When Regular Citizens Have The Mandate, Time And Information To Decide On Complex Issues, They Overcome Their Differences And Develop Sensible Solutions

Why?

Contemporary democracy has several limitations including short-term thinking, permanent election-style campaigning and policy failures. This can be drastically reduced by using deliberative democracy. This brings together a representative cross-section of society to let citizens learn, deliberate and draft policy recommendations. Their proposals are often stronger, cheaper and identified more quickly than what is the norm today.

Current elected politicians often do not reflect the population, similarly, during traditional participatory events, we see the same type of citizen appear. People with lower educational attainment, minorities and young people participate less. If citizens are carefully selected by random selection, you get a much better reflection of your population. You will for example for the first time always have a parity by gender in the room. This strengthens the representative quality of our democracy.

The quality of democratic deliberation also increases strongly via deliberative democracy. Politics often resembles a battle between two groups, one of which is the “winner”. The ’winning’ group drafts policy ‘against’ the losing minority, which leads to unnecessary polarisation. Regular citizens do not need to be re-elected and did not make public promises, they are therefore typically much more open to information from different sides on a topic. This means they can look as a group for solutions that have the largest amount of support, giving their recommendations significant legitimacy.

Deliberative democracy has been proven in individual cases over the past twenty years, it is time to put it more broadly into practice. If these processes are legally enshrined in our political system, we will have a better way to come to policy decisions and strengthen our democracy.