Why citizens' assemblies are not enough against populism

In recent years citizens' assemblies have become the most frequently cited answer to distrust of institutions. A few dozen people are drawn by lot, given time, documentation and experts, and asked for a recommendation on a difficult subject. More than seven hundred such exercises have been counted worldwide, and Europe has been the main laboratory.

Yanina Welp, a researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy of the Geneva Graduate Institute, argues that these instruments cannot do what is asked of them. They improve the quality of discussion, but they do not counter populism and do not on their own restore trust in institutions.

The central argument is a distinction: deliberating is not the same as having the capacity for political action. So-called mini-publics produce recommendations that are almost never binding, and their implementation depends entirely on outside actors, meaning governments and parliaments that may take them up or let them drop. The group discusses, but does not decide, and has no means of obliging anyone to follow through.

The comparison with populism makes the point clear. Populist movements build political identification and collective action: they give people a belonging and a way of acting together. Citizens' assemblies instead improve the ability to speak for a small group, the one selected by lot, without necessarily increasing everyone else's political capacity.

The Geneva case

The analysis has a precise local reference. Geneva this year abandoned a citizens' assembly that had been planned, and that decision lends itself to two opposite readings: a missed opportunity, or a realistic assessment of what the instrument can actually produce.

Welp's conclusion is not a call to stop experimenting. It is rather a lowering of expectations: democratic renewal, she writes, still depends on something older and harder to build, namely organisations that connect people to power.

In Switzerland the question has a particular shape. The country already has instruments that make the popular will binding, from the initiative to the referendum; the problem is therefore not the chance to have a say but participation in that say. Here too, the difference between speaking and counting remains the decisive variable.