Pour en finir avec la démocratie participative,Manon Loisel and Nicolas Rio, Éditions Textuel, 2024
Ending Participatory Democracy is a provocative title, but its content is a breath of fresh air that has excited us.
The book, which has not yet been translated into other languages, was written by two advisers to local institutions in France who also teach at Sciences Po Paris. They know these institutions’ different layers and levels of complexity very well, including the various roles and degrees of power of elected representatives and the public administration, a central actor that is often made invisible.
They make the following diagnosis: as a means of alleviating the crisis of legitimacy of political institutions (abstention, lack of confidence, violent demonstrations, etc.), participatory mechanisms have multiplied on the margins of the political system. However, more than a problem of citizen expression, democracies have, according to the authors, a problem of listening on the part of the institution. The recommendations generated by participatory mechanisms tend to have a limited scope. There are valuable public bodies dedicated to listening, such as the Ombudsman (Ararteko in the Basque Country), but their action is limited.
They also argue that any citizen-participation process should focus primarily on listening to those whose voices go unheard. Deliberative mini-publics seek to achieve this through civic sortition, although some mechanisms do not help people with less formal education to participate on an equal footing, forcing them to adopt institutional language or work alongside profiles with whom they are in an unequal position.
Instead of creating devices on the periphery of the system, as is currently the case, the authors advocate transforming its heart, introducing in particular deliberation into a political system in which it is practically non-existent – deliberation understood as a mechanism to show and make known, in an organized and transparent way, the existing controversies and the different ways of resolving them, before a decision is taken.
They also propose giving those whose voices go unheard a place in legislative assemblies in two ways. Just as informed deliberation requires experts to present different perspectives, they call for systematically inviting people whose voices are rarely heard to give first-person testimony, while ensuring a diversity of viewpoints. They also advocate including organised civil society, in all its diversity, as a source of knowledge.
The text is very rich and proposes multiple paths. The most daring has to do with the proposal to include persons elected by means of a civic lottery in the existing legislative assemblies at all territorial levels, in proportion to the level of abstention in the elections that make them up. If, for example, abstention in an election is 50%, 50% of the assembly will be composed of persons elected through the traditional electoral system, and 50% by citizens selected by lot, with profiles that complement those of the elected persons. Introducing people selected by lot in a legislative assembly (Plenary of a City Council, Parliament of an Autonomous Community, Congress of Deputies), forces to activate deliberative processes to make decisions since these people do not arrive with a pre-defined electoral program. They have to inform themselves, understand the different options and deliberate with their colleagues before making a decision.
This last proposal is currently utopian, but we see it as feasible. There are already mixed mini-publics in Belgium (“deliberative committees”, with 25% of political decision-makers and 75% of citizens drawn by lot), which give good results, with recommendations that are more integrated into the political cycle and politicians who enrich the proposals while better understanding, and therefore better listening to, citizen inputs.
As Manon Loisel and Nicolas Rio say, it is time to test the capacity of our democracy to emancipate itself from its aristocratic ghost. And to go back to talking about Democracy as such, without the need to assign it adjectives such as “participatory”, “deliberative” or “open”.