Deliberative assemblies lies, democratisation and collective autonomy

Deliberative assemblies or mini-publics are currently the most prominent tendency in contemporary democratic innovation. Deliberative assemblies promise to quell the participatory thirst of citizens by providing a novel form of direct participation in political deliberation. Citizen assemblies help to resolve highly contentious issues by bypassing (the entrenched positions of) party politics. Assemblies promise a more inclusive form of participation and representation by randomly selecting citizens from all kinds of backgrounds in the process. On the transnational level, citizen assemblies promise to provide a cross-border forum for democratic debate. In all this, a key – but not frequently asked – question is to what extent citizen assemblies contribute to reproducing the status quo (by merely providing a consultative ‘add-on’ to existing politics) or whether they have a credible potential to contribute to more radical forms of democratization, which involve the recalibration of existing power relations, including a reformulation of the ground rules of democracy. The paper discusses citizen assemblies’ contribution to democratization by comparatively analysing a number of recent cases (including the EU’s Conference on the Future of Europe). In a second step, the paper identifies a number of radical-democratic dimensions (incl. inclusiveness, the representative status of citizens, the political impact of assemblies, the impact on political subjectivities and political culture, and the role of constituent power). In a third step, the argument is made that citizens’ assemblies tend to only display radical democratic potential when embedded in broader, systemic democratic reform. In the context of the EU, this means that the institutionalization of citizens’ assemblies only makes democratic sense if part of a systemic reform.