use case

An on-call deliberative democracy exercise

The Irish Citizen’s Assembly is a successful example of deliberative democracy where a selected group of citizens discussed a variety of topics and provided policy recommendations. Based on the success of the initial iteration, the Assembly was reconvened to discuss additional topics from 2020 to 2022.

source of visual

W Europe, Ireland (Republic of Ireland), Offline
- Where did this use case occur?
2016 - ongoing
- When did this use case occur?
Government of Ireland
- Who were some of the key collaborators
100 members in the Assembly, representing Ireland.
- How many people participated?
Nation/Country, Public
- What are some keywords?

What was the problem?

Academics have studied the growing demand for public participation in democratic processes. Citizens have increasingly felt a lack of involvement in their governance besides the electoral process of selecting their representatives. Any strong democracy needed a method to involve the citizenry in the decision-making.

How does the community approach the problem?

A parliamentary resolution in 2016 established a permanent, deliberative body of randomly selected citizens to gauge public opinion, participate in discussions, and provide policy recommendations on a decided set of topics.

Process

Deliberative Democracy

Technique

The set of topics is detailed in the constitutional document of the Assembly and additional topics can be referred to it. The members, 99 of them and an additional chairperson met during weekends to engage in debates and a submissions process provided an opportunity for the general public to submit their input. The public meetings were live-streamed and archived, all papers were presented and all policy decisions were made available online to the public. The final output of these deliberations was presented as policy recommendations for consideration by the appropriate governance body. Given the permanent structure of the Citizen’s Assembly, the body can be called upon repeatedly and can be assigned various topics for a given duration of time.

Tool

Citizen assemblies

What were the results?

The Assembly provided policy recommendations for three of the initial five topics after two years of deliberation. In the initial set of topics, the Assembly received 15,000 submissions from public engagement. Based on the permanent nature of such an Assembly and the success of the first iteration, the Citizen’s Assembly was called upon to engage in further topics in the following years, and have covered various topics including abortion and gender equality, and will discuss drug use in 2023.

In Our Opinions

How participatory was it?

Consult

As an assembly responsible to provide recommendations, the participants are called upon once the agenda (topics of deliberation) has been established. The assembly assumes a consultative role in the process, with minimal-to-no say in deciding the larger discussion items. A large portion of deliberative assemblies (citizen assemblies) function in this way.

What makes this Use Case unique?