Pepper D Culpepper, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy at Harvard University, Archon Fung, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard, and Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkley compare the Tomorrow's Europe deliberative poll to the Citizens Consultations undertaken by the EU earlier this year, and analyse some of the underlying aims. (Part 1)
Nearly every method of ascertaining the citizens' perspective relies upon a small number of actual citizens who, in some fashion, represent everyone else. Whereas the choices of designing electoral representation are well known - presidentialism or parliamentarianism? plurality rule or proportional representation? - the methods of direct citizen deliberation are novel and largely uncharted. It is therefore appropriate to experiment with a wide range of designs for public deliberation to identify the methods generate credible and useful citizens perspectives. Consider just a few of the important design choices.
First, who deliberates? That is, how should citizens be selected and organized to deliberate?
Both the European Citizens Consultations and Tomorrow's Europe used random selection methods. However, the ECC chose a federated deliberative design in which separate deliberations were held in the twenty-seven EU member states, after which representatives from those states gathered at a transnational deliberative event. Tomorrow's Europe brought around 400 randomly selected Europeans together for a three day deliberative event in Brussels. As John Gastil describes in this series, other designs such as citizen juries or planning cells convene much smaller numbers of people for more sustained discussions.
The right answer to this question depends upon what citizens are asked to deliberate about, empirical issues of fair representation and group dynamics, and the relationship of a designed deliberation to the larger political process.
Second, what should participants talk about? A citizens' perspective on what?
Participants in the European Citizens Consultations developed an agenda of priorities they thought to be most important for Europe. Environmental and economic impacts of energy use, social conditions and supports for families, and the Union's foreign policy and immigration emerged as the three top issues.
In the Tomorrow's Europe deliberations, participants were asked to consider different policy approaches and the desirability of coordinating these approaches across member-states of the EU in two broad domains: (i) labor market and pension policies and (ii) the foreign policy role of the EU.
Both Tomorrow's Europe and the ECC deliberations thus asked for citizen per-spectives on a highly aggregated set of policy orientations. In retrospect, it appears that one limitation of the ECC deliberations is that policy-makers have found it difficult to utilize their results. After all, European agencies are already working, in various ways, on all of the issues raised by participants. In the future, other deliberations may address questions and options directly facing policy makers so that citizens' conclusions may be taken directly into account in current policy decisions.
But public deliberation should not be limited to the role of handmaiden to Brussels policy-makers. When elite consensus is at variance with the citizens' perspective, public deliberation should illuminate that gap.
Third, how should a citizens' perspective relate to public decision-making?
The ECC, Tomorrow's Europe, and the other Plan D initiatives of the European Commission treat citizen deliberation as a kind of consultation - decision-makers can accept or reject the results as they see fit.
If policy-makers ignore the results of such deliberations, they only exacerbate the legitimacy deficits that Plan D seeks to repair. Therefore, public deliberation should be more thickly connected to decision-makers. At minimum, the relevant group of decision-makers (identified as part of the design process of public deliberation) ought to be required to respond publicly to the citizens' perspective that emerges from some deliberation. That is, they ought to offer public reasons about how their decisions take into account the citizens' perspective and respond to it; if they reject the results of public deliberation, they should be required to explain why. The citizens who devote their time and energy to considering some public issues earn this minimum of ac-countability. It may be appropriate for some public deliberations to exercise decision-making authority over some domain rather than being merely consultative.
Finally, how should a the small number of citizens who participate in any given public deliberation such as the ECC or Tomorrow's Europe relate to the larger European public - the hundreds of millions of citizens who do not participate in organized deliberations?
This is a critical problem that existing initiatives in public deliberation have largely failed to solve.
Sponsors and organizers of public deliberation usually seek media coverage, but that coverage is frequently limited.
There is also a deeper problem than the failure to generate publicity: the idea that a randomly selected sample of Europeans - whether 400 in Brussels last weekend or 1,800 across all 27 Member States earlier this year - speaks for me, a European citizen, can feel undemocratic, or at least far-fetched.
But all devices of political representation and voice - from elections to ref-erenda to mass protests - are democratic approximations. Deliberative polls and their kin can have comparative advantages under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, as long as events such as the ECC and Tomorrow's Europe seem like a political novelty or an elite invention, they will fail to secure the respect of not just reporters and their editors, but also of policy-makers and their fellow citizens.
If they are to succeed, innovations in public deliberation must offer an account of their democratic value. That is, what exactly do these condensed deliberative moments add to the intricate political and administrative machinery of the European Union? When done well, these events may generate a distinctive citizens' perspective that is now absent. When policy-makers heed that citizens' perspective, they act democratically. When citizens at large know that policy elites in Brussels have taken the citizens' perspective into account, they have a reason to regard those elites as more democratically legitimate.
