Instrumentalization of Deliberative Mini-Publics: Between Democratic Aspirations and Institutional Realities

Deliberative Mini-Publics (DMPs) have proliferated in OECD countries, heralded as tools to deepen democracy by increasing citizen participation and deliberation while creating an interface with governance. Despite their proliferation, DMPs often exist on the margins of institutional frameworks, lacking formal integration into the policy cycle or political structures. This non-institutionalized status creates a paradox: while DMPs promise greater involvement of lay citizens, their implementation often depends on instrumentalization by institutional actors driven by different and sometimes conflicting goals. Instrumentalization – defined as the strategic use or appropriation of DMPs to achieve specific goals – remains an underexplored dimension in the literature on democratic innovation and participatory governance. While instrumentalization carries risks of cherry-picking, tokenism, and manipulation, it can also serve as a pragmatic way to embed DMPs in decision-making processes and mobilize resources. This paper addresses this gap by developing a conceptual framework to analyze the instrumentalization of DMPs, examining its manifestations in three critical stages: initiation (input), governance (throughput), and uptake of recommendations (output). Comparing cases from established democracies, the framework analyzes how elected officials, public administrators, and civil society actors instrumentalize DMPs to advance or contest policies. It also highlights the relational dimension, where DMPs are used to complement or counterbalance other participatory processes, such as referendums. This approach challenges the prevailing optimism surrounding DMPs by highlighting the double-edged nature of their non-institutionalization: while it fosters flexibility and innovation, it leaves them vulnerable to selective appropriation. This paper contributes to bridging the gap between the normative aspirations of deliberative and participatory democracy and the strategic imperatives of governance within representative systems. The framework helps to understand how instrumentalization shapes the evolving landscape of DMPs, thus enabling scholars and practitioners to assess the democratic surplus - or deficit - generated by their use in the institutional context of a representative democracy.