Learning from actually-existing deliberation: The deliberative principles of self-convened popular assemblies

The academic field of deliberative and participatory democracy rests on the work of scholars originally concerned with the normative underpinnings of (institutional) alternatives to representative democratic systems. Newer generations of deliberative and participatory democrats have rightfully called attention towards political projects that empower ‘ordinary’ citizens to conduct political matters. But these movements or 'generations' have been overwhelmingly based in, and spoken for, the global north (Curato 2022, Morán and Ross 2021), often disconnected from broader, context- and community-bound sociopolitical processes (Bussu et al. 2022, Felicetti 2021) and those taking place in the majority world (e.g. evidence from Participedia and LATINNO). This paper invites reflection over some of the established theoretical principles behind deliberative and participatory democracy, especially those most frequently associated with effective process design, such as sortition, structured and mediated deliberation, and institutionalized impact over policy. It does so by turning the gaze towards examining ‘actually existing’ deliberation, meaning publics convened by its own participants, open-ended in its features and goals, often juncture-driven, extra-institutional, and even anti-institutional (e.g. Pogrebinschi 2023, 2022; Curato 2019, Lin 2019). In particular, I examine how deliberation takes place in popular assemblies (span. asambleas populares) in South America. Adopting a bottom-up theory-building approach, I examine the praxis of deliberation as organized and convened by participants themselves. Self-convened popular assemblies allow me to address the questions: how does deliberation take place in real-life, self-convened political processes in the Global South? Do these forms of citizen mobilization and self-governance uphold the normative ideals of deliberation as theorized in the Global North, or do they respond to a different logic? If so, what patterns and rules of deliberation take place in those processes? I argue that examining people-led deliberation can challenge – but also complement and course-correct – normative assumptions about participation and deliberation. First, focusing on the more disruptive elements in democratic ecosystems (Ross and Morán, forthcoming), rather than on neatly designed, ‘laboratory-made’ (Welp 2022) mini-publics, the paper introduces a characterization of actually-existing deliberation. In a second step, I probe whether the deliberative principles of equity in participation, reason-giving, and consensus-building hold in non-designed cases of deliberation such as popular assemblies, and explore what alternative principles underlie these cases. I conclude with some reflections on how to continue this research agenda and pose the open question on whether/how those patterns and rules of “actually existing” deliberation can be normatively extended beyond their context.