Article by Richard Youngs: “…Amid much fretful worrying over the fragility of European democracy, citizen assemblies’ move to center stage is clearly a positive and promising development. However, all this success begs an obvious and uncomfortable question. As participative forums have inched toward mainstream status, democracy’s problems have continued to mount. Participative forums are now widespread, and yet a sense of democratic malaise persists and, if anything, has worsened.
So, has the mountain of democratic participation been scaled only for a view of future political renewal to remain obscured? Cruelly put, after so many years of hype about citizen assemblies and countless books and reports pushing them forward, has their multiplication ultimately failed to generate much democratic improvement?
A skeptical judgment would see the surge in citizen assemblies as being of limited political significance. As their numbers have increased, democracy scores have stagnated in many places or even worsened. In most European countries where assemblies have been numerous, the far right is on the march and gaining support. The limits to and doubts about mini deliberation have fallen one by one, and yet the results have been negligible. The current enthusiasm over using AI in deliberation is small matter compared with the so-called tech barons’ destruction of basic freedom and human agency worldwide.
A downbeat line on the spread of deliberative initiatives would be that assemblies are beneficial individually on specific topics but that it was naive ever to think they could help shore up democracy in any systemic sense. The implication is that it is better to let community-rooted assemblies do their work on prosaic issues and not overburden them with breathless talk and expectation about random selection replacing the traditional structures of electoral democracy…(More)”.
