Can a European Citizens’ Assembly Improve Political Equality and Overcome the Demoi-cratic Disconnect?
Richard Bellamy (University College London)
Kalypso Nicolaidis’ argument for a permanent European Citizens’ Assembly (ECA) of randomly selected citizens is a characteristically imaginative and bold intervention in the ongoing democratic deficit debate. It combines theoretical sophistication with a concrete, practical proposal. However, while I agree with the concerns driving her suggestion – the increasing disillusionment with actually existing electoral democracy across the democratic world and the resulting allure of populism or technocracy as alternatives – I doubt that such randomly sorted assemblies provide an adequate or even an appropriate response to this problem – indeed, I fear they may exacerbate it. I start by raising some general issues with such schemes. I then turn to how far they can address a core source of democratic disaffection within the EU – that of the ‘demoi-cratic disconnect’.
How equal and empowering is representation by sortition?
Like other champions of lottery or sortition, Nicolaidis sees citizens’ assemblies as offering a way of strengthening political equality and enhancing the sense of democratic empowerment by giving everyone an equal chance to rule. As she notes, from classical antiquity up to the eighteenth century, random selection rivalled election as the main form of democracy. Nicolaidis differs from those contemporary advocates of sortition, such as Alexander Guerrero and Hélène Landemore, who view lottocracy as an alternative to electoral democracy, and regards the two instead as complimentary. However, she shares arguments by Gil Delannoi et al., Peter Stone, and Arash Abizadeh that random selection and regular rotation in office provides a way of giving everyone an equal chance to shape the political agenda and make decisions that are in some ways more effective than the equal opportunity to stand for office or the indirect influence of an equal vote for representatives. Of course, the likelihood of being chosen may be remote in a large society (Christiano, 2010). An individual may be no more likely to serve in a lottocracy than they would be in an electoral democracy. For example, the EU has some 375 million registered voters. Suppose there were 1,000 places within a permanent ECA (more than Nicolaidis suggests). That would give the average citizen a roughly 1 in 375,000 chance of selection every 5 years or so. (I’ve kept the maths simple here, but Nicolaidis’ tweaks do not change the picture much – she wants an assembly of around 300, with a third renewed every 6 months). Given these odds, the equal chance to rule per se seems rather a risky deal. As Thomas Christiano points out, one would hardly regard a welfare system that entitled all citizens (as a supplement to some form of basic income, say) to a single free weekly national lottery ticket that gave them all an equal chance of being a millionaire as an egalitarian form of social redistribution just because everyone had an equal chance of winning the benefits lottery.
To be fair, Nicolaidis could be regarded as advocating a slightly different (and better) argument, whereby sortition offers a more equitable way of choosing political representatives by giving rise to an assembly that is more likely to deliberate and make proposals that give equal weight to the views and interests of citizens, as Abizadeh has argued. The claim here is that random selection avoids voter bias and the influence of those with wealth, connections and other forms of power that bedevil selection and election as a candidate in an electoral democracy. Consequently, sortition will likely result in representatives from all walks of life and lead to greater diversity. Indeed, when combined with stratified sampling, as she suggests, whereby representatives are selected in proportion to their possessing certain socially salient features found in society as a whole, such as gender, age and ethnicity – an assembly chosen in this way is likely to be more representative of society as a whole – at least in its make-up – than an elected assembly (Abizadeh, 2020). As such, it can offer what Philip Pettit has called indicative rather than responsive representation (Pettit, 2010). That is, a randomly selected legislature will be apt to reason like the citizenry taken as a whole.
Yet that cannot be counted on. Notwithstanding the sampling strategies and the payment of members, the wealthy and better educated may be more able and willing to serve – having the resources and competence to do so – and exert greater influence in deliberations. Non-professional politicians may also be more susceptible to lobbying and the influence of conspiracy theorists and the like due to a lack of general information. Representatives may also just act on their own idiosyncratic views or do the bare minimum to draw a salary. In all these cases, there will be little that can be done about it. Citizens will be bystanders to the deliberation – they lack any instruments to motivate representatives to respond to their preferences.
This brings us to the key problem with sortition: as Lafont and Urbinati have noted in their comment, it downplays the political agency all citizens may exercise in authorising and holding to account their representatives (see also Christiano, 2010; Abizadeh, 2020). Choosing who should represent you is itself subject to negotiation and deliberation, forcing party managers to screen candidates for qualities and views likely to play well with voters. The prospect of being held to account and sanctioned for poor performance incentivises representatives to consider how their decisions will be received – both at the next election and in the future. While any system of representation involves inequality between the representatives and the represented, these processes narrow that gap. By contrast, lottocracy both weakens the agency of citizens and reduces the incentives of representatives.
Nicolaidis hopes that regular rotation of representatives may overcome some of the potential problems of the indicative representativeness of even an appropriately sampled membership of an ECA. However, this creates other problems. For, as Jonathan White points out, the unpredictability of sortition and the regular rotation of representatives also works against consistency in law and policy making and long-term planning (White, 2023). Each selection will bring a new set of representatives who may hold quite different views to their predecessors and successors. As a result, whatever agreements they make will be likely to be transient. That may undermine one of the chief virtues of the rule of law – the managing of expectations and the provision of a stable framework within which citizens can plan. It can also hinder the tackling of persistent problems that require planning and investment over time – such as the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. A feature of parties is that they unite representatives around a programme of policies animated by a certain ideology or set of principles. It encourages politicians to see themselves as acting for others to achieve a certain vision of society through a set of short- and longer-term policies. Meanwhile, citizens have agency in both informing that vision and voting and campaigning for or against it.
An alternative, a supplement or a complement to electoral democracy?
It might be argued that the above criticisms have the most force against those lottocrats who see sortition as an alternative to electoral democracy. They have less force for temporary, single issue citizen assemblies, such as those recently deployed within the Convention on the Constitution in Ireland to inform referendums on abortion and same-sex marriage, which have a supplementary role to the legislature and a popular referendum. However, Nicolaidis believes this supplementary, specific and temporary role is insufficient to produce the broader democratic role she envisages for the ECA. As she notes, the EU already uses Citizen Panels that focus on specific policies, such as food waste and energy efficiency. As she also points out, though, these bodies are largely unknown beyond EU experts and can hardly be regarded as improving the democratic legitimacy of decision-making in these areas. Hence, her belief that a permanent assembly that can complement decision making by the EP is needed.
I think there are several reasons why the current Citizen Panels have, at best, a limited effect and why the complementary role advocated by Nicolaidis may well exacerbate rather than mitigate their flaws. First and most importantly, there is the aforementioned lack of citizen agency in the selection and sanctioning of representatives with the ECA. That reinforces rather than overcomes the sense of a democratic disconnect between European citizens and EU decision-making. Second, there is the fact that the more successful of these bodies – such as the Irish and Icelandic experiments – have been created in small and comparatively cohesive societies. That heightens the likelihood of a degree of identification of citizens with these bodies and the perception that people like them are involved. The EU is much more diverse. Third, these bodies have tended to deliberate on constitutional issues of principle rather than the highly technical regulatory economic policy issues that fall within the EU’s competence. Of course, these latter issues can have important consequences for people’s lives, albeit usually indirectly. However, in general, they are harder for people to relate to or to express an informed opinion on. In electoral democracy, the focus tends to be on general approaches to the economy – such as lower taxes vs higher public investment – rather than on specific policies. The much wider remit of the ECA is likely to enhance this difficulty.
Demoicracy and the democratic disconnect
One of Nicolaidis’ innovative ideas that I have adopted and found useful to develop has been her insight into the EU’s character as a demoi-cracy rather than a demos-cracy. By this term, she has sought to emphasise the pluralist character of the EU, one that is rooted in its multinational character, among other factors. While I owe a huge debt to her work in this area, my own version of demoicracy is more intergovernmental and statist than hers. Following Peter Lindseth I see the EU’s democratic deficit as reflecting a demoi-cratic disconnect between democratic decision-making at the national and subnational level within each of the member states and at the supra-national EU level. Such a disconnect is familiar in many federal schemes that have to balance self-government within the constituent units of the federation with shared government at the federal level. It proves especially problematic to negotiate within divided societies, characterised by segmental cleavages between different linguistic, cultural, religious, ethnic or other groups. The solution, in countries such as Belgium, tends to be a form of consociational democracy, that combines considerable devolution of core competences, on the one side, with collaborative decision making at the national level, on the other. Little surprise, therefore, that the much more diverse EU should move in a similar direction.
One of the problems with consociational and other collaborative schemes of government is that it becomes much harder to assign responsibility for bad decisions or to ‘throw the scoundrels out’ when they are identified. Decisions tend to be shared, with all governments necessarily a coalition of some or all of the main parties, which thereby become eternally governmental. As a result, such systems are likely to suffer from a lack of responsiveness that can drive many sections of the electorate towards populist parties claiming to speak more directly for a given people.
Nicolaidis sees the ECA as being, in some respects, a demoi-cratic body, albeit of a transnational kind, aimed at deepening mutual recognition and collaboration between the EU’s different demoi. To that end, she suggests as one of the sampling criteria that there should be an equal number of delegates (she suggests 12) from each member state. But how will these connect with the populations they are supposed to represent, particularly if they are regularly changed? The worry, as voiced by Sandra Seubert, is that the ECA will be seen as just one more unelected EU body. Giving it decisional power will likely increase rather than decrease the demoi-cratic disconnect.
Conclusion
Although much of this comment has been negative, I want to stress that I share Nicolaidis’ concerns regarding the weaknesses of the EU’s (and its member states’) current democratic arrangements. These flaws are real, worrisome and need urgent attention. However, unlike Nicolaidis, I think the answer lies in enhancing the responsiveness and deliberative character of the electoral system. My main complaint with her bold scheme is that it fails to address and may even worsen both these failings.