Developments of Deliberative Democracy Under Various Political Regimes

Abstract

Almost 50 years have passed since the inception of mini-publics by two prominent inventors, Ned Crosby and Peter Dienel, in parallel. With the development of the theory of deliberative democracy in 1990s, mini-publics gained wider attention as the promising method to realize deliberative democracy. Since then, the number of mini-public projects has been increasing worldwide, spreading even in authoritarian regimes like China. Originally the pioneers of mini-publics promoted this method on the assumption that the communicative setting of mini-publics guarantees the quality of deliberation and that the opinions made by mini-publics will be influential on policy making. There is supporting empirical evidence for the first assumption. However, the second assumption is not necessarily true. Based on the experiences of various countries, ways to institutionalize mini-publics are now being explored. In this article, I categorize three stylized approaches of mini-public institutionalization: permanent citizens’ assembly, citizens’ initiative review, and installation of a mini-public into the administrative process. I discuss how these variations correspond to three different political regimes.