Multiple Infra-Mini-Publics? Parallel Deliberation and Epistemic Justice

Recent normative work on deliberative mini-publics stresses the importance of epistemic justice as a standard for evaluating the epistemic credentials of deliberative mini-publics. Specifically, political theorists worry that the deliberative dynamics at play in deliberative mini-publics can lead to paradigmatic forms of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustice whereby citizens are not taken seriously as epistemic agents or they are marginalized from the production of epistemically relevant concepts, theories and rhetorical tropes (Schmidt 2024) or to more sui generis versions of epistemic injustice – most notably, to “expressive epistemic injustice” (Dryzek & Niemeyer 2025), a phenomenon whereby an individual or group’s values or beliefs systematically fail to be reflected in the preferences and decisions of that same (or other) individual or group. In this paper, we reconstruct these epistemic injustice critiques, connect them to evidence from empirical research on deliberative mini-publics, and propose a partial policy remedy to meet these critiques. The remedy consists in breaking up a deliberative mini-public into smaller groups (infra-mini-publics) whose members can deliberate with each other on the same topic(s) or question before moving to a stage where the entire mini-public engages in preference ranking and decision-making. Doing this, we argue, minimizes the opportunities for epistemic injustice in general, and for expressive epistemic injustice in particular.