Citizen Autonomy and its Limits in Deliberative Mini-Publics. Meta-Deliberation and Bottom-Up Resistance in a Comparative Perspective

Democratic innovations (DI) promise greater empowerment of ordinary citizens in politics to shape laws, rules, and policies. However, achieving this promise hinges on participants’ acceptance of the rules and practices that organize the democratic innovation itself. While this assumption was once taken for granted, it has increasingly become a subject of scrutiny, particularly for Deliberative Mini-Publics (DMPs). DMPs assemble diverse panels of citizens to craft policy recommendations for public administrations based on expert and stakeholder input. High-profile cases have influenced national legislation on issues such as abortion and climate regulation. At the heart of the debate lies a fundamental tension: Should DMPs prioritize strict control by supervisors to ensure experimental validity, or should they embrace complete self-management to uphold the democratic principle of self-government? This tension has significant implications for both the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic innovations. In practice, while DMPs are framed, supervised, and subjected to a division of labor, citizen-representatives retain a degree of agency. Their autonomy, recognized by democratic theorists as part of core democratic values—including inclusion, effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding, and agenda control—raises critical questions about the balance of power between participants and organizers. Despite theoretical advocacy for citizen autonomy, empirical evidence suggests that participants’ influence is constrained by procedural frameworks, posing important challenges to the democratic promise of these innovations. This study addresses these challenges by examining two interrelated sets of questions. Normative questions: Should citizens in democratic innovations have control over the process rules and organization? Should citizen-representatives possess the authority to critique or modify deliberative frameworks? Empirical questions: What practices of citizen autonomy and top-down control emerge in real-world cases? What counterstrategies do organizers, experts, and facilitators employ? Who ultimately shapes the deliberative process, and to what effect? Through a comparative analysis of six major cases in Western Europe, this study explores the dynamics of citizen agency within different deliberative designs. Two dimensions are central to this analysis. First, meta-deliberation examines how participants seek to alter organizational frameworks. Second, the study investigates forms of resistance, particularly regarding participants’ interactions with expert knowledge. The findings reveal that while deliberators frequently engage critically with the provided frameworks and occasionally succeed in altering them, these actions remain limited in frequency, scale, and efficiency due to significant constraints imposed by organizers. The results highlight a delicate trade-off: DMPs must empower participants to counterbalance potential illegitimate decisions by supervisors, yet this empowerment must not undermine deliberative procedures’ integrity. Striking a reflexive balance is essential to ensuring the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic innovations as tools for public governance.