Mini-publics and the public: challenges and opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conversation between Sarah Castell and Stephen Elstub: “…there’s a real problem here: the public are only going to get to know about a mini-public if it gets media coverage, but the media will only cover it if it makes an impact. But it’s more likely to make an impact if the public are aware of it. That’s a tension that mini-publics need to overcome, because it’s important that they reach out to the public. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how inclusive the recruitment is and how well it’s done. It doesn’t matter how well designed the process is. It is still a small number of people involved, so we want mini-publics to be able to influence public opinion and stimulate public debate. And if they can do that, then it’s more likely to affect elite opinion and debate as well, and possibly policy.

One more thing is that, people in power aren’t in the habit of sharing power. And that’s why it’s very difficult. I think the politicians are mainly motivated around this because they hope it’s going to look good to the electorate and get them some votes, but they are also worried about low levels of trust in society and what the ramifications of that might be. But in general, people in power don’t give it away very easily…

Part of the problem is that a lot of the research around public views on deliberative processes was done through experiments. It is useful, but it doesn’t quite tell us what will happen when mini-publics are communicated to the public in the messy real public sphere. Previously, there just weren’t that many well-known cases that we could actually do field research on. But that is starting to change.

There’s also more interdisciplinary work needed in this area. We need to improve how communication strategies around citizens’ assembly are done – there must be work that’s relevant in political communication studies and other fields who have this kind of insight…(More)”.

More-than-human governance experiments in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Claudia Chwalisz & Lucy Reid: “There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human intelligences.

‘More-than-human’ was initially coined by David Abram in his 1997 book The Spell of the Sensuous. The term refers to the animate earth and the impossibility of separating our human- ness from our relationship with it. Our exploration related to governance has been around how we might meaningfully consider our relationship with the living world when taking decisions.

We have undertaken a short exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to begin to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings…

There were three main types of approaches to applying the idea of more-than-human governance in practice, sometimes with an overlap:

  • Rights-based;
  • Representation-focused, and 
  • Artistic.

We identified four key groups we felt were missing from our initial research and discussions:

  • Indigenous voices;
  • More non-specialists and artists;
  • A few critical voices, and
  • People using technology in novel ways that reshape our relationship with the living world…(More)”

We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Help Us Solve The Climate Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Graham Smith: “Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision-making. How might they help us address the climate crisis? The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant effects on citizens’ lives. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly. Climate assemblies show us how this can be done.

This book explains the variety of climate assemblies that have taken place so far at local, national and international levels and explains why they have captured the imagination of government and activists alike. It examines the different contexts and designs of climate assemblies and assesses their impact. Drawing lessons from current practice, the book demonstrates how assemblies can take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics and how they can have a real and lasting impact on climate policy and politics…(More)”.

Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lily L. Tsai and Alex Pentland: “Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups. Discussions about community issues could take place among small numbers of people with similar concerns. As coordination across larger distances evolved, the costs of travel required representatives from each clan or smaller group to participate in deliberations and decision-making involving multiple local communities. Divergence in the interests of representatives and their constituents opened up opportunities for corruption and elite capture.

Technologies now enable very large numbers of people to communicate, coordinate, and make collective decisions on the same platform. We have new opportunities for digitally enabled civic participation and direct democracy that scale for both the smallest and largest groups of people. Quantitative experiments, sometimes including tens of millions of individuals, have examined inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. Their findings suggest that large networks of nonexperts can make practical, productive decisions and engage in collective action under certain (1) conditions. (2) These conditions include shared knowledge among individuals and communities with similar concerns, and information about their recent actions and outcomes…(More)”

Design Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ilaria Mariani et al: “This open access book examines how the adoption of Design Thinking (DT) can support public organisations in overcoming some of the current barriers in e-participation. Scholars have discussed the adoption of technology to strengthen public engagement through e-participation, streamline and enhance the relationship between government and society, and improve accessibility and effectiveness. However, barriers persist, necessitating further research in this area. By analysing e-participation barriers emerging from the literature and aligning them with notions in the DT literature, this book identifies five core DT practices to enhance e-participation: (i) Meaning creation and sense-making, (ii) Publics formation, (iii) Co-production, (iv) Experimentation and prototyping, and (v) Changing organisational culture. As a result, this book provides insights into enhancing tech-aided public engagement and promoting inclusivity for translating citizen input into tangible service implementations. The book triangulates qualitative analysis of relevant literature in the fields of e-participation and DT with knowledge from European projects experimenting with public participation activities implying experimentation with digital tools. This research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical frameworks and practical application, ultimately contributing to more effective e-participation and digital public services…(More)”.

Make it make sense: the challenge of data analysis in global deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Iñaki Goñi: “From climate change to emerging technologies to economic justice to space, global and transnational deliberation is on the rise. Global deliberative processes aim to bring citizen-centred governance to issues that no single nation can resolve alone. Running deliberative processes at this scale poses a unique set of challenges. How to select participants, make the forums accountable, impactful, fairly designed, and aware of power imbalances, are all crucial and open questions….

Massifying participation will be key to invigorating global deliberation. Assemblies will have a better chance of being seen as legitimate, fair, and publicly supported if they involve thousands or even millions of diverse participants. This raises an operational challenge: how to systematise political ideas from many people across the globe.

In a centralised global assembly, anything from 50 to 500 citizens from various countries engage in a single deliberation and produce recommendations or political actions by crossing languages and cultures. In a distributed assembly, multiple gatherings are convened locally that share a common but flexible methodology, allowing participants to discuss a common issue applied both to local and global contexts. Either way, a global deliberation process demands the organisation and synthesis of possibly thousands of ideas from diverse languages and cultures around the world.

How could we ever make sense of all that data to systematise citizens’ ideas and recommendations? Most people turn their heads to computational methods to help reduce complexity and identify patterns. First up, one technique for analysing text amounts to little more than simple counting, through which we can produce something like a frequency table or a wordcloud…(More)”.

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Henry Tessler et al: “We asked whether an AI system based on large language models (LLMs) could successfully capture the underlying shared perspectives of a group of human discussants by writing a “group statement” that the discussants would collectively endorse. Inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, we designed the “Habermas Machine” to iteratively generate group statements that were based on the personal opinions and critiques from individual users, with the goal of maximizing group approval ratings. Through successive rounds of human data collection, we used supervised fine-tuning and reward modeling to progressively enhance the Habermas Machine’s ability to capture shared perspectives. To evaluate the efficacy of AI-mediated deliberation, we conducted a series of experiments with over 5000 participants from the United Kingdom. These experiments investigated the impact of AI mediation on finding common ground, how the views of discussants changed across the process, the balance between minority and majority perspectives in group statements, and potential biases present in those statements. Lastly, we used the Habermas Machine for a virtual citizens’ assembly, assessing its ability to support deliberation on controversial issues within a demographically representative sample of UK residents…(More)”.

Ensuring citizens’ assemblies land

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Graham Smith: “…the evidence shows that while the recommendations of assemblies are well considered and could help shape more robust policy, too often they fail to land. Why is this?

The simple answer is that so much time, resources and energy is spent on organising the assembly itself – ensuring the best possible experience for citizens – that the relationship with the local authority and its decision-making processes is neglected.

First, the question asked of the assembly does not always relate to a specific set of decisions about to be made by an authority. Is the relevant policy process open and ready for input? On a number of occasions assemblies have taken place just after a new policy or strategy has been agreed. Disastrous timing.

This does not mean assemblies should only be run when they are tied to a particular decision-making process. Sometimes it is important to open up a policy area with a broad question. And sometimes it makes sense to empower citizens to set the agenda and focus on the issues they find most compelling

The second element is the failure of authorities to prepare to receive recommendations from citizens.

One story is where the first a public official knew about an assembly was when its recommendations landed on their desk. They were not received in the best spirit.

Too often assemblies are commissioned by enthusiastic politicians and public officials who have not done the necessary work to ensure their colleagues are willing to give a considered response to the citizens’ recommendations. Too often an assembly will be organised by a department or ministry where the results require others in the authority to respond – but those other politicians and officials feel no connection to the process.

And too often, an assembly ends, and it is not clear who within the public authority has the responsibility to take the recommendations forward to ensure they are given a fair hearing across the authority.

For citizens’ assemblies to be effective requires political and administrative work well beyond just organising the assembly. If this is not done, it is not only a waste of resources, but it can do serious damage to democracy and trust as those citizens who have invested their time and energy into the process become disillusioned.

Those authorities where citizens’ assemblies have had meaningful impacts are those that have not only invested in the assembly, but also into preparing the authority to receive the recommendations. Often this has meant continuing support and resourcing for assembly members after the process. They are the best advocates for their work…(More)”


Leveraging AI for Democracy: Civic Innovation on the New Digital Playing Field

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Beth Kerley, Carl Miller, and Fernanda Campagnucci: “Like social media before them, new AI tools promise to change the game when it comes to civic engagement. These technologies offer bold new possibilities for investigative journalists, anticorruption advocates, and others working with limited resources to advance democratic norms.

Yet the transformation wrought by AI advances is far from guaranteed to work in democracy’s favor. Potential threats to democracy from AI have drawn wide attention. To better the odds for prodemocratic actors in a fluid technological environment, systematic thinking about how to make AI work for democracy is needed.

The essays in this report outline possible paths toward a prodemocratic vision for AI. An overview essay by Beth Kerley based on insights from an International Forum for Democratic Studies expert workshop reflects on the critical questions that confront organizations seeking to deploy AI tools. Fernanda Campagnucci, spotlighting the work of Open Knowledge Brasil to open up government data, explores how AI advances are creating new opportunities for citizens to scrutinize public information. Finally, Demos’s Carl Miller sheds light on how AI technologies that enable new forms of civic deliberation might change the way we think about democratic participation itself…(More)“.

Building Power, Safety, and Trust in Virtual Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dina Darwish: “Virtual communities are a new frontier in the digital landscape. While these spaces are only in their infancy, it will not be long before they become a part of much of the population’s daily life. Before that becomes the case, it is important that we instill guidelines and parameters to ensure that those interacting with these digital spaces feel safe within them and are able to use them to their fullest capacity.

Building Power, Safety, and Trust in Virtual Communities examines how online groups help people learn and change the way they think. In this book, different people with different academic backgrounds, methods, and personal experience with virtual groups look at this question. Case studies are included to help exemplify these findings. Together, these chapters discuss how virtual communities are built in ways that thinkers, researchers, and practitioners can understand…(More)”.