Opinion Formation Among Equals? Promise and Reality of Assembly Democracy in Switzerland

When discussing institutional designs for democratic innovations, it is worthwhile to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of existing settings tried and tested in the real world. Thus, citizens of the Swiss canton of Glarus have, for centuries, bindingly voted on their state’s most important political issues in a yearly assembly together with their fellow citizens. What is more, each vote is preceded by a public debate during which every citizen has an equal right to take to the stage and address all those gathered to vote. This form of assembly democracy promises to extend democratic equality beyond the mere act of voting to the equally decisive phase of opinion-formation. This paper critically discusses the theoretical potential of citizen assemblies to tackle two of the most important challenges for democratic opinion-formation in modern societies: inequality in access to media and to the public debate more generally; and biased information due to the fragmentation of public discourse into disconnected and often divergent echo chambers. Empirically, we examine the extent to which these radically democratic expectations have materialised in the real-world politics of the Glarus citizen assembly, which usually counts some 5’000 participants and is probably the largest existing assembly democracy worldwide. Using data from official sources and an original survey among some 1’000 Glarus citizens, we will answer questions such as the following: How often do citizens actually make use of their right to speak, and who are those who do? Does the requirement to expose oneself in front of thousands of fellow citizens reinforce or create new inequalities? To what extent is the citizen debate actually relevant for decision-making: Does it confront voters with additional and more diverse arguments, or does it simply repeat the same arguments that they already know from conventional campaign channels before assembly day? And do voters form and/or change their opinions during the assembly, or is the citizen debate nothing more than a farce? Our analyses yield multifaceted and differentiated findings. They show, on the one hand, that the practice of opinion formation in the case of Glarus is far from perfect, but that, on the other hand, combining a general debate with voting in citizen assemblies is nonetheless able to realize crucial parts of its potential to enable a more democratic opinion formation process than conventional ballot-box voting.