The Representative Claim of Mini-Publics: Descriptive and Deliberative

Political theorists such as Landemore (2020) and Smith (2021) argue for some transfer of decision-making power to mini-publics, while Lafont (2020) has offered the most widely received critique of such empowerment. Interestingly, authors at both ends of the debate agree that our understanding of political representation in mini-publics remains undertheorized. As it may be instructive for the wider question of their empowerment, I want to contribute to the debate on political representation in mini-publics by analyzing it through the lens of the representative claims framework (Saward 2010). My main thesis is that the representative claim of mini-publics is not only a descriptive one (see Gül 2019; Ohren 2021), but also always a deliberative one. Against the background of Pitkin's (1967) distinction between different perspectives on representation, I argue that representation in mini-publics has so far been considered predominantly from a perspective of "standing for" as descriptive representation, but that it is also understood from a perspective of "acting for” (Pitkin 1967: 112) by organizers, participants and proponents of mini-publics. This approach leads to the concept of deliberative representation, which is already referred to by some authors (Rinne 2020; Wang/Woo 2021), but has not yet been theorized in detail for the case of mini-publics. Saward's (2010) representative claims framework provides a good starting point for such an effort because it does not understand political representation through an ontological lens as a clearly definable state necessarily tied to particular institutions and is flexible enough to capture processes of representation in non-electoral contexts. I distinguish between two concepts of deliberative representation – one refers to the individual and the other one to the collective level. The latter constitutes the deliberative representative claim of mini-publics, which reads: The organizers of a mini-public (makers) claim a mini-public (subject) to act for a certain polity (object) as it performs the democratically important task of deliberation. The justificatory resource here is deliberation, analogous to descriptivity in the descriptive claim: deliberative representation can be appreciated in a society that values deliberative ideals and therefore the process of deliberation in mini-publics just as descriptive representation can be a relevant property of political institutions in societies that value inclusion and diversity. In the context of mini-publics, those two claims cannot be understood independently, but only together add up to the full picture of their representative claim. In the last section, I sketch some initial thoughts on the usefulness of the concept of deliberative representation. One central conclusion is that it only makes sense for outsiders of a mini-public to accept its representative claim if the dimension of deliberative representation is taken into account.