Yves Dejaeghere is the executive director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy – Europe. He participated in this year’s Annual lecture hosted by Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) on 24 January 2024, discussing how democracy can work for everyone. He talks to the European Science-Media Hub on citizens’ participation and assemblies in the context of current democratic challenges.
What are the most pressing issues for EU society and which groups seem to be the most underrepresented?
When you ask me about the most pressing issues, like others I will point to social inequalities, with human rights and immigration being some of the most pressing issues for EU citizens nowadays. But we know that unequal participation means that different policy topics will get different levels of attention. There is a very biased view on what the most important topics are because some groups are not very visible and so their preferences are more likely to go unheard. This might mean that these topics get less attention: homelessness, inequality, people without proper education who are struggling with low incomes. Someone who is a single parent with a low income is probably someone who will not show up at a town hall meeting because they are working or have to take care of children etc.
What are the most effective ways to bring politics closer to citizens?
Yves Dejaeghere: I think there are two ways to do this. First of all it is to democratise more parts of citizens’ lives. Very often we hear that people should just be more interested in politics and then they think about how we can make people more focussed on political life. You are more interested in something if it relates to you or it touches upon things that are important in your daily life.
Democracy is a certain way of making decisions together, it is common decision-taking. In many areas of our daily life, it is absent or has a very limited presence. So firstly, we need to increase its relevance to make people less passive. This is the notion of active citizenship, trying to decrease the amount of passive voters by bringing ‘high politics’ closer to people so that they pay more attention and engage more.
The second thing that we advocate for, and work upon, is the idea of involving citizens more qualitatively but in smaller quantities. This is because one of the difficult problems that you have in this system is that if you want to reach more people you will almost always become less representative. We know that ‘open participation’ depends on resources, time, availability and all this very often leads to bias in representation. Another problem is that if you want to involve people in everything, it creates an enormous cognitive demand. One needs to know everything about energy, housing, immigration, what the EU is doing, how the European Parliament relates to the Commission and the Council, etc. which makes it very hard to do so. If I am interested in one of these topics then that is great. But how do you engage citizens on a larger scale across different topics of equal importance without falling into the participation trap where only those interested and those that have time end up participating. They are very often highly educated middle-aged men.
In this case we may use sortition or a ‘democratic lottery’. This is something that is increasingly being used. It can be used to solve some of the pitfalls which we have not always been able to solve with other forms of participation in the past. I need to emphasise that we see this as something that adds to what already exists. It does not replace all other forms of participation; it is an additional form of policy input from citizens. These are two ways of bringing politics back to citizens or inviting citizens back to politics.
How do you compose groups when sortition is used?
Yves Dejaeghere: Groups can never be perfectly representative because it depends on what characteristics one finds important to be represented from a community of people. We know that there are a number of representation criteria that most people accept as being the diversity you want in the room. In any European country, if you have a group of 100 participants deciding on a policy and 95 of them are women, then men will definitely dispute how representative’ that really is. Gender is an obvious one.
Age is also a variable and many people think it is very important when taking policy decisions. Senior citizens may have a different perspective on a number of problems in comparison to younger people owing to experience, being in different phases of their life, etc. Think about climate change, for example.
A third one is a person’s socio-economic status. This is determined depending on a mixture of education, income and work situation. Very often, education is used as a proxy variable but the idea is that one’s living situation also has a strong influence on policy options, especially if they are to do with some type of redistribution.
Another criterion that is important to take into consideration is the region or district. Even in a single city, people would say that you need representation from all the different neighbourhoods. Even if a group is very well and diversely composed based on the first three criteria, many people would feel it is fair to have people from every district. Very often, there are additional criteria that might arise because of specifics that are important in a political community. For example, if you do this in Northern Ireland people may find religion to be an important variable. We did a project in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the Council of Europe and people told us from the start ‘you will need to get some ethnicity variable included in defining the citizens’ group’. Not that the citizens in the room find it very important but because people outside of the room will find it more legitimate if all ethnic groups are equally represented. The core criterion is that people who are not in the room from that political community should be able to look at the group of citizens who are there and think: ‘Somebody like me is there, I could have been part of that’. The vice-mayor of a Belgian city with high levels of migration once said:: ‘We need to have some form of nationality criterion because we have a large group of citizens with an African-Mediterranean background’. Even though these people through exclusion are often grouped in with the ‘lower education’ variable, if they don’t see someone from their region in the picture they will feel they are not represented. So selecting purely on the basis of educational level is not enough to include this group.
Part of our work is talking to people in the community such as decision-makers and civil society organisations in order to understand the make-up of the community and what is important to its members. Very often, we act with the three main variables that we have mentioned, as we would always do, and in most cases we add regional or district representation and then those criteria that are really specific to the community.
How successful could EU-level deliberative democracy be?
Yves Dejaeghere: It could be very successful, in the sense that it already happens.
Deliberation requires a number of things to be successful as a method, time being an obvious one. For example if you do something at an EU level and you only give people one day for the whole process – if they meet in the morning and they have to decide by the afternoon – they will probably not be able to do anything meaningful. It also requires a policy of accepting to work with the recommendations coming out of that process at a political level and at an administrative level. Some of the difficulties at an EU level come from the complexity of the institutional structure. But you can have complexities at any level. If you do it at a city level, the mayor may say: ‘this is the task I’m giving you, we need to redesign the transport infrastructure in your neighbourhood’. You take 50 people, chosen at random, from that neighbourhood, the mayor might not do everything that they want but will consider it as much as possible when redesigning the transport infrastructure in their neighbourhood. In a city, the mayor is also the head of the bureaucracy, so if the other members of the administration say ‘We are the experts here and disagree’, the mayor may say: ‘No, I have promised these people, I have the authority and you will take their opinion into account’ to counter this threat of inertia. But the more complex the institutional level is where these recommendations are made, the harder it might be to explain to citizens how their input will relate to a policy being implemented. At the EU level this is not always clear. In the end, there is no level where deliberation has not been done in a successful way. The Commission has performed several Citizens’ Panels in the last year with success. A lot of the questions surrounding them are about what mandate is given, what resources are given and how some real policy impact will come out of the process.
How important are Citizens’ Panels and digital tools for democracy and citizen participation?
Yves Dejaeghere: People who participate in citizens’ assemblies are very committed, and you have to consider that very often these are held during weekends. This means people go to work from Monday to Friday and then they spend Saturday and Sunday sitting in a citizens’ assembly. Think of the sort of the commitment this requires. But we see it happen. And we also know that most of the people who do it find it a super enriching experience. Very often, they start doing other forms of participation once they have been part of a Citizens’ Panel. Most people in modern life sometimes forget how enriching it feels to be part of a community, to do something for a community. We are all very busy with our work, our children, our family, and so community life becomes an afterthought. Research into happiness has showed that volunteering or being engaged is one of the easiest ways to increase your happiness. People feel happy if they feel they contribute something.
The difference between volunteering and citizens’ participation is the element of conscious choice. Traditional participation is self-selective. You decide to go to a neighbourhood garden and work there, you decide to go to a town hall meeting, you decide to be a volunteer for people with disabilities. Whereas random selection means that you get a letter and you then start to participate, and so it’s a new experience for many. Research has shown that sometimes up to half of the participants on a Citizens’ Panel had never done any form of civic participation before.
Digital participation still has a lot of issues to solve on the matter of equal representation because it is still self-selective. You need to rely on people wanting to go onto their computer and do something to give input. It is very often a one-way process, and can also be short and a bit insubstantial, amounting to just a questionnaire. And what we know, from a lot of data, is that the representation gap is actually sometimes even bigger than for in-presence participation. For people who do not work with computers, this will be a problem. There is a digital divide in society that doesn’t just disappear because you use an app for participation.
And we know also from data that very few people are attracted to participate via social media. The people who are interacting on social media are a very small minority. It is good as a consultation tool, but it has a long way to go to become a digital town hall or a new digital sphere.
Useful links:
• STOA annual lecture 2024
• Making democracy work for everyone
• Prof. Sylvia Kritzinger: ‘Europe needs to very seriously take our young citizens into consideration and engage them in politics’
• How to ensure democratic integrity and participation: interview with Prof. Michael Bruter
• Digital technologies and democracy: challenges ahead