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Public Support for Citizens' Assemblies Selected through Sortition: Survey and Experimental Evidence from 15 Countries

par Pilet, Jean-Benoît ;Bol, Damien;Paulis, Emilien ;Panel, Sophie;Vittori, Davide
Référence Pre-print version
Publication Non publié, 2020-08-30

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

As representative democracies are increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular in academic circles and real-life politics: asking a group of citizens selected by lot to deliberate and formulate policy recommendations on some contentious issues. Although there is much research on the functioning of such citizens’ assemblies, there are only few about how the population perceives them. We explore the sources of citizens’ attitudes towards this institution using a unique representative survey from 15 European countries. We find that those who are less educated, as well as those with a low sense of political competence and an anti-elite sentiment, are more supportive of it. Support thus comes from the ‘enraged’, rather than the ‘engaged’. Further, we use a survey experiment to show that support for citizens’ assemblies increases when respondents know that their fellow citizens share the same opinion than them on some issues.