Addressing Power Imbalances in Deliberation

In February 2025, the state of California announced a new deliberative democracy program and platform. Carnegie California played a collaborative role in its development and launch, bringing in scholarly and practitioner expertise from California and around the world. The essay below captures key ideas from the experts who informed that process.

Simply put, deliberation is about gathering members of the public to discuss, consider, and make decisions about issues that affect them. The “deliberative turn” in democratic theory began in the 1990s, after which public institutions started to experiment more with these methods of participatory policymaking; experiments since then have ranged from the ongoing wave of citizens’ assemblies in Europe to National Issue Forums in the United States. The theories behind this trend have traditionally assumed that members of the public are able to participate as equals, and accordingly, practitioners strive to create conditions where everyone’s voices can be heard.

However, the countries that have advanced those experiments (including the United States) are laden with inequalities that distance them from the theoretical ideal. Wealth inequalities in particular have risen dramatically in the past few decades, with those holding vastly more wealth facing better outcomes across metrics of health and well-being. These inequalities are also frequently correlated with race, class, and caste divisions that have long granted special privileges to certain groups of people over others, and political systems often give more power and opportunity to these privileged classes. Even the way people give and receive arguments is coded by cultural norms; the default expectation of “rational” deliberation has been challenged by various scholars, who argue that those who regularly engage that way are often whiter, more educated, and more economically well off. As such, deliberative processes still often proceed along lines of privilege, cutting off the prospect of truly equitable participation.

This dynamic presents a significant challenge to both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative processes. The legitimacy of democratic decisions is derived in large part from the rights, opportunities, and capacities of citizens to participate in political decisionmaking. But if these assemblies fail to account for power imbalances, they are also more likely to reproduce them and therefore develop more of the same solutions that neglect the needs of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised residents. Thus, the effectiveness of deliberative processes is threatened by what British political theorist Marit Hammond describes as “processes that may have the appearance of empowerment, but only serve to pacify democratic demands without actually submitting to their bottom-up force.” 

Despite the persistence of these inequalities, publics can still collectively learn about their shared issues and discuss potential solutions. In fact, designers and facilitators of deliberative processes regularly encounter these asymmetries and have developed practices to address them. What follows is an overview of how power asymmetries can affect two important stages of the deliberative process (recruitment and facilitation) and of the practices that hold a chance at creating more equal conditions for public participation. 

Representation

One of the most crucial elements of a deliberative process is a deceptively simple question: Who’s in the room? For public problems, that typically means recruiting a group of participants who are affected by the issue at hand and reflect the demographics of the region—what is often referred to as a “mini-public.” A recent prominent example was the Citizens’ Convention for Climate in France, which gathered 150 randomly selected citizens who were representative of the French public to develop recommendations that could push the country toward its climate goals.

At a baseline, standard practice is now to use processes of “sortition” to recruit a pool of participants who broadly represent the impacted population. In this process, invitations are sent to a large, random segment of the affected public, but discretion is applied in the selection of participants to ensure proportional representation by race, gender, socioeconomic status, education, and other attributes. More nuanced sortition practices may also consider moving beyond these standard categories and including more issue-specific categories. For example, a deliberation on development prospects in an area where families and businesses were systemically displaced en masse (as was common in many predominantly African American neighborhoods during “urban renewal” in the 1950s–1970s) might intentionally include that status as an attribute.

In certain cases, it can be wise to over-sample perspectives that are disproportionately affected by the issue or that would otherwise be drowned out in the process. Australia’s 2001 deliberative polls on reconciliation efforts with its Indigenous communities are a good example of this approach; at the time, the Indigenous only composed about 2.5 percent of the total population, and therefore a standard minipublic would have whittled their representation to a negligible number despite their being the center of the issue. In this instance, the organizers chose to seed half of the small group discussions with randomly selected Indigenous representatives, such that their firsthand experiences could be an active part of the discussions. They also facilitated regional enclave discussions (as described in the “Facilitation” section below) ahead of the deliberation to identify feasible policy strategies and co-design the questions that the deliberative poll would ask of the public. In the end, they found greater differences in policy positions in groups with Indigenous representation compared to groups without, and concluded that a critical mass of disempowered perspectives adds value to deliberative processes. 

Beyond sortition, a savvy practitioner might consider ways to more actively bring in people who are socially disadvantaged. These strategies include minimizing barriers to participation, recruiting through trusted messengers, and partnering with associations in the community. Best practices for more involved deliberative processes often include offering free childcare, transportation, and other benefits that can alleviate common financial and logistical barriers to public participation. 

Facilitation

Jürgen Habermas, an early preeminent scholar of deliberative democracy, conceived of deliberation as the exchange of arguments, and argumentation as the primary way to determine the legitimacy of decisions in a democracy. While this original definition made room for more than just logical arguments, in practice deliberations have placed much emphasis on rational, empirical argumentation, ignoring the diversity of ways people make sense of their world. As such, more professional and college-educated people often dominate deliberative forums, even when the full body is more representative of the public.

In citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative forums, facilitators play a crucial role by helping people from different backgrounds navigate difficult conversations and creating space for everyone to productively exchange their views. Experienced facilitators are often intimately familiar with these challenges and adjust their facilitation methods to account for the diversity of ways people communicate. Storytelling and emotional appeals are frequently encouraged as a way to communicate in deliberative settings, given that they are common ways for people to communicate and therefore level the playing field. Similarly, testimony is often embraced as a legitimate and meaningful contribution to deliberations. This is not to say that people with less are less capable of producing rational arguments, but rather to acknowledge that emotional appeals and the relation of lived experiences are crucial parts of argumentation.

Another tested approach, sometimes known as “enclave deliberation,” is to have disadvantaged groups make sense of their situations in a more homogeneous and power-balanced setting. Especially in the face of political institutions that consistently disenfranchise lower socioeconomic classes, talking together about their experiences can help these groups develop a language for articulating their collective interests.¹ In practice, this could mean hosting civic forums specifically for structurally disempowered groups alongside more broadly representative forums. This strategy may also be helpful for engaging non-native English speakers in deliberation, as they can communicate with one another more fluidly before joining an environment where live translators might slow communication. 

This strategy was employed in a “consensus conference” over wireless broadband access in Silicon Valley in 2006. In order to prioritize the interests of those who were most impacted, the organizers created a community panel that consisted entirely of people who belonged to at least one disenfranchised group (e.g., low-income, senior, or disabled) rather than trying to represent the full population. The group developed a collective identity around being representatives of underserved communities, but the internal diversity of the group still allowed for constructive, transformative discussion (rather than defaulting to groupthink). After asking questions of experts and deliberating among themselves, the panel was able to develop clear policy recommendations that addressed the needs of the region’s historically disempowered communities. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, the essential work of creating systems that genuinely work for everyone requires us to redistribute resources and grant power to those who have been denied it—something that deliberation can help to achieve alongside other political organizing. Deliberation alone will not create a more equal society, and the outcomes of such processes are absolutely influenced by our persistent inequalities. But with this awareness, those committed to communicative methods have found ways to create fairer conditions when bringing communities together, including (but not limited to) the recruitment and facilitation methods above. With continued attention to these issues, we can hope to see the best that deliberative processes can offer.