How to re-enchant politics through citizen deliberation

Introduction

Political scientists around the world tend to agree that representative democracy is in crisis.[1] Many citizens and NGOs are therefore calling for increased citizen participation in the policymaking process, and many public bodies are experimenting with deliberative initiatives such as citizen assemblies, juries or councils, and consultative committees.

Through a more inclusive, transparent and accountable process, they are hoping to restore the political legitimacy of public administration. What is political legitimacy? While definitions vary, the rationale behind deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) is often focused on improving rational dimensions of the legitimacy of decision-making processes, frequently explained through Vivien Schmidt’s 3 dimensions of input, output and throughput legitimacy.[2]

In today’s polarised society, however, politics can feel illegitimate even if rational criteria such as fair and free elections are met, as we have seen with Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020.

PLNT and Dreamocracy’s research and experiments show that, in addition to the aforementioned dimensions, deliberation can produce emotions legitimacy in participants by taking into account their individual experiences and creating higher levels of empathy towards each other and towards public officials.

What are the mechanisms behind this, and how can we foster emotions legitimacy?

Insights

Through a series of long-form interviews with individuals involved in DMPs as well as ethnographic observations of citizen deliberations in Belgium, we have gathered insights into the role of emotions in deliberation and specific elements of process design to better take them into account.

It has thus become clear that the role of affect in human reasoning is not thought about enough when it comes to deliberative processes. While nearly all those we interviewed acknowledged that politics, decision-making or reasoning in general cannot and should not be thought of as purely rational, they also admitted that the rationale behind and the process design of deliberative initiatives tend to be justified through entirely rational criteria (i.e. political legitimacy, which is often conceptualised as a goal in-itself achievable through normative prerequisites). Accordingly, deliberative processes prioritize elements such as inclusiveness, transparency, equality and accountability, which should in theory provide the decisions reached with higher levels of legitimacy. However, as a representative of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy Europe (FIDE) puts it, representative democracy has also evolved to focus very much on these rational, abovementioned “on-paper”[3] dimensions of legitimacy (i.e. input, throughput & output), which have not sufficiently contributed, evidently, to countering the crisis in trust in politics.

What, then, makes deliberative democracy different? We argue that democratic deliberation, similar to protest movements and political campaigns such as Obama 2008 or Trump 2016, is particularly adept at channeling a more “diffuse”[4] kind of legitimacy. In this regard, thinkers such as Jane Mansbridge have recently moved to account for the interdependency of “cognition and emotion”[5]. We would now like to expand this line of thinking by accounting for this emotional dimension in our concept of political legitimacy.

Indeed, participation in democratic deliberation, i.e. being able to share one’s own perspectives, being listened to and empowered to contribute to decision-making processes, appears to provide citizens with a “deep sense of satisfaction”[6], resulting in an added sense of legitimacy. While the relationship between satisfaction with deliberation and legitimacy has been briefly investigated before[7], we argue that it cannot be understood through pre-existing frameworks of political legitimacy, such as Vivien Schmidt’s influential dimensions of input, output and throughput. We therefore call this emotions legitimacy, which we define as “the legitimization fostered by the careful acknowledgement of people’s deeper values, aspirations, worries, and general feelings to inform policymaking”.[8]

Learnings

What have we learnt? The evidence indicates that deliberative mini-publics, if they are well done, can act as a remedy for fading levels of trust in politics by raising emotions legitimacy, both in participants as well as organisers.

How can we adapt processes in order to better channel this and possibly take the effects beyond the mini-public?

We should seek:

• to acknowledge the role of emotions in human political reasoning and provide participants with a safe space to express themselves

• skilled, emotionally intelligent facilitators

• to empower democratic deliberation in the policymaking process

• greater transparency throughout the process, especially during the random-sampling phase

• more expansive mediatisation efforts, such as TV, social media and documentary coverage, in order to convey the participants’ experiences

What do we take away from this?

As Simon Niemeyer, Director of the University of Canberra’s Center for Deliberative Democracy and Governance, pointed out: We still do not fully understand deliberative processes and the mechanisms behind their legitimacy.

While they started out as small scale experiments in deliberation, given the impossibility of making the whole population deliberate, scholars now believe that the propagation of deliberative mini-publics can lead to a globally more deliberative and “democratically fit”[9] society, potentially raising overall levels of emotions legitimacy. In order to achieve this, we need to see democratic deliberation in a multitude of settings, such as schools, companies and clubs, which would weave the practice into our cultural fabric, according to Jean-Benoit Pilet, Professor at the ULB’s Cevipol.[10]

Therefore, in the end, “it doesn’t really matter what the exact intentions were behind [a deliberative mini-public]”[11], as Stephen Boucher, founder of Dreamocracy, put it. Ideally, the mere propagation of deliberative initiatives contributes to the overall evolution of best practices, to higher levels of trust in politics and thus to the proliferation of emotions legitimacy. Consequently, our study suggests that democratic deliberation can “re-enchant politics”[12] through a better acknowledgement of people’s lived experiences, values and emotions.

Endnotes

1. Hélène Landemore, ‘Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative Democracy’, Daedalus 146, no. 3 (July 2017): 53, https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00446.

2. Vivien Schmidt, ‘Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union Revisited’, 2012, 33.

3. Anonymous Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 31 May 2021.

4. Anonymous Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 31 May 2021.

5. Jane Mansbridge, ‘A Minimalist Definition of Deliberation’, in Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies, Equity and Development (The World Bank, 2015), 95, https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0501-1_ch2.

6. Simon Niemeyer, Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 13 July 2021.

7. Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Peter Muhlberger, ‘Agreement and Disagreement in Group Deliberation: Effects on Deliberation Satisfaction, Future Engagement, and Decision Legitimacy’, Political Communication 26, no. 2 (11 May 2009): 173–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600902850775.

8. Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin, and Lex Paulson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance (Forthcoming) (Routledge, 2021), https://www.dreamocracy.eu/project/smarter-together/.

9. Claudia Chwalisz, Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 24 June 2021.

10. Jean-Benoit Pilet, Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 14 June 2021.

11. Stephen Boucher, Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 26 May 2021.

12. Jonathan Moskovic, Interview, interview by Jeff van Luijk, 28 May 2021.