#09 · Before the Assembly
How best to bring a diverse group of people together? How to overcome biases in sortition? How to deal with unequal acceptance of invitations and resulting voids?
—
What distinguishes CCAs from other participatory formats is the principle of ‘representing the large in the small’ through the random selection of participants. The bottom line is that by inviting groups considered representative of a community, a variety of needs, experiences, and desires will be voiced.
Although invitations are sent to randomised groups based on gender, area of residence, or age, research suggests that more privileged people respond more often. Sometimes, legal restrictions limit invitations, when only people with citizenship status are eligible. Moreover, crucial characteristics for inclusion are not captured in the official records and cannot be used as variables. These include housing stability, recent relocation, ethnic background, diverse gender identities, sexual orientation, education, socio-economic status, disabilities, multilingualism, temporary housing, or unpaid care work. In practical terms, it is difficult to account for intersecting facets of discrimination, and biases in sortition will persist to an extent. Still, capturing social diversity beyond statistical representativeness calls for adaptive approaches before and during the assembly. These can include context-sensitive recruitment (e.g., using multiple languages in plurilingual contexts) and attentiveness to disproportionate drop-outs.
HOW to organise a democratic lottery FIDE (Federation for Innovation in Democracy)
Key selection principles of the global citizens’ forums combine stratified random sampling with diverse social characteristics, and discursive (considers the variety of discourses), developmental (based on prior participation in a deliberative process), and affected (based on the extent to which people are affected by the issue at hand) aspects.
Grappling with “Good Enough”: Selection and Recruitment of Citizens for a Global Citizens’ Assembly debates how to recruit citizens, focusing on whether random selection is “good enough”. They suggest adaptive, context‑sensitive recruitment methods that balance randomness with deliberate outreach.
Direct outreach to people who did not respond to the invitation through personal dialogue at their doorstep. “Aufsuchendes Losverfahren”, supported by an App for managing the whole process, or How are public participants selected to take part in an assembly? (Involve UK)
Flanigan, B., Gölz, P., Gupta, A. et al.(2021) Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies. Nature 596, 548–552. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03788-6
Smith, Graham (2024). We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Help Us Solve The Climate Crisis. E-book, London: University of Westminster Press. https://doi.org/10.16997/book73.
