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Citizen Infrastructure

Letting citizens govern the assembly

A citizens’ assembly is supposed to put ordinary people in charge. But look closely at most of them and you find a quiet contradiction: an expert governance committee decides the agenda, picks which experts the citizens hear, sets the procedures, and often writes up the final report. The citizens deliberate — but others control how that deliberation is run, aggregated, and presented.

The “infantilising” critique

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Hélène Landemore, after serving on the governance committee of the French citizens’ convention on end of life, came away uneasy: “Who are we to decide this?” She worries the current model keeps participants in an “infantile state” — they get to speak, but the agenda, the experts, the synthesis, and the report are controlled from outside the room. It risks repeating the central flaw of electoral democracy: you let people choose, but never actually exercise power.

There’s evidence it backfires. When four members of the end-of-life convention later reflected on their experience, one explained that because they’d never been allowed to govern themselves, they didn’t trust each other enough to take on the report when finally offered the chance — they’d been kept “equally powerless,” and preferred that to risking failure together.

The alternative

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Hand real procedural control to the participants. The Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly is testing “full citizen governance”: partway through, the expert committee surrenders its voting rights, leaving decisions about experts, schedule, and even the form of the final output to the citizens — within budget and time guardrails. The bet is twofold: you can’t credibly champion citizen competence while micromanaging citizens; and ownership of the process yields better, more legitimate outcomes.

A smaller version already worked at the end-of-life convention: rather than have the committee pick who would address the President, members decided for themselves — debating whether to choose by election or by lot, and ultimately drawing their two spokespeople at random, in keeping with the assembly’s own founding principle.

It connects to civic love (ownership deepens the bond) and to the question of whether assemblies have any real power at all.

Sources

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