Favorable Institutional Conditions for Permanent Minipublics: Federalism, Direct Democracy and Beyond

Citizens’ assemblies known as “deliberative minipublics” have been flourishing all over the globe. Yet most of them were conducted as one-shot experiments. Only in a few places their use has been codified in formal decisions or positive laws. Examples include the State of Oregon in the United States of America, the German-speaking community in Belgium, the region of Voralberg in Austria, the city of Aachen in Germany and the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland. It is striking to notice that all these examples come from federal countries. Hence the question arises: is federalism a favorable institutional condition for institutionalizing minipublics and, if so, why? Other institutional patterns, however, are not common to the five cases. Direct democracy (i.e. a frequent use of referendums), in particular, is a key institution in Oregon and in Switzerland but not in Austria, Belgium and Germany. Against this background, the scope of the paper is to draw a roadmap putting forward institutions that can be more or less accommodating towards the attempts to see democratic innovations such as deliberative minipublics become a permanent feature of contemporary democracies.