Democratic Panacea or Trojan Horse? Should Elected Representatives Take Part in Deliberative Democracy?

Representative democracy is allegedly in crisis with an increasing distance between citizens and their representatives. One existing solution is to randomly select citizens to participate in the decision-making process through so-called 'deliberative mini-publics'. Yet, these mini-publics usually lack any political impact. Recently, in order to address this issue, some deliberative mini-publics, the most famous one being the Irish Constitutional Convention, have been composed of both randomly selected citizens and elected representatives in order to secure this missing link between the mini-public and the decision-making. This mixed composition raises two questions. First, how does this mixed composition affect the quality of the deliberations? If inviting politicians to mini-publics enhances the chances of its political impact on subsequent decision-making, it could damage the quality of deliberations. Indeed, as politicians master the art of debate, they could use their ability to bring powerful arguments to (in)directly impose their views on other participants. The risk is that instead of closing the gap between citizens and their representatives, mixed mini-publics widen it even more. Consequently, our second question is: under which conditions are these inequalities lowered – can a change in the rules of deliberation affect the way citizens and elected representatives deliberate equally, respectfully and reasonably and hence achieve a better deliberative (e)quality? Because mixed designs are a newcomer in the world of mini-publics, it is important to begin to get familiar with the potential effects of this change of composition in terms of deliberative quality. However, because this is a new phenomenon, there is a limited number of cases to analyze. Therefore, this study relies on an experimental design bringing together citizens and Belgian representatives to test (1) the effect of bringing elected representatives in a mini-public and (2) the effect of the rules of deliberation (majority or consensus) on the deliberative quality of the mini-public. The deliberative quality will be measured by two methods. First, we will evaluate the Discourse Quality Index (DQI) of the whole mini-public and of each participant. This will help us understand to what extent citizens and elected representatives actually differ in terms of deliberative abilities, understood as their faculty to exchange reasoned arguments through a respectful discussion. We expect representatives to be better at advancing powerful arguments and consequently have better chances of influencing the outcomes of the deliberations, while scoring lower on respect. The exact reverse observation is expected among citizens. Second, we will perform a Social Network Analysis (SNA). This method will allow us to grasp to what extent power relationships of the outside world enter the mini-public. More precisely, this method will allow us to picture the extent to which some participants hold positions of power, having therefore more chances of influencing the outcomes, thanks to a favored position in the network. Then, we will investigate if changing the rules from simple majority to consensus affects the deliberative quality of the process and the inequalities among participants in terms of power, understood as their faculty to influence the outcomes of the deliberations.