Enhancing Democracy with Mini-Publics: When and How?

Widespread mistrust of established democratic institutions spells a time of crisis for liberal democracy. How can this crisis be overcome? Democratic innovations, in particular deliberative mini-publics, are often said to provide a promising way forward, promoting reflective engagement with issues of public policy and making civic participation consequential. Yet treating mini-publics as a ready-made solution to the current problems of liberal democracy, as much of the literature on the topic does, misses that the traditional representative-democratic institutions that are widely thought to be failing citizens do have independent normative virtues worth preserving. An account of when mini-publics should be used and how they should be designed that can be defended on normative grounds must therefore be informed by a close analysis of both the virtues and the failures of traditional representative-democratic institutions. We develop such an account, focusing in particular on the virtues and failures of the most important traditional representative institution, the political party. Our analysis allows us to derive a set of institutional design guidelines that show both how mini-publics can incorporate some of the distinctive virtues of political parties and how they can most effectively correct for their failings. It also indicates the limits of using mini-publics in the making of public policy, questioning many orthodoxies in the literature on democratic innovations.