Seeing Like a Citizen: How Being a Participant in a Citizens' Assembly Changed Everything I Thought I Knew about Deliberative Minipublics

Abstract

This paper presents a participant-observation account of my experience as a randomly selected participant at a Citizens’ Assembly. I reflect on what the unique experience of ‘seeing like a citizen’ can add to accepted understandings and practices of mini-public deliberation. I find that the experience, though energising, exciting and ultimately hugely worthwhile, also upended many of my prior assumptions grounded in academic scholarship and previous experience as an observer, facilitator and organiser of such events. I draw on the experience to shed new light on the capacity of assembled citizens to: accurately reflect the concerns of the broader community; soberly digest and reflect on evidence; earnestly engage in reasoned argumentation with one another; carefully reach sophisticated or thought-through recommendations as a collective; or ultimately gain a broader sense of efficacy from their engagement as individuals. The point in making these observations is not to critique moves toward democratic innovation (or the specific Citizens’ Assembly I was a part of), but to push forward scholarship and practice to respond and adapt to these little considered challenges.

Asymmetric Communication and Internal Exclusion in Everyday Political Talk

“…Others accused this literature of downplaying the democratic element in a shift toward "participatory elitism where citizens who participate in face-to-face deliberative initiatives (and only a small fraction do) have more democratic legitimacy than the mass electorate" (Chambers, 2009, p. 344;Lafont, 2020, p. 138-160;Tanasoca, 2020). This is vividly illustrated by a recent study of mini-publics in the UK that calculated that since the inception of this innovative institution not more than about 0.002 percent of the population had yet the chance to be selected for participation in such an event (Boswell, 2021). In line with these perspectives, the present article departs from the premise that in deliberative democracy authoritative decisionmaking should enjoy legitimacy only when preceded and nurtured by inclusive and egalitarian discussions within the citizenry at large (Schmitt-Beck, forthcoming).…”

Policy implementation in crisis: Lessons from the Philippines

“…The event engaged with ECQ policy measures already enacted and the research team did not formulate explicit alternative policy options or adjustments for the participants. Purely bottom-up formulations of the issues and subsequent policy recommendations can be problematic (Boswell, 2021), so the research team anticipated many of the key issues raised by participants during the first day (e.g. masking requirements, quarantine practices and facilities, jobs and livelihoods, curfews, and church restrictions) and enlisted the support of appropriate experts.…”

Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means

“…Instead, abductive approaches allow researchers to observe practices in light of theoretical discussions and concepts but also to reflect on what practices may tell us about theories—their limits, their flaws, their need of reconceptualization. To work abductively with deliberative theory is to consciously challenge ourselves, as theorists and researchers, to commit epistemologically to deliberative ideals—how we think we know what deliberation looks like should reflect a commitment to inclusive, reflective research and theorizing (see also Boswell, 2021; Felicetti, 2021).…”