A quiet revolution has enlivened European democracy in the last several years: the spread of citizen assemblies at multiple levels across Europe. An EU-level citizen panel has just opened to reflect on the state of democracy itself—an event that would have seemed remarkable only a few years ago.

This trend offers an apparently positive counterweight to the antidemocratic spirit of the current era. And this needs stressing because it is a development rarely picked up by the media and think tank accounts that focus on the macropolitical dramas driving the illiberal zeitgeist.

The extent to which such citizen assemblies have become a regular, mainstream feature of European democracy is at first glance quite astonishing. Yet, the ubiquity of these assemblies now raises some difficult questions about their ultimate impact on democracy.

The Growth of Citizen Assemblies

Ten or fifteen years ago, small groups of participation advocates pushed for randomly selected assemblies, but most political scientists who focused on big political trends tended to be dismissive. They concentrated on what was still seen as the essence of democratic challenges, such as the rise of illiberal populist parties and all-consuming ideological clashes.

In the last decade, the skepticism toward mini deliberative forums has evaporated. Almost everyone now favors citizen assemblies. They are supported across the political spectrum, from the far left through the center to the far right. Books and articles on this subject now invariably tout assemblies as the solution to almost all of democracy’s ills. Even writers focused on high-level questions of political philosophy and general regime-type trends routinely throw in a call for local deliberation as a means of reviving liberal democracy.

These assemblies have increased in number to the extent that they are now a standard and firmly embedded part of democratic processes in many European countries. While experts still use the label of democratic innovations to refer to them, in truth they have existed for quite some time; they are more the middle-aged stalwart than the radically erupting youth of European decisionmaking. Many other strands of democratic action in recent years have far stronger claims to be the real innovations in political engagement.

In many senses, assemblies’ advocates have secured what they long called for. In Western and Eastern Europe, assemblies have multiplied at all levels: local, municipal, regional, national, and international. They have addressed a widening range of issues, moving out of their traditional focus on local questions to weightier political choices. They are generally well run and enthuse their participants. Many have become permanent and more strongly institutionalized within decisionmaking processes. Public authorities have increasingly taken on board assemblies’ output and no longer treat them as mere PR exercises.

Across Europe, nearly all major cities now have some form of deliberative process. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis acted as catalysts for a dramatic increase in the number of city-level assemblies. Permanent assemblies now operate in the east of Belgium and in Paris, among other places. Brussels has created the first permanent mixed assembly that brings together randomly selected citizens and elected politicians. The European Commission now runs regular citizen panels at a pan-European level, including on major issues like security—in addition to the one on democracy now underway.

Civic groups are creating more assemblies outside the purview of formal authorities. A first permanent civic-led assembly now sits in Stavanger, Norway. An influential group of experts has set in motion the foundations of a pan-European citizen assembly. Many other examples could be given. In a latest phase of excitement, hundreds of organizations have begun to use AI tools to enhance and scale up citizen deliberation and make it easier to find consensual output from such exercises.

Flattering to Deceive?

Amid much fretful worrying over the fragility of European democracy, citizen assemblies’ move to center stage is clearly a positive and promising development. However, all this success begs an obvious and uncomfortable question. As participative forums have inched toward mainstream status, democracy’s problems have continued to mount. Participative forums are now widespread, and yet a sense of democratic malaise persists and, if anything, has worsened.

So, has the mountain of democratic participation been scaled only for a view of future political renewal to remain obscured? Cruelly put, after so many years of hype about citizen assemblies and countless books and reports pushing them forward, has their multiplication ultimately failed to generate much democratic improvement?

A skeptical judgment would see the surge in citizen assemblies as being of limited political significance. As their numbers have increased, democracy scores have stagnated in many places or even worsened. In most European countries where assemblies have been numerous, the far right is on the march and gaining support. The limits to and doubts about mini deliberation have fallen one by one, and yet the results have been negligible. The current enthusiasm over using AI in deliberation is small matter compared with the so-called tech barons’ destruction of basic freedom and human agency worldwide.

A downbeat line on the spread of deliberative initiatives would be that assemblies are beneficial individually on specific topics but that it was naive ever to think they could help shore up democracy in any systemic sense. The implication is that it is better to let community-rooted assemblies do their work on prosaic issues and not overburden them with breathless talk and expectation about random selection replacing the traditional structures of electoral democracy.

Where and when European democracy has proved resilient, it is difficult to make the case that this is mainly because of deliberative forums like citizen assemblies. Take the two cases—Hungary and Poland—where European democracy has most clearly shown signs of recovering from autocratization. Driving democratic recovery here was a combination of protests, party alliances, new leadership, social media campaigns, citizens moving into new political parties, and EU pressure. There were participative initiatives in both countries during the darkest days of authoritarian drift, but it would be a stretch to claim any tangible impact from these. The champions of assemblies are highly dismissive of politicians and political parties, yet in these contexts it is widely maligned traditional democratic actors that have been crucial in getting democracy back on track.

The critical line would be that assemblies’ advocates have been loud and skilled in PR, but that ultimately these exercises have done little to restore any widespread sense of citizen agency among large numbers of people. One distortion is that those leading the advocacy have generally been involved in either running assemblies or advising consulting organizations that do so—analysis and practitioner interest unhealthily overlapping.

The skeptical interpretation would conclude that the striking spread of citizen assemblies has proved a damp squib in improving democracy’s fortunes. At the very moment when participative initiatives have made such progress in Europe, the wider Trump-ravaged context looks bleaker and more unsettling for democracy.

Building on the Positive?

Those drawn to a more positive storyline might counter that citizen assemblies have begun to make a difference in less visible ways and, over time, will start to reap clearer benefits. If so, the most pertinent and thorny challenge for citizen assemblies’ organizers and supporters is to map out what comes next in what might be defined as a second, consolidation phase in their evolution.

In the last decade, those running or arguing for assemblies have focused on making the basic case in favor of citizen participation, improving the methodology of sortition, and getting public authorities to take assemblies’ recommendations seriously. They have succeeded beyond expectations in all of these aims. But in the second phase, a different set of issues now needs to guide participative democracy if the skeptics’ arguments are to be rebutted.

Indirect vs. Direct Roles

Proponents of citizen initiatives might argue that they are designed not to have dramatic or tangible impact immediately but to create the ground on which healthier democratic pluralism can thrive. Even if it can be almost impossible to infer direct causality of impact from local participative exercises, that does not mean they have failed. In Hungary and Poland, for example, deliberative exercises might not have been the main drivers of democratic recovery, but they were still useful in a secondary sense of keeping open some space for deliberation and citizen engagement. Still, in the next phase of participation, such background utility will need to be connected more meaningfully to the direct forms of political action that determine whether crucial moments of change move in a democratic direction.

From Individual Forums to an Ecosystem

Champions of participation insist that while assemblies have increased in number, many more are needed and with more formalized influence over political decisions. More detailed templates will be required to show how an increase in the number of assemblies can be implemented in practical terms. If the number is to rise from dozens to thousands, far more difficult questions will appear than those that organizers have had to grapple with so far. Coordination will be needed between different parts of a participation ecosystem if and when this thickens appreciably beyond what exists today. As their numbers increase, assemblies will begin to clash with and cut across each other, and some authority will have to adjudicate between them.

Negative Accountability

In addition, as the ecosystem of assemblies expands, some initiatives will inevitably push policies in directions that do not have successful impact. The assumption to date has been that the main challenge is simply getting assemblies up and running and that once they exist, their output will be almost intrinsically benign. But this surely cannot be guaranteed as assemblies begin to cover more issues and address more complex questions. Detailed plans will be needed for when assemblies’ decisions go drastically wrong: Who is accountable and who is responsible for taking corrective action if members of an original assembly have already disbanded? It is striking how little attention assemblies’ champions have paid to this negative accountability.

Trade-Offs and Reconnective Principles

Assemblies’ supporters celebrate the fact that these bodies separate out issues from each other and enable citizens to deliberate on individual policies—whereas party manifestos more bluntly invite voters to take or leave a whole package of proposals. Yet, if assemblies were to begin covering all major issues and if the participative ecosystem were to start taking seriously the trade-offs required between different policy aims, this technocratic or de-ideological approach is likely to become a problem. After assemblies have broken deliberation down into separate policy areas, it will be necessary to reconnect issues under a coherent set of principles—as connecting ideology will be needed across assembly-driven policy decisions.

Depolarization vs. Repolarization

Assemblies are based on the assumption that if citizens come face to face with each other and talk through problems, their views will converge at least to some degree. For this reason, many see assemblies as key to depolarization. However, if it appears that polarization is still deepening despite thousands of assemblies being run over several years, many will argue that a more hardball attack against illiberalism is required. In their next phase, citizen assemblies would need to adapt and prove themselves relevant to this changing angle—an increasing focus on repolarization against antidemocrats, as opposed to depolarization.

The Era of Big Capacity

The concerns of national governments and the EU today are all about centralized and effective capacity for action in an era of large states and predatory power politics. European public authorities at all levels see the priorities as getting key policies moving, dragging Europe out of its lethargy, and showing more efficient and pointed capacities in economic, defense, climate, and tech policies. The next generation of citizen assemblies will need to show that microlevel deliberative exercises can contribute to this get-things-done ethos and are not democracy’s esoteric marginalia.

A New Phase

It is curious that these kinds of fundamental question have not been answered in two decades of work on citizen assemblies. Articles and books still focus mainly on explaining why assemblies are good things to have. The debate needs to shift gear to the second-phase dilemmas outlined above—certainly if the aim is for citizen assemblies to have more political impact on improving European democracy.

The progress in small-scale deliberation has been stirring and has confounded the many doubters of participative democracy and those who tend to assess European politics only as a matter of interparty competition, firewalls, and alliances. Yet, having come this far, the emerging system of citizen panels and assemblies will now face the challenge of moving into more uncharted territory. For years, the focus has been on a basic push in favor of citizen assemblies. Now they are everywhere, the key questions are different.

Many might feel that these deliberative initiatives have come as far as they can and that they are useful but not of any great importance to the overarching politics of European democracy. Surveying the effects of so much participative activity, the skeptic might give a desultory shrug and ask disdainfully: Is this what all the fuss was about, with so much activity generating so little change? Assemblies’ champions will need to broach a new range of questions if they are to counter this perspective and show that there is, in fact, a lot more to come from citizen participation.

This publication is part of the European Democracy Hub initiative, run by Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.