In the last two decades, a great number of Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) were launched in consolidated democracies, from Canada to Australia. These included several initiatives in European countries as well as at the European Union level. CAs are tasked with learning, deliberating and advising upon a law or policy. Ideally, CAs are expected to draw a unique picture of what the whole citizenry would think about a public issue if they had the time to access information, deliberate, and decide on the matter. But as more and more CAs are launched around the world, the debate about their possibilities, challenges, and outcomes rise. What drives such initiatives? Are they just an experiment specific to wealthy countries and consolidated democracies? Which criteria should they meet to become real instruments of empowered and democratic citizen’s participation?

For some scholars, sorted citizens assemblies incarnate the purest model of democracy based on descriptive representation and addressed to decide on the basis of the best arguments. Meanwhile, skeptics invoke at least two types of concerns, quite distant one from the other. On the one hand, many consider CAs irrelevant because they commonly do not have binding powers. A potential solution for that would be to institutionalize CAs, thereby replacing the institutions of representative democracies. On the other hand, others suggest that CAs open room to manipulation exercised around different forms of intervention, as in the selection of experts, the writing of recommendations, etc. and consider them illegitimate and unaccountable.  

In Iceland and Ireland Citizens Assemblies were activated to address the crisis of representation that exploded with the 2008 financial and economic crisis. While the former failed to end with a new constitution, the latter produced several constitutional amendments with CAs in an advisory role, while some decisions were taken in referendums (e.g. same sex marriage, and abortion law). What do these experiences tell us about the type of participants (mixed, with partisan actors as in some cases in Ireland or composed by ‘pure’ citizens as in Iceland) and the articulation of CAs with traditional institutions? And how does this inform pathways to youth participation in crucial decision-making themes such as the ones related to climate change?These are some of the key questions that feed the conversation in the fourth episode of Constitutions for Democracy‘Citizen’s Assemblies for constitution making?’, with the participation of Min Reuchamps, Clodagh Harris and Jón Olaffson, moderated by Yanina Welp. This podcast is made by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the Cost Action 17135.
 

Min Reuchamps is the chair of the COST Action Constitution-making and deliberative democracy and professor of political science at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium). His teaching and research interests include federalism and multi-level governance, democracy and its transformations and innovations, participatory and deliberative methods, as well as relations between language(s) and politics and in particular the role of metaphors in political discourse.

Clodagh Harris  is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government & Politics and affiliate of the Environmental Research Institute. As part of a wider research team led by Professor David Farrell (UCD), she has conducted research on Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution (2012-2014) and the Citizens’ Assembly (2016-2018). Currently, she's co-PI (principal investigator) on the Imagining 2050 (EPA funded) project.

Jón Olaffson is professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland. His research interests combine cultural theory and political philosophy and his most recent papers deal with political culture, including dissent and protest action.

Yanina Welp is Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She is also editorial coordinator at Agenda Pública and founder member of Red de Politólogas. Her main areas of study are the introduction and practices of mechanisms of direct and participatory democracy, and digital media and politics, i.e. ‘democratic innovations’.