From Oregon to Switzerland: Connecting Mini-Publics with the Larger Public in a Context of 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). How direct democracy could be reformed in order to provide better opportunities for high-quality deliberation? Can the results of deliberations within mini-publics be connected to the larger public? A promising innovation comes from Oregon: Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) is a process where a group of 20-24 randomly selected citizens deliberate over a (pre-established) topic of a real referendum. Their conclusions are then published as a short statement in the official pamphlet that all voters of Oregon receive and that is meant to assist them in making an informed decision. With my research team I have conducted the first CIR pilot in Switzerland. It is actually the first mini-public in Switzerland whatsoever which participants were selected via sortition. It took place in November 2019 and the topic was the federal popular initiative on affordable housing that will be put on popular vote on 9 February 2020. The pilot was conducted in the city of Sion and was supported (both politically and logistically) by local authorities (the Mayor, other members of the executive, and civil servants). Experts from different fields participated in the process, as well as the political actors involved in the campaigns pro or against the initiative. The media attention has been very high. The 20 panellists – descriptively representative of the society – deliberated during two weekends and produced a 2-page citizen statement that will be sent to all voters of Sion in January 2020, approximately four weeks before the popular vote. To measure the impact of the statement, three waves of survey experiments will be conducted (in December 2019, and January and February 2020) among 2500 randomly selected citizens of Sion. They will be divided into four treatment groups and two control groups. In particular, we want to test how citizens evaluate the information provided in the citizen statement compared to the official pamphlet containing the vote recommendation of the federal parliament, but also to what extent (if at all) their attitudes changes if the statement contains the information on panel-internal vote on the popular initiative (instead of “simply” presenting the key findings in favour and against the initiative, as in the last editions of the Oregon model). Contribution to this workshop As a political scientist working at the intersection of political theory and comparative politics, in my paper I wish to address elements of three out of five “paper types” mentioned in the call for papers for this workshop (i.e. paper types 1, 2 and 5): - Empirically, I will draw insights from our field experiment in Sion to explore the interactions between different actors that were involved in the first randomly selected mini-public that took place in Switzerland – before, during and after the pilot: local elected officials, local and federal civil servants, local and national media, academic and non-academic experts, NGOs (i.e. the pro and the contra camp), political parties and, last but not least, citizens themselves. Given that we have tried to follow as much as possible the Oregon model (CIR), I will compare our results to the similar pilots conducted in Oregon and other US states, as well as with the CIR pilot conducted in Finland in February 2019 by Maija Setälä and her team. - The paper will critically (and also self-critically) draw inspiration from the field experiment to discuss its impact on how we theorize the inclusion/exclusion dilemma inherent to democratic innovations, with regard to various political actors, as well as broader democratic implications of such experiments. 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.