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.

From the late 2000s onward, municipal governments in Tokyo have expanded citizen participation and discussion initiatives involving the selection of citizens at random from the Basic Resident Ledger. Such initiatives have been applied not only at the ordinance-making and planning stages but also at the evaluation stage, where there are few examples internationally. This approach has taken the form of citizen deliberation meetings, which are an implementation of German planning cells localized for Japan. As this type of citizen participation based on random selection has spread, elements of citizen deliberation meetings have been adopted by citizen workshops conducted by local governments since the 1990s. However, the emphasis on proposing judgments through “deliberation-with” and “deliberation-within” shifted to a focus on articulating various opinions. The municipal bureaucracy's willingness to utilize citizen deliberation meetings as a means of public hearings seems to have facilitated this transformation and led to its widespread use. We consider this to represent the emergence of a second localization stage, along with its use in the evaluation stage.

Mini-publics are often criticized for causing democracy with shortcuts. In response to this criticism, we have turned to community spheres in order to broaden trust in the forum of deliberation. We thought that by repeatedly holding mini-publics in a community area, a “deliberative community” would be born. A “deliberative community” should be the foundation for achieving deliberative democracy. Next, we sorted out the types of community deliberations. There are two types of deliberations in the community sphere: “deliberation over the community sphere” and “deliberation by the community sphere.” Mini-publics held in the community area provide legitimacy to the deliberations of the community sphere. Mini-publics in the community sphere have the role of connecting the community sphere to the public sphere. In addition, mini-publics can connect multiple community spheres to create a larger “we.”

Deliberations among randomly selected participants are beginning to be institutionalized. Even if not institutionalized, there are an increasing number of cases where policy making is conducted through a process of citizen participation, including deliberation by randomly selected citizens, with “respect for the results of discussions” and advanced indication that the results of deliberation may influence the policy to be formulated. Correspondingly, there have been studies on people's evaluations of citizen participation processes, including deliberation, as well as studies using hypothetical or simulated deliberation situations as experimental settings. In this paper, we review studies published since January 2010 through the end of July 2022 that examine people's evaluations of the deliberative process with a focus on procedural fairness from a social psychology perspective. The results are examined from three perspectives: the degree of evaluation of procedural fairness, the relationship between procedural fairness and antecedents of procedural fairness, and the impact of procedural fairness on social acceptance. Finally, we discuss the potential contribution of social psychology in promoting the establishment in society that representative deliberation through fair procedures supports policy making in the public decision-making process on important social issues.

This paper revisits the relationship between deliberative democracy and selection by lottery, or sortition. Research on deliberative democracy shows that lotteries have been viewed as an essential procedure for mini-publics. More recently, however, some views have emerged that consider deliberation and lottery separately, especially in the context of sortition legislatures. From a deliberative democratic perspective, this paper argues that mini-publics are not sites of deliberation only by sortition and that, in light of recent deliberative system approaches, deliberation is not necessarily essential, especially in mini-publics or lottery-based legislatures related to decision making. Finally, this paper states that there are, therefore, cases where “deliberation within” alone is not a problem even from the deliberative democratic perspective. It also points out that the interest in “deliberation within” without mutual communication may bring us closer to an individualistic concept of democracy and the expected problems associated with it.

Mini-public deliberations, in which ordinary citizens are selected by lottery to discuss and participate in the planning processes of local governments, have spread around the world. Why deliberation? The deliberative process provides more than just an opportunity for participation and a sense of acceptance of public decision-making and policy-making processes. Deliberative democracy is expected to have the epistemic function of guiding the outcome to the right one. In this paper, I aim to show that the study of collective intelligence in epistemic democracy provides a new mechanism for explaining that deliberative procedures can improve the correctness of outcomes (i.e., the substance).