Deliberative integrity: Emerging consensus and divergent views in the governance of deliberative mini-publics

The practice of mini-publics composed of randomly selected citizens convened to yield policy recommendations has proliferated in recent years in what the OECD calls a “deliberative wave”. Currently there are no generally accepted integrity standards to govern their practice. We advance a search for such standards by bringing the scholarly literature on citizen deliberation into dialogue with the lived experience of practitioners. We locate five distinct perspectives on the integrity of mini-publics, and map the structure of agreement and dispute across them, with a view to improving the integrity, practice and governance of mini-publics.