Democratic Renewal Through Experimental Deliberative Mini-Publics: An Argument for Institutional Rehearsal Using EU Citizen Deliberation on AI

Proposals to institutionalise structured citizen deliberation fora, known as mini-publics, often focus on their potential for democratic renewal amidst the legitimacy crisis in liberal democracies. In these fora, mini-publics approximate the conditions for good democratic deliberation that promise to address the pitfalls of liberal democracy. Citizens directly participate in decision-making and their inclusion expands the scope of policy options that can be considered. But what limits the renewal potential mini-publics hold? Some scholars propose to take a prescriptive (Curato et al., 2021; Fishkin, 2018) or a mending (Hendriks, Ercan & Boswell, 2020) approach where mini-publics design is perfected or mini-publics can introduce repairs as other forms of participatory action do. Sceptics often refer to the one-off and non-committal aspects of mini-publics as insufficient to create change. Adding to these approaches and addressing this critique, I argue we take an experimental approach where we view mini-publics as practices for institutional rehearsal. I develop the idea of institutional rehearsal by positing it as the capacity for political actors to be reflexive about the constituencies included/excluded in mini-publics, the influence citizens have in decision-making, and the links to previous processes (e.g. discourses and claims in the public sphere, social movements, etc.). Rehearsal can locate where the limits lie. I apply institutional rehearsal to two cases of citizen deliberation on AI: Ireland’s National Youth Assembly on AI (2022) and the Belgian EU Presidency Citizens’ Panel on AI issues (2024) to demonstrate how it can be used in future research.