Helping Citizens in Assessing Transformative Proposals for Representative Democracy

Democracy is based on a procedural consensus. Even if democratic citizens cannot be expected to agree on the substantive content of collective decisions, they should be able to reach agreement on the procedures leading to these decisions (Landwehr 2020). In principle, these procedures should be adaptable in order to meet growing democratic demands or emerging challenges. In this sense, the trend towards a more extensive implementation of deliberative mini-publics is by some actors seen and promoted as a possible "transformation to adapt the architecture of representative democracy" (OECD 2020: 3). This presents political theory with two central tasks: First, it must scrutinize and critically evaluate the underlying concepts of representation and representative democracy endorsed by those advocating for these changes. Second, theorists should make their findings accessible to citizens to help them agree on which representative institution they want to play what role in their decision-making process. Or, to put it in simpler terms: Help them reach a procedural consensus on how they want to be represented. The paper outlines a specific perspective on how political theorists can in this sense engage in "democratic midwifery" (Geissel 2023). A combination of the systemic approach (normative theory) and Saward's (2010) representative claims framework (constructivist theory) is used as a tool for analysis and illustration. As an example, the three basic representative claims of mini-publics (descriptive, deliberative and equal opportunity) are reconstructed in order to show how their implications, mutual trade-offs and their embeddedness in a democratic system can be understood and communicated.