Mini-Publics in the Democratic System of Switzerland: Trust-Based, Critical, or Both?

Multiple authors have theorized the place of mini-publics within their interpretations of the deliberative systems approach, for a review see Kuyper (2018). Consequently, there are different theoretical approaches as to what counts towards the systemic success criteria with regard to the wider impact of a given mini-public. In this literature, two approaches have gained traction. Curato and Böker’s (2016) critical mini-publics building on Dryzek’s (2009) concept of deliberative capacity and MacKenzie and Warren’s (2012) trust-based mini-publics provide quite different conclusions concerning the legitimizing need for, implementation, and ultimate purpose of mini-publics in a deliberative system. Nevertheless, they show that the same empirical examples may be seen through the lenses of both approaches using the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. We argue that when engaging deliberative systems empirically, authors of case studies need to adopt a coherent framework to engage with the systemic analysis of specific mini-publics. In the presentation, we provide an empirical example to weigh off the arguments and predictions of the critical and trust-based approaches. We contend that the context of Swiss direct democracy provides suitable characteristics to investigate their respective success criteria. Drawing on these insights, we extend the empirical knowledge of the systems approach by means of implementing a Citizens’ Initiative Review process in a Swiss municipality before an upcoming federal popular vote. Concretely, we present results from a trial with a randomly selected group of students from the University of Geneva, who will deliberate on a topic of a national referendum that will take place on 19 May 2019. In our paper we will present the results of this trial and its implications for our pilot CIR to be held in November 2019.We argue that the Swiss context is characterized by a transmission between sites in the system where deliberative mini-publics fulfil both trust-based and critical functions that may ultimately strengthen the centripetal effects of direct democracy when implemented in a regularly recurring fashion.