Why Millions Can Deliberate: It Just Requires an Economy That Supports Mass Participation

There’s an age-old debate that centres around a simple question: can millions of people govern and make decisions? As the debate goes, there is a prevailing skepticism about mass deliberation’s feasibility as a governing practice, often from classical theorists of representative government.

There are two facets to this perspective. One is that modern democratic theory has trained us to treat scale and geography as the decisive obstacles to meaningful deliberation. Once a polity reaches the size of a city or nation, the story goes, we need indirect representation through popular sovereignty, or indirect decision-making: a small body deliberates and the many receive its outputs, usually through elections, media, or consultation. This assumption, for different reasons, has also shaped the contemporary turn to deliberative mini-publics, where a bounded microcosm offers the more realistic and authoritative form of legitimate collective decision-making. Of course, there have been debates within the field around this dilemma, but these have largely focused on communicative pathologies and capabilities rather than capitalist political economy.

The second facet connects scale to claims in different theoretical traditions about mass irrationality, which then justifies concentrating decision-making in smaller groups of people, either elected, or selected by sortition, to make decisions that are rational and reasonable. Arguments in favour of meritocratic selection of civic leaders through elections have long been a justification for representative democracy, but civic assemblies in their own way prioritise small groups for the purpose of making collective decisions that are legitimate because they’re easier conversations to manage through consensus-making.

At least for modern democratic innovators, there is one model that is used to justify a citizen assembly, the Boule in the ancient Athenian polity. The Boule was a small body of citizens selected by lot, responsible primarily for preparing legislation and setting the agenda for public decision-making. I am broadly sympathetic to the rationale behind small-group deliberation selected by civic lottery, and I work directly with such processes in practice. What I struggle with, however, is the way that in contemporary discourse, the Boule is often detached from the institutional context in which it operated, particularly from the Ekklesia, the mass assembly open to all eligible citizens, and the Dikasterion, composed of large citizen juries. I have noticed there is a tendency to diminish the Ekklesia in order to elevate the Boule as a proto–citizens’ assembly, arguably misappropriating the Athenian model.

The problem is that modern societies have organised time as if democracy were an after-hours activity, and organised political economy as if participation were a luxury rather than a public obligation.

The consistent challenge of scale often misidentifies the main constraint in modern democracy. The binding limit on mass deliberation is not simply that there are “too many people” spread across a large territory. It is also not that masses are inherently poor deliberators and completely prone to be swayed by demagogues. Surely, it is not hard to appreciate why large amounts of people might not be able to govern large territories. However, as I see it, the problem is that modern societies have organised time as if democracy were an after-hours activity, and organised political economy as if participation were a luxury rather than a public obligation. Put differently, the claim that “a million people cannot deliberate” often means something more prosaic: a million people cannot all stop working, travel, prepare, deliberate, and return to work without destabilising the economy. It is not that people cannot be organised in masses for conversation, because we have enough theoretical and practical resources to design such processes, both in-person and online.

A return to Athens is useful if only for reference: democracy once treated participation as work worth paying for. What made Athenian democracy function was not a single institution that “solved” scale, and it certainly was not the Boule alone. The Boule was excellent for agenda-setting, but only ever led to half of the laws passed in the Ekklesia. The strength of it was complementarity to other democratic bodies, i.e. the Ekklesia as a mass decision-making assembly, and the Dikasterion as large citizen juries that judged, reviewed, and disciplined power. The Ekklesia also had the power to reject proposals from the Boule. Historians like the late Mogens Herman Hansen have made seminal arguments in detail about the Athenian model, and at least by my reading, made it quite clear that the Ekklesia was just as if not more important, than the Boule. This raises one question for the field of democratic innovation: shouldn’t we figure out a way to have mass deliberation and decision-making, adjacent to agenda and priority-setting minipublics?

Athenian institutions did not form a rigid hierarchy in which “serious deliberation” happened only in the small body and “mere passions” governed the mass body. They formed a system in which deliberation, authorisation, and accountability circulated across different sites, each drawing on large numbers of citizens in different ways leveraging open and randomly selected participation. The Ekklesia’s centrality mattered because it made the demos visible to itself.

That point cuts against the way deliberative democracy is often scaled today. Mini-publics solve democratic deficits of modern representative democracy and do a good job at that. There’s plenty of research to support their positive attributes. But that doesn’t change that they have to function as a workaround for the modern work week. Mini-publics are asked to substitute mass participation under economic conditions that make sustained participation by the many structurally infeasible. To be clear, I’m not aligning this argument simply with them being “shortcuts”. They are “feasible” because they are small, time-bounded, and can be slotted into a society where most people cannot afford sustained political time. In practice, their strength is that they can overcome geography through stratified random selection drawing people from across neighborhoods, districts, and regions. But the democratic problem of how we make meaningful collective decisions within capitalism is not only a matter of crafting the demos to a manageable, inclusive sample.

The contemporary democratic response is not to retreat from mass participation but to rebuild the temporal conditions that make it plausible. The critical move is to treat democratic participation as civic labour: a form of socially necessary work that deserves protected time and public compensation, just as jury duty and elections already do in limited ways. Once deliberation is understood as labour, “economy” stops meaning mere scarcity, limited attention, time, and resources, and becomes a field of institutional choice: how a society allocates time, pay, and obligation between production and self-government. Of course mass participation is not only labour; it must be treated as a public good that makes a society actually want to govern itself this much, and be socially meaningful, culturally valued, emotionally engaging, and even fun.

Indeed, there are variations in how we compensate people in modern Citizens’ Assemblies. In North America in particular, compensation typically takes the form of stipends rather than full wage replacement, making it difficult to sustain long-term participation beyond extra-curricular civic activity. That reframes the geography challenge as well. People cannot travel to deliberate, cannot attend, cannot sustain participation, not because mass publics are inherently incapable of being convened, but because participation competes with having to rent large spaces, with jobs, precarity, care work, and exhaustion. And we have a hard time wrapping our heads around how we would pay for such endeavours, because that’s how our current frame of thinking about democracy is: how much does this cost, and who, i.e. the rich or taxpayers, will have to pay for mass deliberation. Capitalism blurs how it structures the way citizens engage with politics.

A democratic future that takes legitimacy seriously would invest in deliberative infrastructure, not just deliberative events: paid civic time, recurring moments of large-scale participation, and institutions that keep mass engagement continuous rather than episodic.

This is where the contrast between mini- and maxi-publics becomes less about design preference and more about political economy. Mini-publics can be valuable as part of a democratic system, just as the Boule and Dikasteria were valuable in Athens, but they are not the answer to scale if they replace the possibility of mass participation rather than complement it. A democratic future that takes legitimacy seriously would invest in deliberative infrastructure, not just deliberative events: paid civic time, recurring moments of large-scale participation, and institutions that keep mass engagement continuous rather than episodic. What looks utopian, paid national days for collective decision-making like ‘Deliberation Day’, or regular civic time carved out of the work calendar, is really just a demand to reverse a taken-for-granted priority: that economic life is non-negotiable and democracy must adapt to it.

This perspective also clarifies what is at stake in contemporary calls to move “beyond elections.” Arguments for participatory budgeting, citizen juries, and other non-electoral democratic forms rightly insist that legitimacy cannot be generated by voting alone. Democracy beyond elections risks becoming democracy for those with flexibility, security, and surplus energy, if these reforms leave untouched the deeper political economy of participation. They multiply venues for engagement without asking who can realistically show up, how often, and at what cost. This is not a zero-sum critique in which mass participation and mini-publics compete for legitimacy; rather, it is an argument that contemporary innovations have been forced to carry democratic expectations that properly belong to a much broader participatory infrastructure.

The promise of mass governance is not that it abandons representation or replaces smaller deliberative bodies, but that it aims to rebuild the foundations of broader civic participation. It suggests that the democratic challenge today is not simply to design better forums. Any reform capable of supporting mass participation must confront how the economy is organised in contemporary societies. Asking democracy to flourish without reshaping how work is structured is to ask it to operate under conditions chosen in advance to limit it.

About the Author

Nick Vlahos is the Managing Director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League.