Hugh Pope

“All those who would trust a Citizens’ Assembly to take decisions for them, stand up!”

Half of the 50-strong audience rose to their feet in response to the question posed by Bridie Nathanson, co-founder and joint animator of the Brussels debating club Full Circle. 

A sign of changing times? The unexpected endorsement of deliberative democracy came before my fellow pro-Citizens’ Assembly presenter and I had even begun to speak: Eva Rovers, co-founder of the Dutch deliberative democracy organizers Bureau Burgerberaad, and myself, co-editor of my father Maurice Pope’s posthumous book, The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, published exactly a year ago.

Ideas do sometimes travel faster than you realize. One of them is certainly that of the Citizens’ Assembly: the idea that good policy proposals to solve polarizing problems can come from a group of people randomly selected from a community. This method is also known as sortition. The randomly selected members meet, inform themselves, deliberate with the help of facilitators, hear everyone’s views and find new ways forward. 

When my classicist father first typed a manuscript proposing similar kinds of assemblies in the 1980s, as a modernized version of ancient Greek democracy, none of his usual publishers would touch the work. Now there have been at least 800 sortition-based Citizens’ Assemblies around the world since the first one in British Columbia in 2004, most of them in the past decade. 

Belgium, where I live, has a permanent Citizens’ Assembly for the German-language community, and the city of Paris has one too. The German Bundestag is running a series of three. In Britain, columnists and podcasters are increasingly referencing, even approving of the concept. It even (briefly) surfaced as a 2024 UK election campaign issue when a Labour Party adviser said these assemblies were a good idea.

When Bridie gave me the floor, I spoke a little about how my mother Johanna found the lost manuscript of The Keys to Democracy in the family library after my father’s death in 2019, the publishers Imprint Academic took it on and it is now endorsed by many in the fast-growing field of sortition studies. But mostly I spoke about the experience of being an official observer at France’s recent Citizens’ Assembly on the End of Life.

I wanted the audience to hear and feel how inspiring it was to see ordinary people from a cross-section of society – from an immigrant baggage handler at Charles de Gaulle Airport to a high official of the French Central Bank – all contribute to discussions and reach a clear decision. Over 75 per cent of the 184 citizens endorsed the idea of possible assisted death, but 95 per cent – that is, including those who were against it – endorsed the report, because it had taken their views on palliative care and other mitigating alternatives into account.

The Assembly was inspiring too because of the sense of collaborative joy shared by the citizen participants. I spoke of my amazement that my father, a proud but shy person who spent most waking hours in his library, had understood how random selection would empower people to simply represent themselves. “Democracy liberates,” he foresaw (p. 171). “The less that people feel belittled and the more that they feel they belong to society, the greater will be their zest for life and the more fruitful the energy that they will display.”

Eva Rovers told the story of how she pivoted from art history to deliberative democracy in response to what she saw as the failure of the current government system to come up with policies to deal with the climate emergency. The organization she leads is at the forefront of Citizens’ Assemblies taking off in municipalities all over the Netherlands.

Organized well, she said, Citizens’ Assemblies are proving good at finding innovative solutions to tricky problems. She gave the example of how one Assembly discussing the expansion of a nuclear power plant came up with an unexpected formula to quell disquiet in the coastal province of Zeeland. One of the ideas it suggested was that housing for workers should, after the completion of the project, be offered for occupation first to families of local people. “No architects would ever have thought of that on their own,” she said.

Our Full Circle discussion afterward seemed intrigued by deliberative democracy, even if not all participants were convinced that Citizens’ Assemblies could ever replace elections. My view, refined over my past year of book talks, is that any change will of course take time. Limiting the power of kings started (in England, anyway) 800 years ago; originally aristocratic parliaments took centuries to become the locus of power; and when parliamentary electorates began to expand beyond the elites, it took nearly two centuries to get to universal suffrage in most countries.

But it’s been more than a decade now that groups like Freedom House have recorded backsliding in the long global expansion of elected representative government. Polls show how many people are frustrated at the failure of elected bodies to make decisions in the public interest. I also argued that if we don’t find a path to more efficient government by expanding democracy beyond the confines of party politics and elections, even more people will be attracted to another seemingly more efficient alternative: authoritarian rule.

For sure, it may take many more decades before a majority of the population accepts the idea of giving Citizens’ Assemblies (or whatever develops from them) the full right to make recommendations, let alone have decision-making power. But engaging with so many people open to new ideas for better public decision-making, and seeing several more copies of my late Dad’s once-spurned book on sortition being sold, I feel it is not crazy to hope that change is on its way.