grassroots empowerment and democratization.

Overall, the presentation calls for a more nuanced consideration of trade-offs, particularly between the ideals of deliberative democracy on one hand and the effectiveness and functionality of these “democratic innovations” on the other.