Mind the Gaps: Scaling up Digital Spaces to Increase Translocal Porousness in an ECA
Andrea Gaiba (European University Institute)
Building on the specific inter-institutional design of a permanent European Citizens’ Assembly (ECA) proposed by Kalypso Nicolaidis, this symposium has highlighted the need for balancing between (i) a permanent, transnational citizens’ assembly, (ii) traditional structures of electoral democracy; and (iii) increasingly polarised public spheres.
Many contributions ask, one way or another, the question: How does Nicolaidis’ proposal cope with the original sin faced by all assemblies? That is, how can deliberative assemblies connect with a broad public (also beyond Europe) while being accountable at multiple levels of governance?
I propose a pragmatic approach towards widening engagement that increases the porousness of a citizens’ assembly towards local communities, the other EU institutions, and the wider European public spheres.
As Ross & Felicetti argue, part of the problem of how to connect with the broader public sphere lies in the ability to mobilise the European demoi across borders. One of the techniques suggested focuses on the interactions between the ECA and local communities (see (Dobler & Vergne on “The Assembly is coming!”) and the hope that this exchange mobilises narratives about subsidiarity, identities and citizenship that affirm this translocal shift. The Assembly itself ought to be a celebration of translocal democracy, and I endorse Nicolaidis’ ‘pedagogy of sortition’ as one of the ways in which we can consolidate participatory cultures across borders.
But is this enough? Many in the symposium have discussed how the level of attention to assemblies will not grow unless they are empowered. Grassroots actors and local communities should also be provided with spaces where they can equally say, “We are coming to the Assembly!”. In other words, spaces where they can reclaim their agency in contributing to the ECA.
This raises a fundamental question about the assembly’s ‘porousness’ (Dobler & Vergne), i.e., the ability of the ECA to connect with public discourses through a multi-stakeholder approach. Thinking about renewing a given participatory culture also requires reimagining how this would look, particularly in the eye of actors that might have pre-established attitudes vis-à-vis political power, such as civil society organisations. They, too, must be empowered within the ECA to make participation meaningful for them.
Are EU institutions interested in adopting such a multi-stakeholder approach? Alvaro Oleart suggests this is not the case. If the ECA ought to break with what he calls the ‘disintermediated logic’ of previous deliberative attempts, it must do away with existing institutional understandings of mediation or, rather, the lack thereof.
This is a practical question of radically rethinking the design of an ECA so that it does not reflect pre-existing structures of power uncritically. The avoidance of intermediate organisations, based on a Rousseauean ideal of deliberative purity, should be overcome in four main areas: (i) agenda-setting; (ii) sortition; (iii) experts’ inputs in deliberation; and (iv) follow-up.
Porousness in agenda-setting
Building on Nicolaidis’ observations, the Democratic Odyssey project proposes two complementary and yet very different scenarios for the agenda-setting of a permanent ECA. Agenda-setting could be either enabled by an ECI process representing the broader push from civil society actors who mobilise on particular political issues or by a permanent body of rotating citizens, taking the Ostbelgien model as inspiration. Based on these two options, I identify an opportunity for better connecting them in the scenario where an ECI directly initiates an ECA. To be clear, this does not dismiss the second model, where the ECA sets up a parliamentary process towards an ECI. The assumption is that an ECI-led process would generally present an ECA with very specific proposals, also for reasons of campaigning effectiveness. I propose to add a feedback loop from the previous assembly’s cohort so as to make sure that all the expertise accumulated through a year of deliberations is not lost and provides specific counsel as to how this topic could be best handled in an assembly space. Formal feedback from this earlier cohort on the breadth and goals of the ECI would set the stage for the ECA-led legislative crowdsourcing on the ‘how’. This is a way of avoiding the specificity of a single proposal from an ECI providing an escape route to the EP, i.e., accepting an ECI as an emergency measure and a proxy for systemic change. It is about ECIs becoming entry points to broader questions of structural renewal, with deliberative outputs of the ECA integrating the requests of an ECI with the broader-ranging potential of agenda-setting that an assembly body might have (an “ECI+” ECA). Combining both may be a good way to test and maximise their respective strengths.
Porousness in sortition
Regarding the porousness of sortition, Rainer Bauböck suggests widening the deliberative demos beyond the legislative demos (citizens) by giving non-citizens and non-residents of Europe access to the ECA. This is something the Democratic Odyssey project has prominently tested through its first moment, the pilot implementation by bringing in non-citizens who are residents in the locality the assembly travels to. Bauböck goes one step further by proposing that we decrease the purity of sortition to give voice to the communities most impacted by the policies discussed in the assembly, even if these reside outside Europe. He raises a salient concern, which mirrors a similar point I have raised about agenda-setting above: Who is best suited to set the selection criteria for an ECA, in view of the fact that these should be understood to change depending on the topic discussed? Could current ECA members be consulted on sortition criteria for the next period of the ECA?
Porousness in composition
A second proposal further enriches sortition as weighted random selection by raising a question about the overall composition. The ECA should also be a space where we do not simply imagine descriptive representation of the European demoi but also of the traditional structures and actors of power, as well as the panoply of stakeholders that create counter-hegemonic discourses. An ECA configured this way could unlock its potential to become a space for agonistic politics and give a deeper meaning to the concept of a ‘mini-public’. If we assume optimal follow-up, an ECA is best placed to consolidate its salience in European politics by providing public spaces where all stakeholders can and should make their suggestions for policy change more transparently.
In particular, I argue against purist approaches that the ECA should only hear neutral experts. I believe it should not only welcome expertise from lawmakers, academia, civil society, and trade unions, among others but also offer a space for politicians, lobby groups and regulatory bodies to intervene in a longer process. This would involve reimagining the deliberative process itself and throwing it open for multi-stakeholder contributions where traditional political actors providing inputs to an ECA do not only have to convince lawmakers of the quality of a given policy proposal, but also members of an ECA.
This would require more transparent processes that use the exploratory crowdsourcing of facilitation techniques to recover the agonistic spirit of democracy but simultaneously help narrow it down to its core ideological varieties and evidence-based disagreements. August & Westphal remind us that this is only possible if the heuristics of de-escalation and reconciliation are deployed. In other words, a space where the initial “us vs them” (of different localities and demoi coming together) can be transformed into a more cooperative space of mutual recognition and co-creation. Nevertheless, as for agenda-setting and sortition criteria, a central question remains. Should members of an ECA also be empowered to make proposals as to who should sit at the table of experts? Should they be empowered to propose names through preferential voting or even be given the ability to nominate a third of the experts that will be called upon in the assembly? This would allow for interesting experiments of gamifying agonistics within the assembly space.
Porousness in follow-up
A third normative proposal for the ECA speaks to rethinking the spectrum of follow-up that assemblies are normally concerned with. Is it sufficient, satisfactory or indeed optimal to only consider institutional and policy recommendations as the exclusive deliberative output of an ECA?
When set up by policy-makers as consultation devices, assemblies do not fulfil their transformative potential in bringing about radical change. How do we design an ECA in a way that gives it adequate breadth for the much wider scope of inquiry that Alvaro Oleart prescribes in view of global challenges? The case study of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) tells us very clearly that beyond the official claims of completion and appropriate follow-up, we have lost the initial momentum behind specific proposals, such as that for amending the EU Treaties. Most recently, the Commissioner-designate Maroš Šefčovič, in his EP confirmation hearing, pointed the finger at the European Council for lack of follow-up to CoFoE while claiming that most recommendations have been translated into policy proposals. As Sandra Seubert warns us, it is crucial that the ECA does not become an instrument of legitimisation for even more untransparent and elite mechanisms of policymaking through favouring technocratic and top-down consultation between bureaucratic bodies and randomly selected citizens.
For instance, the Global Assembly’s “People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth” features an explicit call for corporations to become agents of change. Wilson & Mellier identify such calls as part of a broader theory of democratic change, where the scope of an assembly is to ‘defibrillate democracy’. Through imagining a wide-ranging follow-up, with a spectrum of recommendations that go beyond traditional institutional and policy recommendations, an ECA could open up to public-private partnerships, new diplomacy actions and new social movements emerging from the process (assuming porousness in composition). I argue such a multi-dimensional output is crucial in devising an interface with the European Parliament that restitutes wider agency and mandate to the ECA as an independent branch.
Technological challenges and opportunities of scaling porousness
We move here to the ‘how’ question, particularly in view of the role that new technologies could play in enabling porousness. Nicolaidis proposes that this final step of the deliberative process could happen either through the European Parliament or an EU-wide referendum. I would endorse direct democracy as the most intuitive progression from the legitimacy of a European mini-public to that of transnational demoi, building on Cheneval and el-Wakil’s proposal for citizen-initiated, bottom-up and binding referenda. A strong multi-level participatory culture, as well as political endorsement at supranational, translocal and national levels, would be extremely important for reaching a number of voters that legitimises the output of the ECA through a Europe-wide referendum.
As previously mentioned, Bauböck builds on the reminder by Oleart that we should decolonise the way we think about the composition of an ECA by including representatives of the Global South, among others. This is part and parcel of the methodology for the composition of the Democratic Odyssey project, which acknowledges that the best way for a critique of colonial practices to be scaled out is through virtual spaces.
I introduce here, as a fourth proposal, the idea of a digital platform as the enabler of this scaling out function through structures of transcalar polycentricity, which builds on Nicolaidis’s conceptual framework for planetary politics. On this platform, different localities become interconnected horizontally and simultaneously generate convergence of discourses above and beyond the nation-state. My proposal builds on the experience of the CoFoE’s platform and yet emerges as a critique, among others, of its top-down approach to AI-powered aggregation of debates and funnelling to the assembly cohort. A tech-enhanced ECA could bolster the accuracy and frequency of public participation and monitoring, fostering political debates beyond the assembly itself and consolidating process legitimacy, also preparing the public discourse for direct democracy practices at the end of the process.
Simultaneously, technology can also assist in this latter stage of the assembly. On the one hand, a neglected theme in this symposium, as suggested by Chiara Valsangiacomo & Christina Isabel Zuber, is the potential for liquid democracy to translate transnational participation in practice and across the heterogeneous demoi of Europe. On the other hand, Valsangiacomo & Zuber’s thought experiment proposes a model where a wider pool of European demoi – that can importantly be extended to the whole population of Europe – take part in a liquid ECA, within a process that accepts fragmentation and variable geometries of topics, of interest and engagement, of different intensities in follow-up across different topics. Doing fully away with sortition and the need for in situ assemblies calls into question whether this should be called a Citizens’ Assembly at all. The fragmentation in sub-assemblies that are not selected through sortition but through interest in a given topic risks undermining the idea that a deliberative process holds agenda-setting powers on what the next ECA must deliberate on. Additionally, a liquid ECA as described would broaden the scale of participation, but not necessarily that of mutual recognition across different demoi, as it forecloses trans-European meetings on site as a central part of the ECA.
Therefore, my fifth proposal suggests a more modest use of liquid democracy as a more nuanced form of direct democracy post-deliberation. Liquid democracy could be adopted for the final step of an ECA process when a popular vote is called on a set of ECA recommendations. It would rest on the shoulders of a deliberative output that is as legitimate as the principles of civic lottery can ensure but is also as ambitious in mobilising the public as technology allows.
Here, the granularity of liquid democracy lends itself to more nuanced final outputs. Building on the more ambitious spectrum of recommendations I have suggested above, liquid democracy processes powered through digital platforms could (i) further refine and vote on ECA members’ requests covering a specific recommendation, (ii) flesh out recommendations to civil society actors, businesses and other stakeholders over time and separately from policy recommendations; (iii) signal other political issues and priorities to be picked up in future ECA moments that are raised by, yet not fully addressed through the ECA process.
Of course, doing so at the translocal level would require the deployment of significant digital resources to enable e-voting, which remains contested in scholarly work. Pernicious actors are bound to populate the space as soon as e-deliberation and e-voting become integral parts of the decision-making process of an institutionalised and permanent ECA. However, this should not make us shy away from such a momentous and probably inevitable challenge.