Connecting Mini- and Macro-Publics: Can the Citizens’ Initiative Review Improve Swiss Direct Democracy?

It is common knowledge that Switzerland is the world’s champion in direct democracy. In no other country citizens have the possibility to vote so often on referendums and citizens’ initiatives (typically three to four times every year) at all levels of government: national, regional, and local. While there are many things to admire in such a system – direct democracy enhances legitimacy of the polity, provides incentives for compromise within the Parliament, promotes a participatory political culture etc. – it has its drawbacks too. In particular, theorists of deliberative democracy have viewed it with suspicion, due to its allegedly poor deliberative features (see Bächtiger 2016). With regard to four ideal conditions of deliberative democracy put forward by Joshua Cohen (1998) – i.e., (1) open participation; (2) communicative competence, (3) equality of resources, status and respect among participants, and (4) making decisions by consensus –, critics have argued that direct democracy cannot fulfil any of them (Parkinson 2001). In view of such criticism, in our presentation we explore the question how direct democracy can be reformed in order to provide better opportunities for high-quality deliberation become more deliberation-friendly. In particular, we focus on the use of mini-publics and the possibility to connect the results of their deliberations to a macro-public. A promising innovation comes from Oregon: Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) – where a group of randomly selected citizens deliberate over a (pre-established) topic of a real referendum. Their conclusions and recommendations are then published as a one-page statement in the official pamphlet that all voters of Oregon receive and that is meant to assist them in making an informed decision. Our research team will conduct at least two CIR pilots in Switzerland. The first one will take place in November 2019 (on a topic of a national referendum to be held in February 2020). However, in March/April 2019 we will conduct a CIR trial with a randomly selected group of students from the University of Geneva, who will deliberate on a national referendum that will take place on 19 May 2019. The topic of the referendum is a new Schengen/EU gun directive aimed at tightening firearms regulations that Switzerland had signed; more than 120k citizens have signed a referendum against it (50k would have been sufficient), so that in May 2019 all Swiss voters will be called to say “yes” or “no” in a popular vote. In our paper we will present and discuss the results of this CIR trial and its implications for our first real CIR pilot to be held in November 2019. References Bächtiger, A. 2016. Warum die Schweiz mehr Deliberation gut brauchen könnte. In D. Brühlmeier & P. Mastronardi (eds), Demokratie in der Krise? Chronos, pp. 29-41. Cohen, J. 1998. Democracy and liberty. In J. Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge UP, pp. 185-231. Parkinson, J. R. 2001. Deliberative democracy and referendums. In K. Dowding et al. (eds), Challenges to democracy. Palgrave, pp. 131-52.