The advantages and perils of a civil-society-led European Citizens’ Assembly
Brett Hennig (Sortition Foundation)
The Sortition Foundation and Sortition Europe applaud the effort of the Democratic Odyssey to kick off an impressive campaign to bring people into the heart of democratic decision making at the EU level.
We are particularly impressed with the demand for a permanent European Citizens’ Assembly (ECA), something dear to us as we also launch our 858 campaign to replace the anachronistic, and much loathed, House of Lords in the UK with a permanent citizens’ assembly, which we are calling a House of Citizens.
Below I will not discuss whether sortition should complement or replace elections – I’ve made my point on that score in numerous publications (see the chapter “Who needs elections? Accountability, Equality, and Legitimacy Under Sortition” in Legislature by Lot; the book “The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy”) and many times online (e.g. Ted.com: “What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people?” and on National Public Radio in the US).
Instead, I focus here on one element of the Democratic Odyssey campaign that Kalypso Nicolaidis mentions in her introduction, and specifically on the construction of a pilot European Citizens’ Assembly, kicking off in Athens in late September 2024, which we have been involved in. Nicolaidis’s essay can clearly be seen as laying out the intellectual foundations for this campaign and the pilot ECA for which she is a pivotal and inspiring leader.
Of course, campaigning is a long and arduous process, and civil society organisations have many and multiple strategies and theories of change for achieving their aims. One of these – also identified in Alvaro Oleart’s commentary – is prefigurative politics, more colloquially known as “building a new world in the shell of the old” or “building tomorrow today”. I locate the building of the pilot European Citizens’ Assembly within this strategy and below I focus specifically on the pros and cons of doing this via a civil-society-led citizens’ assembly.
Advantage: Freedom to Experiment
One of the main advantages of a civil society-led assembly is the lack of constraints to follow “standard” practice and to adhere to narrow expectations and tight prescriptions of how a deliberative process should be conducted and what it should look like. For the Democratic Odyssey project, we see this primarily in two aspects: (i) the selection of members of the assembly and (ii) the informed deliberative process itself.
Specifically, the members of the first assembly in Athens in September 2024 are veering dramatically away from standard practices of “pure sortition” i.e. using a two-step democratic lottery process to create a representative sample of the relevant community, in this case Europe. Not that there is actually any such thing as pure sortition: even the Commission’s European Citizens’ Panels (ECP) over-represent youth (thankfully, as their voice is often unheard in EU politics) and thus don’t adhere to the pure model.
The Democratic Odyssey’s very conscious decision to include non-EU citizens is, in my mind, also to be applauded, and follows standard practice at local and national level across Europe, where often the only requirement for inclusion in a citizens’ assembly is permanent residency. It should be highlighted, however, that ECPs exclude non-EU citizens from their deliberations. As usual, with most of these topics, an advantage can also be a peril, as you will see below.
The freedom in process appears to be very exciting, especially as the typical deliberative process of plenary, small-group discussion, prioritisation and decisions (then repeat) is highly prescriptive and, as many would claim, lacks imagination. Proposals to use performance, art, and more humanly engaging processes should be welcome and learning how they affect deliberative outcomes will be very interesting to observe.
Advantage: Freedom of topic and agenda
Another potential advantage is that the assembly could have the freedom to set its own agenda. I say “could” because obviously there is a bootstrapping problem here: how does the first assembly set its own agenda without an agenda-setting meeting? And although there are some obvious solutions to this (the members could have been brought together online first to set the agenda) there are practical and logistic reasons – not to mention (internal) political campaign reasons – why this was not done in this first instance. Instead, the first topic was discussed and decided on by the broad and expanding “constituent network” of civil society groups involved in the Democratic Odyssey campaign, and left deliberately broad so the members themselves could narrow it down in the future.
In the future, as is planned at the conclusion of the Athens assembly meeting, the assembly members themselves could usefully set the agenda for the next meeting at which they might not participate due to rotation of membership. This would also separate some powers of agenda-setting and decision-making, but locate the agenda-setting power firmly in the hands of ECA members.
Of course one could (should?) also consider extending agenda-setting power to broader civil society (perhaps through an ECI-like mechanism?) and even the wider public, using mass participatory “deliberate and vote” tools such as vTaiwan. This is an option that will be important to experiment with in the future.
Peril: Biased composition undermining legitimacy
The next two perils are both flip sides of the above two freedoms. With the freedom to experiment, the Democratic Odyssey has chosen to bring together a complicated, mixed, transnational and translocal group of people that includes – technically overrepresents – local residents (in the first example those who live in Athens and the wider municipality of Attica) and will also give space on the floor of the assembly (so to speak) to civil society actors. I find this problematic, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, even though the local residents include people who aren’t Greek, or even from the EU, they are necessarily overwhelmingly urban city dwellers, and the very significant urban-rural divide in Europe today will be dramatically skewed in the makeup of the assembly by such a decision. I understand the reason why this decision has been made, but in the trade-off between the pros and cons of such a model, I find myself more on the cons side.
Secondly, civil society actors (even if chosen by lottery) are notoriously not good deliberators: they assume they know the answers, are typically well educated, articulate, and very likely intimidating for so-called “everyday” assembly participants selected by lottery. In most (normal) citizens’ assemblies civil society actors are asked to contribute either through expert and witness panels, or by making written submissions, but are never given decision-making power on the floor of the assembly. In my opinion, they should have the power to inform, but not the power to decide. Which brings us to probably the most important peril.
Peril: Lack of (direct) political impact of the assembly outcomes
This is obviously and commonly brought up by many observers of the Democratic Odyssey assembly: will the outcomes of the assembly have any direct political impact? It seems almost certain that they will not. Although some of the EU institutions praise participatory and deliberative democracy – and have by now organised several ECPs – presumably they only want to see this done on their own terms. Moreover, the topic will most likely not fit into the current agenda of those in power, and the discussions risk being too vague and rushed to be useful. I estimate the first event will include only around 12 hours of deliberations, mostly due to budgetary and logistical constraints. The EU institutions may even find the attempt to impose outcomes provocative and react defensively.
Of course, from a campaign perspective, if the purpose of the assembly is prefigurative politics, then direct political impacts may not even be strategically important to the campaign, but they will be of the utmost importance to the assembly members who will have sacrificed a weekend away from family and perhaps taken days off work to participate. It will be potentially demoralising or even angering – as we have seen repeatedly when assembly recommendations are ignored by those in power, such as after the first French climate assembly – and may lead to a loss of interest and difficulty with future assembly meetings. As one person said in the online Democratic Odyssey forum in early September (2024), neglect will be the worst outcome in our responsibility to ECA members. Fortunately, this is being taken seriously by the Democratic Odyssey with several plans to amplify and connect outcomes to decision-makers.
Peril: Lack of independence leading to low legitimacy
Civil society-led citizens’ assemblies are becoming more common, especially since Extinction Rebellion’s third demand calling for empowered citizens’ assemblies on the climate and ecological crisis.
It seems obvious that no civil society organisation would call for a citizens’ assembly if they didn’t imagine that the outcome would support their objectives – it is surely a calculated risk, but if they have done some thorough polling then the risk is probably low. We see in the UK, for example, the People’s Plan for Nature – organised by the WWF, RSBP, and the National Trust – being used to push their climate-related agendas.
To keep the (perceived?) legitimacy of such a process high, those who organise and conduct the assembly must be independent of the organisation convening (read: paying for) the assembly. In the case of the “radically inclusive” Democratic Odyssey, where these lines are blurred, and the convenors and many of the deliberative democracy practitioners organising the assembly are all part of the campaign, this will be difficult. The hope may be that the other academic and NGOs members of the Democratic Odyssey campaign will hold the organisers to transparent and clear standards of independence in member selection and deliberative process design and conduct.
The concern and risk of course is that external political actors will dismiss the assembly as an illegitimate and biased project, whose outcomes and processes are controlled by those looking to support their own (typically progressive) agendas.
The hope of civil society actors convening citizens’ assemblies is of course, that if they can point to independent conduct of those organising the assembly, they can point to the results and say “Look, we told you so. This is what a representative sample of people think after going through a process of informed deliberation.” This is (almost) the best-case scenario.
Peril: Lack of budget leading to low quality
A third key problem is that transnational assemblies cost a small fortune. Our guess for the budget of a European Citizens’ Panel of 150 people brought together for 2 weekends in person and 1 weekend online to discuss one topic thoroughly with experts and a variety of “witnesses”, is around 2 million euros. I stress that this is merely an educated guess, as the venue and the very significant translation costs for an ECP are done “in-house” by the European Commission (I believe). Others in the Democratic Odyssey network know these details better than I do.
One caveat here is that demonstrating that transnational assemblies can be done on low budgets, in a climate-friendly way, alongside a “festival of democracy” will be a significant Democratic Odyssey achievement.
In any case, what must be clear is that to do justice to a transnational deliberative process – to have adequate time, simultaneous translation, and to cover the participants’ food, travel, and accommodation – is expensive. Without the resources of a national government or the EU shortcuts must be made and the peril is, obviously, that these shortcuts undermine the quality of the deliberative process to such an extent that the outcomes are meaningless, giving further ammunition to those who would wish to see the project fail.
Advantage: Spreading the deliberative word!
The pedagogy of sortition Nicolaidis emphasises is an important advantage, even if I find “pedagogy” condescending and would prefer the more banal “raising awareness of democratic lotteries”. As she points out, public awareness of EU-level deliberative events is extremely low; even when the European Commission threw substantial budgets at the problem it failed to produce any noticeable increase (that I am aware of). Deliberation is not a spectacle, no one bleeds (“if it bleeds it leads” say the media cynics – or gets clicks we might say nowadays) and therefore it will be an uphill battle, to say the least.
Therefore trying to convey the power and (dare I say) excitement of democratic lotteries is an immensely valuable aim. We at the Sortition Foundation, inspired by Adam Cronkright’s forthcoming campaign and film in the US (I got a sneak preview), used a simple system of numbered balls in plastic containers where the President of the German Bundestag pulled out the “winning numbers” for the first government-commissioned citizens’ assembly in German (on nutrition). The live lottery got significant positive coverage in the German press, noticeably from Tagesschau, ZDF, Welt and RTL, and the Democratic Odyssey appears committed to organising something similar in the future.
Furthermore, as seen in Ireland, after many years of high-profile citizens’ assemblies, public awareness of these processes is now high, and response rates to join such assemblies appear to be (finally) climbing.
The Democratic Odyssey’s civil society network will be very important in spreading this word, which brings me to my final point.
Conclusion & Advantage: Concrete activity building a movement to upgrade democracy at EU level
The above perils are merely intended as warnings and are surely well appreciated by those organising this Democratic Odyssey campaign. The prefigurative angle for campaigning can be a powerful one: as everyone knows, “show, don’t tell” can be inspiring.
The assembly is, of course, only one part of a wider campaign being actively constructed by the Democratic Odyssey: they’re building a network of civil society actors with a vested interest in the success of the project and developing closer relationships through working together on such a project is important and powerful. I agree wholeheartedly with Oleart that, “Putting forward an ECA without the explicit backing of social movements and civil society is likely to merely reproduce mainstream institutional narratives.”
Hopefully, alongside the civil society organisations, we will also see “everyday” people taking an interest in democratic reform (which is typically not high up on people’s list of concerns). Such a movement will be indispensable if the project is to move from a comforting activity that civil society organises but is ignored, to actually challenging political power, which is ultimately what a permanent European Citizens’ Assembly will do.