To Deliberate or Not to Deliberate: Non-Participation of Randomly Selected Citizens in Two Mini-Publics

New forms of engagement are offered to citizens that challenge the conventional representative model of democracy such as participatory budgeting, citizen conferences and deliberative polls. They are inspired by the deliberative democratic model and are based on random selection to create more inclusive political process. Yet, the following question remains: Why does the very large majority of the population refuse to go in such devices? Indeed, when random selection is used to select participants, organizers always have difficulty composing a diversified panel of citizens. This calls into question the capacity of different forms of deliberative democracy to really interest people outside a small circle of activists. This paper offers an empirical analysis of the refusal to come deliberate in two cases of mini-publics using random selection procedures in Belgium, the so-called G1000 and the G100. The first case has been organized at the country level and gathering more than 700 individuals for a one-day deliberation. The second case is inspired of the former but organized at the local level, in the particular municipality of Grez-Doiceau, and gathered 50 participants. Analyzing socio-demographic characteristics of participants for each case and about forty in-depth interviews with participants and mainly non-participants, this paper shows that motives of acceptance and refusal are always related to the evaluation of the political context and actors. The research link (non-)engagement to attitudes towards the representative system and to their confidence in elected representatives, political parties, experts and other citizens. The findings challenge classical results found in the literature on the sociology of participation and show that the acceptance or not to deliberate depends on the way people see mini-publics as an alternative to the current model of democracy.