Gatekeepers or Guardians? How Governance Upholds Deliberative Integrity in Mini-Publics

The proliferation of deliberative mini-publics has produced an increasing variety in their design and performance, enhancing cooptation concerns. Focusing on Irish Assemblies, Fionna Saintraint argues that safeguarding these processes requires shifting focus from deliberative quality alone to including governance arrangements into analytical evaluations, to reveal how power, interest and accountability operate.

Governance decisions shape every facet of a deliberative mini-public: setting the remit, choosing the experts, identifying how, when and about what people deliberate, and ultimately how they reach and validate their final recommendations. Unsurprisingly, the rapid spread of mini-publics has brought with it a patchwork of process designs, each adapting to different political settings, purposes, and actors. Variations in recruitment, deliberation time, facilitation quality, and information provision reflect the distinct choices of the actors behind each process. However, scholars have observed a gap between DMPs’ normative aspirations and their performance in the face of real world challenges. For instance, the inclusion of marginalised voices is seen by many as a core tenet of DMPs, yet some scholars have found that in practice forums tend to reflect elite preferences. Growing use of mini-publics by public institutions has heightened concerns about cooptation by commissioning bodies or manipulation of processes to drive towards a particular outcome, ethical challenges which scholars of citizen engagement have long warned against.

If we want to understand how the mandates given to deliberative mini-publics become the procedural choices that characterise them, we must examine those calling the shots, to understand how various interests shape the deliberative process, beyond its deliberative quality. This matters because it helps ensure that those who hold power are answerable for decisions that either gate-keep or redistribute democratic authority. Studying governance helps us identify when participation looks inclusive but does in reality little to shift power, creating spaces where people can air grievances without the expectation of policy change. As well as looking at quality and impact, an assessment of governance also needs to be a conversation about integrity.

Studying governance helps us identify when participation looks inclusive but does in reality little to shift power.

Deliberative integrity focuses on the governance of a mini-public, examining what happens in the background between the process and the commissioning entities. Assessments of integrity should expand beyond the process itself, to encompass what happens before the participants convene for the first time and after they have gone home. My research to date has analysed deliberative integrity by studying the interface between commissioners and state-run Citizens’ Assemblies, focused on comparative analyses of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly iterations. Ireland offers an interesting case to reflect on integrity, as its model has evolved over a decade from the Constitutional Convention to five consecutive Citizens’ Assemblies, delivering recommendations across 18 topics. Different iterations of the model have been the result of remits and designs evolving to match conflicting interests of various stakeholders, further illustrating the importance of considering commissioners as well as organisers in our assessment of deliberative governance.

Commissioners have vested interests that shape the process from the outset. For instance, in Ireland, a significant shift in the Assembly model was to move away from the pioneering hybrid membership of the Constitutional Convention, in which politicians deliberated with randomly selected citizens, towards a citizen-only membership. The change stemmed from adding abortion to the agenda, a requirement set by an independent MP as a condition for backing the minority government during coalition negotiations.

Within the framework set by commissioners, organisers translate deliberative ideals into actual procedures, and decide on acceptable deviations from those principles. Irish Assembly governance is shared by public and civil servants who moderate proceedings (the Chairperson) and handle logistics (such as the Secretariat), as well as experts and Assembly members who occupy advisory positions. It has evolved into a dual-leadership structure in which decision-making is shared between a Chair and a Secretary. These leaders determine when to involve Assembly members in higher-level decisions, and the degree of discretion they require shapes how transparent those decisions can be. The trend over the past decade has been encouraging in this respect. Successive Assembly Chairs and Secretaries have negotiated with commissioners to strengthen the inclusiveness of the Assemblies, whether by revising the selection process or securing payment for participants. Transparency measures have steadily improved, and leaders have shown a consistent commitment to ensuring a diversity of voices in the learning phase. This has included adapting learning formats, such as incorporating site visits, and expanding governance structures by adding a Lived Experience advisory group alongside the Expert group.

At the same time, the model is not without critics. Some scholars note that the dependence on civil servants stifles innovation and leads to path dependency for the process, or that the model itself never had the capacity to challenge power structures meaningfully, given elite control over the agenda. Some worry that Assembly outcomes are shaped by the Chairs, through selection of experts.

Others decry the lack of formalisation of Irish Assemblies, which now exist in an ambiguous position. Their iterative nature has evolved into unwritten convention, normalised them as a policy tool and significantly contributed to constitutional shifts over the past decade. However, their lack of formalisation by way of legal or administrative embedding into public institutions means that there is no path to initiate an Assembly that doesn’t rely heavily on the preferences of the ruling party in Government. As a result, a new administration can simply choose not to convene an Assembly, as is the case under the current government, and no alternative institutional mechanism exists to trigger one. There is a risk that knowledge could therefore be lost as experienced staff are allocated to new positions. However, as seen in other contexts, embeddedness is no guarantee of continued relevance. In Belgium, for instance, a number of examples demonstrate that permanent processes are still heavily reliant on political will.
At the same time, lack of formalisation could also be the reason that Assemblies have had sufficient flexibility to improve procedures internally. For instance, civil servants working on the Assemblies on Biodiversity Loss and Dublin City Mayor were able to negotiate internalising a more robust sortition process (as opposed to previous ones, where this was outsourced), expanding the scope of the selection pool from citizens to residents for non-Constitutional issues and implement the remuneration of members building on feedback from previous Chairs.

Durable deliberative democracy requires more than good design and positive political moments; it demands governance arrangements capable of anchoring processes in its most fundamental ideals.

The Irish model is inherently elite driven. The Chair and Secretary are appointed by the Prime Minister, a practice that helps secure political buy-in and institutional trust from the outset but may also limit the inclusion of more radical perspectives. This arrangement sits uneasily with the OECD’s guideline that “the process should be run by an arm’s-length co-ordinating team, distinct from the commissioning public authority.” The selection of leadership by the Prime Minister for a process their own government is commissioning does beg the question of sufficient independence. However, in my forthcoming research with Jane Suiter, we conducted interviews where civil servants involved in the Assemblies countered that they are already entrusted with the functioning of core public institutions, so entrusting them with the governance of deliberative processes shouldn’t be controversial. Additionally, the absence of Ireland-based deliberative practitioners (combined with the political sensitivities surrounding the use of British contractors) raises separate concerns about legitimacy. Finally, outsourcing deliberative governance to external commercial entities may be seen as undermining democratic institutions rather than providing them with the space to develop the internal capacity needed to sustain these processes over time.

Ultimately, governance determines how power operates around a mini-public, shaping deliberative integrity long before participants convene and long after they disperse. As mini-publics continue to proliferate globally, the Irish experience underscores a broader lesson: durable deliberative democracy requires more than good design and positive political moments. It demands governance arrangements capable of resisting cooptation, ensuring continuity, leveraging flexibility to be more creative and anchoring deliberation in transparent, accountable structures rooted in its most fundamental ideals: mutual respect, inclusion of all affected interests and equal freedom of expression.

About the Author

Fionna Saintraint is a PhD researcher at the Dublin City University Institute for Future Media Democracy & Society (FUJO), supervised by Jane Suiter, researching the deliberative governance of mini-publics and working with ScaleDem on the institutionalisation of mini-publics.
Previously, she worked at the Brussels Francophone Parliament on deliberative committees before beginning her doctoral thesis.