Institutionalising deliberation

A citizens’ assembly that meets once, advises, and disbands “rehearses its own inferiority,” as Nicholas Gruen puts it — it keeps reminding everyone that the real lawmakers are elsewhere. And a body set up by one government is easily scrapped by the next. So the frontier of the field isn’t running more assemblies; it’s institutionalising them — making them a permanent, embedded part of how decisions get made, like the Ostbelgien standing council or the Paris permanent assembly.

Two kinds of institutionalisation

Drawing on the political scientist Steven Levitsky, Paolo Spada and Marco Giovanni distinguish two things that “institutionalisation” can mean — and you need both:

• Routinization — the behavioural habit. The process simply recurs: a participatory budget every year, an assembly every cycle.
• Value infusion — the cultural embedding. People actually believe in it and support it.

A related distinction (from Sonia Bua) is survival vs embeddedness: a process can persist in “zombie mode” — surviving on paper without doing much — or be genuinely embedded, with real capacity and impact. The reason this matters is dynamic: assemblies tend to be abandoned when the governing coalition that created them changes. Only value infusion gives the system enough support to resist reverting.

Centripetal vs centrifugal

Studying six Italian regional laws designed to spark local participation, Spada and Giovanni found the design of the incentive shapes how it embeds:

• Centripetal laws fund a single model (in Italy, usually participatory budgeting) for a single kind of actor (the municipality). They produce a strong routine — but when the funding or the coalition shifts, the process dies. They “drag the system temporarily,” like a drug that wears off.
• Centrifugal laws run competitive grants that reward constant reinvention across many kinds of actor (municipalities, civil-society groups, even schools). The single-model routine is weaker, but the churn spreads know-how and participatory culture far more widely.

The surprise was that the centrifugal model’s relentless churn built durable capacity: Tuscany’s practitioners accumulated so much skill that, once the regional money dried up, one participation firm went from 15 projects (all regional) to 80 — 79 of them funded from outside the region entirely. The culture outlived the cash.

The municipal reality

On the ground, the fight is mundane and recurring. Practitioners in Nordic cities (Trondheim, Jyväskylä, Gothenburg) report the same objections every time: assemblies are “too expensive,” “too time-consuming,” a “bypass of the elected council,” or “just another pressure group” — and a change of local government can switch off the political will overnight. Their hard-won responses: expensive, but can we afford not to? (plans rejected late get sent back to square one anyway); the assembly validates officials’ own assessments and gives cover for politically sensitive decisions; and the durable move is to write participation into steering documents and build a standard process (Gothenburg’s formal assembly flowchart) so it no longer depends on one supportive administration.

This is the same ambition behind a people’s branch and democratising finance — building a system (with its own governance, agenda-setting and follow-up bodies), not a one-off. It’s also why advisory-only assemblies risk “participation washing”, and why building the people matters more than the artifact.

Four routes into a parliament

A 2026 Carnegie UK report by Oliver Escobar and Stephen Elstub sets out four concrete blueprints for embedding citizen mini-publics in a parliament, from lightest touch to deepest reform:

• On demand — a mini-public convened whenever parliamentarians request one, backed by standing rules and staff. Minimal culture change.
• By public petition — an e-petition that crosses a threshold triggers a mini-public, tying citizen-set agendas to deliberation.
• A standing citizen council — a permanent 24-member body chosen by lot that commissions and oversees issue-specific mini-publics across the parliamentary cycle (the Ostbelgien model in parliamentary form).
• A lottery-based second chamber — a deliberative chamber selected by lot, complementing or replacing an elected upper house. The most far-reaching, and closest to a people’s branch.

Each is grounded in a real precedent: Ireland’s permanent Citizens’ Assembly (2016), Ostbelgien, the Brussels Parliament’s mixed citizen-politician committees (2019), and the Bundestag’s ad hoc assemblies. Demos’s Miriam Levin frames the same shift from the other end in Everyday Democracy (2026): make “participation, deliberation and shared governance a normal part of public life” rather than leaning on one-off consultations — her answer to a “democratic doom loop” in which low trust and weak government feed each other. The everyday-government version of that ambition is participatory policymaking: wiring public input into the routine work of the civil service, not just the occasional set-piece. Stephen Elstub and Oliver Escobar’s longer-run history of UK democratic innovations — collaborative governance, participatory budgeting, referendums and mini-publics across the four nations from the 1970s on — finds the same pattern at national scale: after decades of an “inhospitable” environment, rapid but geographically asymmetrical growth, shaped by uneven devolution and a backdrop of democratic backsliding. Their conclusion is that genuinely embedding these innovations needs a constitutional convention, not just more pilots.

Beyond the mini-public

Embedding doesn’t have to mean building new assemblies. The political sociologist Nicole Curato sets out five ways to spread deliberative norms through a society without a single fresh mini-public:

• Reform existing avenues. Many countries already have participatory institutions worth improving rather than replacing — India’s constitutionally mandated village assemblies (Gram Sabha), Indonesia’s Musrenbang development-planning forums, participatory budgets and public hearings. The work is helping local officials and leaders model deliberative behaviour inside spaces that already exist.
• Co-design the mechanism. Use deliberative principles to let citizens design their own participation format, rather than importing a template; Curato’s work with youth leaders in Iraq produced “listening circles” suited to their context.
• Heal after conflict. Following the late Jürg Steiner’s research, deliberative forums can build mutual understanding in post-conflict societies, as with ex-combatants in Colombia.
• Use online platforms. Tools in the Taiwan / Polis tradition can make contentious discussion “fast, fair and fun,” surfacing where consensus and disagreement actually lie.
• Change the media. Journalism shapes deliberative culture; one Colorado newspaper reworked its opinion column so community members address one issue a week and work toward ways forward, instead of picking fights.

Sources

• Paolo Spada & Marco Giovanni, “Putting Back the Action into the Deliberative System Debate” — Participedia paper discussion, 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=tEhpNXYXxZo
• Nicholas Gruen, “How citizens can take back power” — Nesta, 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=j7i72bJSBZE
• Oliver Escobar & Stephen Elstub, “Blueprints for Democratic Wellbeing” — Carnegie UK, 2026: carnegieuk.org
• Miriam Levin, “Everyday Democracy: A new democratic operating model” — Demos, 2026: demos.co.uk
• Nicole Curato, “Five ways to promote deliberative norms beyond deliberative mini-publics” — UNDP & UN Democracy Fund webinar, 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=aofZqy8y8RA
• Stephen Elstub & Oliver Escobar, “Democratic innovations in the UK: Reflections on historical trajectories across space and time,” European Political Science, 2026: doi.org/10.1017/S168209832510012X