Disadvantaged citizens’ support for randomly selected citizens’ assemblies: Evidence from 15 European Countries

For the last decades the development of deliberative instruments stemming from citizens, civil society and institutions rocketed. Some countries, such as Belgium, even institutionalized deliberative instruments such as mixed parliamentary committees or installed a permanent randomly selected assembly (both at the regional level). For a long time, scholars focused on the “object” in itself (process characteristics, deliberative qualities, etc.). There is now a growing literature on support for sortition from an elite (Bedock et al., 2019; Jacquet et al., 2015; Junius et al., 2020) and a citizen perspective (Bedock & Pilet, 2020a, 2020b; Font et al., 2015; Gherghina & Geissel, 2020; Pilet et al., forthcoming) on elites’ and citizens’ support for DMPs. The following paper aims to contribute to the literature regarding support for sortition by studying the support of disadvantaged groups for the inclusion of citizens selected by lot in democratic decision-making. Indeed, while few papers study citizens’ support for sortition, even fewer papers study disadvantaged citizens’ support for mini-publics selected by lot (i.e. Gherghina et al., 2020, Talukder and Pilet, forthcoming). The paper proposes to contribute to fill in this gap in the literature taking advantage of the EPIS survey administered in 15 European countries in spring 2020. The innovation of this analysis is to take simultaneously into account objective inequalities and perceptions of inequalities. Our analysis is threefold. First, our analysis investigates how various sociodemographic indicators (gender, education, place of residence, etc.) and political inequalities (turnout, interest for politics) influence support for sortition. Secondly, we investigate the effect of self-perceptions of economic disadvantage on support for sortition. Thirdly, we investigate the effect of the perceptions of the importance to fight inequalities on support for citizens selected by lot. Finally, the paper investigates whether the topics that citizens would take charge of (European integration, Immigration or Social benefits) have an influence on support of disadvantaged citizens for sortition.