Internal Exclusion and Epistemic Injustice in Deliberative Mini Publics

Deliberative mini publics (DMPs) are all the rage in recent years. They promise to answer what civil society’s opinions would be, had all facts and points of view been readily available. DMPs are supposed to provide this solution by fostering high quality deliberation and thereby engaging citizenry in a meaningful way. Crucial to this promise is the selection mode (random sampling), which allows a diverse set of people to come together in a structured setting that promises everyone the chance to be heard who otherwise simply would not. However, as much as this political innovation has to offer, critics claim that, even though DMPs manage to avoid external exclusion (marginalized individuals are rarely present at decision-making tables), a more insidious kind of exclusion remains: internal exclusion. Internal exclusion are the ways in which some people – typically members of marginalized and disempowered groups – speak and are heard and believed less in face-to-face deliberation. Empirically, this manifests as the exclusion of those who are physically present by ignoring, belittling, or ridiculing their contributions. I argue that the empirical concept of internal exclusion can best be made productive by looking to feminist theories, specifically theories of epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is concerned with wrongs of a specifically epistemic kind, i.e., a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. It provides a theoretical foundation for the empirical problem of internal exclusion, because it provides both a theoretical foundation for how internal exclusion comes about and why it overwhelmingly falls on marginalized groups, as well as a guideline to identify which aspects of DMPs nourish its existence. Using epistemic injustice to make internal exclusion more fruitful conceptually allows us to identify the aspects and organizational choices in DMPs that need to be made in order to mitigate internal exclusion. Examples of such choices include the selection method, the organizational team, the choice of experts and the role of speech norms. For instance, whether or not random sampling is weighted to overrepresent certain groups and whether distortion in the sampling process is accounted for are factors that can have a detrimental effect on internal inclusion, especially because the group composition in relation to the choice of decision-making rule can worsen or alleviate epistemic injustice. The growing empirical role of DMPs should be accompanied by a critical theoretical reflection of their potential for inclusivity and therefore use the vast theoretical field of epistemic injustice to understand and reduce internal exclusion.