Building democracy takes time, and deliberative democracy will prove no exception. To that end, we will explore one possible path toward more deliberative institutions via Gastil and Wright’s proposal for a sortition chamber. We argue that deliberative innovations require a gradualist approach to implementation. Whereas other authors in this volume may take for granted that some form of sortition chamber will be institutionalized and focus instead on design questions, we consider the necessary conditions preceding institutionalization.
We undertake this effort because we believe Gastil and Wright’s proposal has merit as a deliberative democratic reform. A sortition chamber’s “hybrid legitimacy” may allow it to overcome critiques addressed to one-shot, single-issue consultative or empowered minipublics, which may lack institutional footing.1 Conventional minipublics face multiple challenges, which include significant social or political uptake, electoral accountability, capture by interests, political redundancy, representativeness, and framing biases.2 If a sortition chamber, prima facie, meets or precludes these different critiques, it represents a striking contribution to democratic innovation.
Whatever their merits, sortition reforms warrant a gradualist approach for three reasons, as we argue in the body of this chapter. First, a strong but unaccountable deliberative device like sortition may delegitimize both existing and prospective forms of citizen deliberation, including sortition bodies themselves. Second, a weaker deliberative device like citizens’ consultation can be effective, though unstable institutional footing often causes such efforts to fail. Third, once it is proven to be effective and normalized, citizens’ consultation will open a clearer path toward enhanced deliberative innovations like the sortition chamber. To prove these points, we draw on examples principally from the European Union, but we believe our argument applies equally well at local, regional, national, and transnational levels. If institutionalizing consultative minipublics is desirable and feasible at the EU level, it will be all the more so at all others.
Dangers of Delegitimization
Introducing a sortition chamber without considerable public trust and institutional redesign is likely to undermine sortition’s wider implementation and delegitimize deliberative innovation more generally. These problems would arise, in part, because citizens and policy makers are ill prepared to implement a sortition chamber outright.
To understand why, we must consider the institutional mechanisms for implementation. Most likely, institutional redesign would be decided either through public referendum or via legislation authorized by public officials. Previous research suggests that three problems would arise from implementation via these two channels: resistance from citizens, resistance from decision-makers, and a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating the viability of continuous empowered embedded minipublics, let alone sortition chambers.
Because a sortition chamber reduces or limits the scope of powerful legislative institutions (elected or otherwise), it represents an especially daunting electoral reform. Though we lack clear cases for direct comparison, systemic changes such as this would face obstacles even higher than those confronted by more modest electoral reforms.3
Regarding potential opposition from lay citizens, research shows that when voters have no structured preferences on an issue, risk aversion leads many of them to favor the status quo.4 Status quo bias may be compounded when the vote bears on issues or institutions embedded in constitutions, for which change requires a qualified majority.
Writing on referendums, Alan Renwick contrasts this “anxiety-based voting model” with “issue-based” and “cue-based” voting models, which suppose a well-informed voter or one reliant on heuristic shortcuts.5 Although all three models help explain voter behavior, Renwick notes that “the prevalence of each of these forms of voting varies … in response to the saliency of the issue.”6 Moreover, the validity of the issue and cue models depend on the quality of public information, which may vary depending on cue-givers, misinformation campaigns, media coverage, and campaign spending.7
To this, we add Renwick’s cautious assertion that “opinion during referendum campaigns tends to shift towards the status quo” and away from change.8 The safest conclusion is that a sortition chamber referendum is unlikely to win majority support, especially when less ambitious changes (such as legislative term limits, campaign funding and voting reform, or public consultation) could accomplish similar objectives with higher chances of success.
Voter skepticism will come not only from a status quo bias, but also from the difficulty of grasping the sortition concept. If a sortition chamber meets criteria for democratic justification, it does so via complex tools and concepts. To appreciate sortition’s virtues, one must simultaneously appreciate stratified random sampling, equal opportunity for selection, open agendas, cognitive diversity, deliberative public input, and the possibility of democratic legitimacy without electoral accountability.9
It is an open question whether voters (or decision-makers for that matter) would accept the premises behind this battery of complex concepts when deciding whether to implement a sortition chamber. Certainly, the ideas underlying sortition have appeal in the current climate of political disillusionment and institutional dysfunction, but the concepts themselves—and the uses to which they are put—remain unfamiliar, even unsettling. A sortition chamber is not a question of implementing more minipublics with limited service-time or decision-making power; it would fundamentally alter the lawmaking process. In short, citizens may be unsure whether a sortition chamber merits their support and whether they would later recognize the chamber as a legitimate source of laws.10
Resistance from Decision-Makers
We have asserted that citizens and voters are unlikely to support a sortition chamber if less ambitious reforms are possible and the concepts underpinning sortition remain unfamiliar. These difficulties seem even more pronounced with decision-makers within public institutions. Implementing a sortition chamber would, referendum or no, require policy makers’ assent, as altering legislative institutions would involve tremendous legislative and administrative detail. In most polities, the move to sortition would require a constitutional amendment approved by the legislature itself.11 Faced with entrenched constitutions and uncertain public opinion, public officials are likely to resist sortition absent sufficient political will and self-interest, social learning, and attitudinal change.
A standard story of rules emerges from the literature on public administration: rules are stable because of institutional rigidity, procedural hurdles (such as qualified majorities), and decision-makers’ strategic motivations. Hence, systemic change, such as electoral reform, seldom occurs. Reform attempts are quite common, particularly at subnational or local levels,12 but major reform remains rare.13
Two reasons for the rarity of structural reform apply to the case of sortition. First, from a rational-choice perspective, decision-makers will support an electoral reform if they believe it serves their own interests.14 If a reform cannot appeal directly to such self-interest, it may require external pressure, such as social movements, voter initiatives, or judicial intervention.15 When popular support is the primary driver, decision-makers must sign on for reforms and may even co-opt them to further their self-interest. Indeed, major electoral reforms often take the form of “elite majority imposition” or “elite-mass interaction,” wherein policy makers either retain control of the reform process (and pursue strictly strategic goals) or lose control of the reform process to the public (but retain an essential role in defining its final form).16
Sortition advocates will have difficulty convincing legislators that eliminating or limiting their role in the decision-making process is conducive to their interests. Even so, a sortition chamber might appeal to politicians’ long-term interests, if conditions such as “systemic threat” or “idealism” exist.17 Decision-makers may be motivated to avoid future electoral instability, reestablish their own legitimacy, make electoral changes better to meet democratic ideals, or unload no-win decisions onto another party. However, background stability, normal politics, and uncertainty over the fallout from sortition may leave legislators unmoved.18
Returning to our central thesis, less ambitious approaches may face lower obstacles, while eventually reaching similar goals. Pursuing more ambitious reforms, such as a sudden switch to a sortition chamber, could set back the underlying goal of making lawmaking more deliberative by provoking voter backlash or legislative stonewalling.
The second challenge for structural reform is cultural. Whether decision-makers support an electoral reform follows from social learning, attitudinal change, innovation diffusion, regional contagion, and electoral fashion. Whether decision-makers back reform partially depends on whether innovations are culturally available to them, such that policy makers converge on a specific reform “through voluntary emulation or borrowing from other political systems, through interaction, through external actors imposing innovation, and through the entrepreneurship of expert networks.”19
When deciding whether to initiate or back a reform, such as sortition, public officials may look to the reforms that organizations, states, and policy actors are undertaking. Decision-makers are more likely to consider and adopt reforms being considered or implemented by other actors, but a sortition chamber does not yet figure among such deliberative innovations. Thus, it is unlikely that decision-makers will consider the sortition chamber a viable reform path. They cannot arrive at sortition either through borrowing from another political system or through developing the idea in interaction with other systems. Similarly, there are at present no significant actors, internal or external, imposing such changes on decision-makers, nor sufficiently prominent and cohesive sortition expert networks acting as middlemen between sortition reform entrepreneurs and public officials.20 Until these circumstances change, a sortition chamber will meet resistance from decision-makers, who will remain doubtful of its appropriateness as a legislative and electoral alternative.21
Lack of Empirical Evidence on Sortition Chambers
A final problem underlies resistance from citizens and decision-makers alike: there exists too little empirical evidence on the degree to which sortition would succeed as a legislative innovation. Many authors in this volume make plausible arguments for how a sortition chamber might overcome institutional challenges and internal hazards, but we can also imagine it falling short on those counts. Until more evidence is available on the effects of a sortition chamber (or a body sufficiently like it, such as an ongoing, empowered, and embedded minipublic), we cannot rule out different outcomes in terms of intrabody accountability, interbody accountability, citizen professionalization, and citizen visibility.
Intrabody accountability designates the possibility of a sortition chamber member’s being held to account by the chamber, whether through informal sanctions by members or formal sanctions by the oversight committee. Although this possibility may follow simply from the fact of face-to-face interaction and could constrain discourse and deliberation in important ways, it is unclear how well this would function as an accountability mechanism. Whereas a member’s being held to account for her remarks and reasons depends on members’ willingness to hold her to account, her being held to account for individual votes would hinge on her voting record being made public, which Gastil and Wright preclude by use of secret ballot. In a word, more evidence is needed on how participants in such bodies behave toward one another before we consider intrabody accountability secure.
Interbody accountability concerns a sortition chamber’s being held to account by its counterpart within the bicameral legislature envisioned by Gastil and Wright. Insofar as direct relations exist between the elected and the sortition chambers (such as a reconciliation process, joint hearings, and intralegislative checks and balances), the electoral counterpart may formally or informally demand reasons for the sortition chamber’s decisions. It may exercise an important check on the chamber’s legislative output if its joint approval is required for a bill’s passage.22
This might also allow for transitive authorization and accountability through the democratically elected counterpart’s direct authorization from—and being held to account by—the electorate. In this way, the public might exercise indirect control over the sortition assembly. The sortition chamber will be transitively accountable, however, only if the democratically elected chamber is itself accountable (that is, it gives accounts to the public and is held to account by voters). For some elected bodies, one may reasonably conclude that this is not the case, given falling turnout (as in the European Parliament), high incumbency rates (as in the US Congress), and so forth. Thus, whether the elected chamber would exercise such accountability remains an open question—and a difficult one to answer given the absence of modern cases available to study.
We also know too little about the capacity of a sortition body. A significant level of professionalization and institutional know-how would be required from a chamber’s members if they are to work effectively alongside more experienced political actors. Such professionalization might well increase assembly members’ influence and avoid partisan contagion, but it could, by the same token, transform sortition members into yet another set of out-of-touch professional politicians.23
In the European Parliament, for example, an EU-level sortition chamber would need to learn the ins and outs of a decision-making process largely opaque to most citizens, given a lack of EU civic education. EU sortition chamber members could well become or be perceived as part of the “Brussels bubble.” To decide the question one way or another, it is vital that we obtain evidence by observing participant behavior in ongoing minipublics that are both empowered and institutionally embedded.
We also do not know the degree to which sortition chamber members’ deliberation would benefit from social uptake—and thereby play a role in formation of public will. Such a chamber may be guaranteed visibility through its share of the decision-making power and institutional linkage with well-known decision-makers. The chamber’s novelty also may lead to increased attention from traditional and new media.
On the other hand, visibility comes in degrees, and it is equally conceivable that members could enjoy either too much or too little attention. The former could expose lay citizens serving in the chamber to uncharitable treatment or confrontation with politicians or experts in the media, which may prove detrimental to members’ performance. Conversely, the chamber may lack the strong personalities vital for generating social uptake, as members are selected without regard for the personality traits or rhetorical gifts privileged in elections. Likewise, opaque institutional arrangements may hide what the chamber, in fact, does. In both cases, the media might choose to focus on members themselves or the institution’s novelty rather than on disseminating arguments, reasons, and conclusions from deliberation.24
Taking the example of the EU, one proposal to increase visibility of European Parliament members involves democratic contestation and politicizing the EU agenda.25 Yet, directly, an EU-level sortition chamber might not increase contestation and politicization in its own body, nor is it obvious that it would indirectly help its counterpart (the elected parliament) to emphasize partisan lines and amplify interests.
Given all these uncertainties, it is more reasonable to advocate more gradual deliberative innovations, such as the institutionalization of consultative minipublics at the national or transnational level. Should these minipublics prove successful, there will likely emerge greater public and political will for further deliberative innovations, such as sortition chambers. If studied carefully, these interventions could also make clear the likely benefits and liabilities of a more ambitious move toward sortition.
Effective Consultation
In this section, we lay out the reasons why continuous embedded consultative minipublics further citizen deliberation and how they can avoid the problems plaguing earlier consultative experiments. We begin by examining reasons for preferring such minipublics before taking up the example of a project that we have recently submitted at the EU level to institutionalize consultative minipublics. We then advance a design proposal for combining existing consultation procedures with decentralized minipublics as effective tools for deliberation, legitimacy seeking, and capacity building when properly integrated in the deliberative system.26
Reasons for Preferring Consultative Minipublics
Our argument for continuous embedded consultative minipublics has two parts. First, we contend that consultative minipublics are preferable to empowered ones. Second, we argue that consultative minipublics consistently fail to achieve social uptake owing to poor or critical media coverage.
Minipublics can be granted decision-making or agenda-setting power. Regarding decision-making power, no minipublic has been given ultimate decision-making power, to date, as such bodies lack familiar forms of public accountability, in the sense of being held to account by the public on whose behalf they would decide. Some minipublics have experimented with intermediate forms of decision-making power, as with the citizens’ assemblies on electoral reform in British Columbia and Ontario and those on constitutional reform in Ireland, Iceland, and Luxembourg.27 The Canadian citizens’ assemblies were granted the power to choose a new voting system that would then be put to public referendum. In part, this owed to organizers’ recognition that the assembly group “did not have the requisite authority to speak exclusively for the people.”28 After the British Columbia referenda narrowly missed a 60 percent threshold in a special provincial election (and a majority of voters rejected the Ontario referendum), no similar experiments in intermediate decision-making power were attempted.
In the case of Iceland and Luxembourg, citizens were granted the power to elaborate proposals on preselected areas of constitutional reform, which would then be discussed and voted on by the parliament. In Iceland, constitutional reform was still more ambitious, as it granted citizens the power to draft a new constitution combining electoral and participative procedures, subject to advisory referendum and parliamentary approval. Whereas a majority of Iceland’s citizens backed the 2012 referendum on the draft constitution, the decision on the bill for a new constitution was delegated to the following parliament and remains in limbo. The constitutional process in Luxembourg finds itself in a similar position after rejection of the 2015 referendum’s three questions concerning specific constitutional reforms.29
In contrast, Ireland’s government seems to have taken the Constitutional Convention seriously, as they answered the latter’s initial reports in a timely fashion, and two referenda took place in spring 2015 on questions raised by the convention, of which one (marriage equality) passed. Of the examples cited here, it qualifies as the most successful experience at the level of policy output.30
Yet the lessons from these experiments show that intermediate decision-making power alone is no guarantee of efficacy, nor are organizers and policy makers ready to entrust a minipublic with ultimate authority. Moreover, in none of these cases did the minipublic have the power to set the agenda. Instead, they were free to decide within a predefined set of parameters. Even intermediate decision-making power is deemed too much to pair with agenda-setting authority.
In these same cases, social uptake was weak, partly due to poor or critical media coverage. In the British Columbia case, surveys found that the public felt uninformed on the subject.31 British Columbians were unsure what the ballot question meant, and many were surprised that a referendum was taking place at all. Though the referendum was nearly successful, with 55 percent turnout, many voters relied on preconceived notions when marking their ballots. They lacked even a distilled version of the electoral system education that assembly members had received. Likewise, in the Ontario case, “the Assembly’s recommendations were also not widely discussed nor well understood by the public at large.”32 The Iceland case saw similar uptake problems due to the complexity of the process and to failures in organizing the elections to vote for members of the citizens’ constituent assembly.33
All in all, this analysis shows the difficulty of implementing, let alone institutionalizing, empowered minipublics, due to political resistance, public skepticism, limited social uptake, poor or critical media coverage, and organizational failures. The relative success of the Irish case suggests—in our historical phase of sortition ignorance—that minipublics can be effective only if they meet four conditions: include politicians in the process; give citizens intermediate decision-making power on a predefined agenda; leave the final decision to political representatives or sovereign citizens through referendum; and organize them regularly on a broader range of topics, other than as one-off attempts at constitutional or electoral reform.
This last condition would institutionalize (or embed) minipublics and help to overcome pitfalls that noninstitutionalized (or dissociated) versions invariably face, in particular social and political uptake.34 Put differently, no amount of empowerment can overcome the lack of institutionalization. If these experiments remain sporadic affairs, we will be unable to build the trust in minipublics required to introduce successfully something as ambitious as a sortition chamber. In the next section, we take the EU as an example to show how institutionalizing citizens’ minipublics is feasible and desirable even in such a complex multilingual setting.
EU Citizens’ Consultation
The example in question is a project that we have recently submitted at the EU level to institutionalize consultative minipublics when the European Commission organizes public hearings on its initiatives. Over the past decade, the EU has organized several projects to expand citizens’ participation in policy making, from voting to engaging with EU-level institutions and holding them to account.35 These projects have taken different forms including deliberative consultation (European Citizens’ Consultation), deliberative polling (Europolis), and petition systems (European Citizens’ Initiative). They have taken place with different kinds of communication (virtual or face-to-face) at different geographical levels (national, cross-border, or pan-European).
A recent analysis of such experiments suggested that, although valuable from a civic perspective, they did not fulfill their democratic ambition of informing and empowering a significant number of lay citizens on complex EU issues.36 Having reached similar conclusions at the national level, we recommended a new strategy in a recent presentation taken up by the European Economic and Social Committee. One can break this experimental deadlock without transforming EU institutional settings by introducing minipublics within the context of the European Commission’s public consultation website, previously known as “Your Voice in Europe.”37 Originally designed to allow stakeholders to contribute to commission initiatives, it has since evolved to become a broadly used consultation tool for stakeholders and citizens.38 This tool serves three purposes: allow the commission to make use of external expertise and thus create better policies; ensure that EU actions are coherent and transparent; and increase the EU’s democratic legitimacy by giving citizens greater voice in the decision-making process.39
Unlike other EU deliberative experiments, this consultation comes with minimal standards aiming to ensure that consultation is clear, inclusive, transparent, and sufficiently long (at least twelve weeks). More importantly, it also requires that the commission provides feedback, which involves acknowledging receipt of contributions and publishing them; publishing and displaying consultation results; and giving adequate feedback on how results were taken into consideration in the policy-making process.40
Currently, the commission struggles to provide feedback to individual contributions within a reasonable time. A May 2017 report shows that the commission failed to give participants feedback in roughly one-third of public consultations processed in 2016.41 This delay owes to the high number of consultations to process (around one hundred per year) and the chronic lack of human resources facing the EU.
Likewise, lay citizens are almost absent from the consultative process, which is dominated by civil-society organizations, public authorities, and research centers.42 Significant citizen participation occurred in the form of either petitions or consultations conducted as online surveys in an essentially multiple-choice format.43 In other words, significant citizen participation most often proved superficial and had little social uptake. Although the reasons for this are well known (that is, topic complexity, lack of interest in EU affairs, and the procedure’s low visibility), we see a way to reverse this trend.
Combining EU Consultation with Decentralized Minipublics
We contend that the strong imbalance in favor of organized groups can be tackled by introducing decentralized minipublics (in the different member states) to deliberate on select commission initiatives. If correctly designed and implemented, this process would enable diverse voices to be heard (through sociodemographic and geographical representativeness) when new EU initiatives are elaborated. It would, therefore, contribute to meeting the three objectives of EU public consultations—namely, better policy, coherence and transparency, and democratic legitimacy.
As we will argue in the last section of this chapter, if such consultative practices are regularly repeated and adapted at the national level (such as for select parliamentary and governmental initiatives), it would familiarize citizens with minipublics as an efficient consultative method and with the features and concepts that minipublics share with a sortition chamber. Before returning to possible transitions toward a sortition chamber, we should first sketch how these minipublics should be organized for efficient inclusion in the EU decision-making process and for increased information and participation among lay citizens. Specifically, we lay out initial proposals concerning issue selection, citizen selection, minipublic setup, and consultation outcomes.
Regarding issue selection, since it would make little sense to foresee consultation on all possible topics, we suggest that consultation be organized on a selection of topics concerning major initiatives (such as initiatives involving high costs, new legislation, or a large number of citizens). Similar to participative procedures like the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, a mixed commission—comprising political officials from the relevant decision-making bodies, organizers, and a sample of citizens—would select the topics to be discussed by the national minipublics.44 The example of the Irish Constitutional Convention—comprising one-third political representatives and two-thirds citizens—suggests that involving politicians in the consultative process may be necessary to guarantee success, while benefiting both lay participants and consultation outcomes.45
Concerning citizen selection and minipublic setup, we favor decentralized consultation involving a limited number of citizens, of which one good example is the European Citizens’ Consultations.46 In each territorial unit, minipublics of thirty to sixty participants would be selected on the basis of representative sociodemographic criteria. To rationalize organizational and budgetary costs, the national commission representation could host these minipublics in the EU. In other cases, one could appeal to decision-makers, foundations, or wealthy individuals for funding.
To prepare for deliberation, the minipublic would receive a briefing from the initiative’s opponents and proponents, as well as neutral experts. Using these sources, their own values and third-party research, minipublic members would weigh the propositions’ pros and cons by means of facilitation techniques enabling all viewpoints to be heard and points of consensus to be uncovered. Depending on the topic discussed, the session could run from one to several full days. Once deliberations concluded, participants would summarize the different viewpoints (pro and con), remaining questions, and recommendations for courses of action in a national synthesis report. This would be made public and submitted to the commission or legislature with the request to take an official, justified position.
Important efforts should be made throughout the process to make the consultation accessible and visible. This might include promoting public events and deepening collaboration with national institutions, civil-society organizations, schools, national public media, and social media. Following the example of the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, minipublic participants could be invited on traditional media to debate the topic and inform the public about this innovative consultation method. This would likely have a positive impact on a population that increasingly identifies with opinions expressed by other “ordinary” citizens over and against “professional politicians” or “bureaucrats.”
If such consultations can be implemented at the European level—that is, characterized by the usage of different languages, high levels of complexity, and strong resilience to reform—it should be that much easier to implement them at the national levels both from a legal and practical perspective. Indeed, a similar initiative has already been experimented in the New South Wales Parliament in Australia.47 In the last concluding section, we will argue that a broad, decentralized institutionalization of minipublics is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to lay the social and psychological foundations for implementing a sortition chamber.
Toward a Sortition Chamber
In this section, we contend that the institutionalization of consultative minipublics is the logical, necessary next step before we can seriously consider introducing a sortition chamber. As an intermediary step to a sortition chamber, institutionalized consultative minipublics will prove useful in at least four ways: testing potential behavioral changes in randomly selected participants within a future sortition chamber; gaining citizens’ trust and support; gaining decision-makers’ trust and support; and reinforcing citizens’ links to a future sortition chamber and their ability to hold the chamber to account indirectly.
As we argued earlier, introducing a sortition chamber presents two opposed dangers, the severity of which are difficult to gauge without empirical evidence. On one hand, a sortition chamber risks becoming a chamber of professionalized citizens, therefore losing its genuine link with the public. On the other, a longer stay in power, combined with a lack of political experience, could increase the risk of interest group influence and partisan contagion. In both cases, sortition chamber members would be assimilated among other politicians, with no net increase in democratic legitimacy and trust. This threat must be seriously weighed before introducing a sortition chamber.
Institutionalizing consultative minipublics would allow us to test the extent to which time spent in such minipublics affects lay citizens’ behavior and autonomy. For instance, it would be particularly relevant to compare, over a limited time frame (such as one year), a continuous minipublic participating in all consultations with newly selected citizens for each consultation. This experimental approach would offer important lessons not just on whether lay citizens’ behavior and autonomy are affected by long-term participation, but also on how a sortition chamber should be designed to avoid these dangers.
Citizens’ Support
As far as citizens are concerned, institutionalized consultative minipublics should increase their awareness of sortition’s functioning and benefits. Supposing that such minipublics were implemented regularly and successfully, the sortition process would increasingly be perceived as a valid method. Public acceptance of the idea would increase to the extent that the minipublics demonstrated the process’s transparency and accessibility, incorporated citizens’ input, and decreased the net influence of organized political and economic interests.
To evaluate the public’s readiness to support a sortition chamber, national and international surveys should start tracking key attitudes. Standard questions related to perception and trust in democracy should be augmented with items measuring knowledge of—and attitudes toward—institutionalized consultative minipublics and related concepts, such as sortition.
Decision-Makers’ Support
If these minipublics are efficient and the public calls for increased sortition in political institutions, public officials may come to view a sortition chamber as a necessary, inevitable reform. As renewed populism shows, with increasing appeal of authoritarian regimes and distrust in “classical representative institutions,” the survival of the democratic system conceived at the end of the eighteenth century is at risk.
The political class, which largely backs the institutional permanence of democratic values and practices, would have no option but to reform the existing system by including sortition-based political practices as one part of broader reforms. They might do this first through institutionalized consultative minipublics, then via a sortition chamber. From a self-interested perspective, their participation in the design of this reform would allow them to retain strong influence over the process and to ensure their survival, in one capacity or another.
Citizens’ Links and Holding to Account
Finally, from an institutional perspective, we maintain that institutionalized consultative minipublics would inherently strengthen the raison d’être behind a sortition chamber by building lay citizens’ feedback into the agenda and main legislative initiatives. Moreover, the presence of such minipublics could also heighten the sortition chamber’s interbody accountability. If one and the same minipublic were maintained from a legislative proposal’s beginnings until its implementation, it could act as an agent verifying whether the decision reached is correctly executed—and whether sortition chamber members deliberate free of influence or threats, political or economic. This would arguably be the most efficient protective procedure, as both owe their existence and legitimacy to sortition.
Conclusion
In sum, if institutionalized consultative minipublics were successfully implemented, it would not only lay the foundation for a sortition chamber but also serve to gather citizens’ opinions and maintain government’s indirect accountability to citizens. From an interinstitutional perspective, a sortition chamber might become the privileged link with lay citizens who are not involved in interest or partisan groups. Meanwhile, the elected chamber would continue representing organized interests and broader ideologies through political parties. Thus, interest groups would find two distinct entry points for their demands.
This incremental reform could create a new institutional equilibrium wherein citizens feel better represented (through institutionalized consultative minipublics and a sortition chamber) and organized groups continue playing an important role in gathering different interests (through the elected chamber). Though a striking solution in theory, we have yet to see whether it would hold up in practice. Only time will tell, for deliberative democracy as for all else.