No Strings Attached: The Concept of Representation in Deliberative Mini-publics

Deliberative innovations for citizen participation often attract "the usual suspects". To respond to this problem of self-selection, a category of institutions called deliberative mini-publics select participants by random sampling. This method of selection is argued to increase the representativeness of mini-publics. However, ideas of what it is that ought to be mirrored, and what random sampling really solves, vary between scholars. In this paper I explore three well-established ideas of good representation in the mini-publics literature. I argue that they all more or less tend to implicate principal-agent aspects of representation that could hinder the deliberative process of achieving considered judgments. More precisely, I claim that these ideas of good representation risk attaching participants to specific social groups, discouraging them to consider how they would feel and think if they were in other people’s place. The main reason these issues of representation arise is that the legitimacy of the process is thought to heavily rest on its representativeness. However, legitimacy, I show, can be achieved through a different logic. In particular, accountability in deliberative processes has a logic that is different from representative democracy. Having shown that mini-publics do not necessarily suffer from a lack of legitimacy, I am able to propose a concept of representation that can confidently let go of principal-agent aspects of representation. This concept safeguards a diversity of perspectives and experiences without interrupting the achievement of considered judgments. It cherishes random sampling to mini-publics on both of these grounds. As a result, it allows deliberative mini-publics to offer truly deliberative processes.