Achieving a 92% consensus in an era of polarisation: Interview with Claudia Chwalisz

As part of our interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Dr. Greg Stride interviews Claudia Chwalisz, founder and CEO of Democracy Next, about the role of citizens’ assemblies in enhancing democracy. Claudia shares her journey into democracy advocacy, the principles of citizens’ assemblies, their impact on local governance, and her deliberative vision for the future.

She discusses the evolution of these assemblies, particularly in Paris, and addresses the challenges and opposition they face. The conversation also touches on the warning signs of troubled democracies, the importance of sortition in encouraging participation, and the potential of technology to improve democratic processes. Claudia envisions a future where deliberative practices become the norm in various institutions, fostering greater civic engagement and trust in democracy. Watch/listen/read below for an engaging discussion about innovative democracy in action.

Claudia Chwalisz is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on youtube here.

01:28 – Claudia’s journey into democracy advocacy
02:47 – Understanding citizen assemblies
05:27 – What problems do citizen assemblies solve?
08:02 – Local government use of citizen assemblies
10:28 – The evolution of permanent citizen assemblies
15:53 – The responses to citizen assemblies
21:24 – Warning signs for democracy
25:54 – Encouraging participation through sortition
28:13 – Combatting mis/disinformation in citizen assemblies
31:12 – The evolving role of technology in democracy
36:03 – Claudia’s hopes for the future of local democracy

Watch/listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.

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Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Tell us a bit about your background. How did you become interested in and involved in democracy advocacy?

That takes a few steps back actually, before DemocracyNext and the work I’m doing now. My initial entry point into all of this work was research that I was doing close to 15 years ago now. I was looking at populism and the extent to which people’s disillusionment with politics and the system, but also a lack of voice and agency in shaping decisions affecting their lives, was driving them to different populist parties and actors. From that work, I’ve become quite convinced that it’s one of the deep drivers of these trends that we’ve seen. It’s obviously not the only thing because that’s a complex phenomenon. There are economic and cultural factors that are related. But if you recognise that political dimension, from that moment onwards, you no longer think that we just need better economic policies and that’s it. My work then very quickly shifted and has been focused since that time around ‘what can we do about it? How can we give people a meaningful say in shaping the decisions that are affecting them?’ What started off as a relatively broad exploration of those questions ended up becoming more focused on citizens’ assemblies and what gets called deliberative democracy in particular.

Could you explain a bit about what you do, how it began, and your aspirations?

I think for understanding what I do, the idea of citizens’ assemblies is really central to it. To explain, rather than starting with an abstract definition, I’ll just give you one example from the country where I’m living now, France.

One of the last citizens’ assemblies that took place here was at the national level. The French government convened an assembly with 185 people. These people were selected by a lottery process to be broadly representative of the diversity of French society and they were tasked with coming up with proposals to the question of ‘Should we update our existing legislation related to end of life and assisted dying, euthanasia and other related issues, and if so, how?’

To be able to answer such a question, this group of 185 people met for 27 days of deliberation over the course of four months, where they heard from over 60 experts – and experts in a very broad sense of the term. This includes faith group leaders, doctors, people with lifelong illnesses, and philosophers. So many different perspectives, and then they worked together to come up with what ended up being 67 very specific, concrete recommendations for how the law should change, which they reached a 92% consensus on that was written up into a report of 176 pages. I include all those little bits of detail because I think they highlight to what extent citizens’ assemblies are quite different to many things that people are familiar with.

They embody these three principles: 1) sortition, meaning the random selection of decision makers. 2) deliberation, creating the structured space for informed decision making, and then 3) rotation, referring to the idea that, you know, in this instance, there were 185 people, but power rotates and that privilege of representation changes. So in the next assembly, it’ll be a new group of people who are selected to be part of it.

That’s the core idea. And the work that we’re doing at DemocracyNext is wanting to have more of these kinds of citizens’ assemblies that are set up and are done in a high quality way, that are empowered, and are also made permanent or institutionalised. By that, I mean that there’s actually a legal basis that can get established behind them, which outlines their relationship with elected officials, with public administrations, as well as other stakeholders.

What sort of problem are citizens’ assemblies there to solve, and how do they manage to achieve that resolution?

I mentioned that threshold of 92% because typically in a citizens’ assembly, you’re seeking at least 75 to 80% consensus around the recommendations of a group. Some recommendations sometimes in these processes have less of a threshold than that, so they might get included in a report by saying these were talked about, but didn’t achieve that high level of consensus. But I think what’s astonishing when you look at assemblies that have taken place around the world is the consensus on many different contentious topics.

One of the things that I did before founding DemocracyNext was working at the OECD, which is the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. I led their area of work around the future of democracy and innovative citizen participation. One of the key pieces was a big study looking at the use of citizens’ assemblies by governments around the world. So I gave one example, but that’s actually one out of well over 700. I would say probably close to a thousand today because that database was last updated in 2023.

There’s a lot of data which also shows us what kinds of issues citizen assemblies have addressed, and it’s a really wide variety of policy topics. The most common types of issues that have been tackled tend to do with things around urban and strategic planning questions, health and environmental issues, infrastructure and investment. So, typically the kinds of issues that tend to embody trade-offs and where it’s not just obvious yes or no, or there’s not just one way forward, but actually what you’re needing to do is to manage different compromises and trade-offs that are needed between different stakeholders with different values.

I think a lot of times people try and make a distinction between an issue, perhaps like end of life versus a city’s mobility plan, where one might seem more technical than the other, but actually, at the end of the day, all of these decisions are underpinned by questions about, ‘What kind of society and what kind of community do we want to be living in?’ Which are values-based questions.

Of course, there’s a technical dimension of information that you need to take into account, which is why the learning phase of these assemblies is so important. But at the end of the day, you need both the science as well as the deliberation around values when you’re taking decisions that impact people in a democracy.

Where does local government fit in with the examples of democratic institutions using citizen assemblies that you’ve encountered?

So, the OECD study that I’m referring to has examples from all levels of government and the vast majority, around 67% from the latest data that’s available are at the local level. So there’s a huge number of examples. If anything, actually, cities and other local governments have been leading the way in this movement, which at the OECD, we refer to as the deliberative wave. I think it’s precisely because of the nature of issues like urban planning, mobility plans and infrastructure. A lot of these kinds of questions actually come up more often at a local level where in some ways you’re dealing a bit less with that big P partisan politics between like big left and right issues and people are more concerned with like the street they live on, their children’s school, things that feel much more like small P politics in a way that concern everybody.

Also, cities, I think, have been at the forefront of some of the movement to institutions which I was referring to earlier. Most of these hundreds of examples from the OECD are instances of one-off citizens assemblies, which I think have on the one hand shown us the benefits of this kind of approach in terms of we have a lot of evidence which shows us that when you gather people in this way with structure, with time, with information, that people are astonishingly able to reach high levels of consensus, really detailed, concrete, effective policy recommendations that can enable actions on a lot of issues where politics might be stuck. But on the other hand, the one-off approach has also shown the limitations of relying on the political will of a moment in time. I think they have also shown one of the weaknesses in terms of the link to impact and implementation and follow up, where it hasn’t always been the strongest because you might have an assembly that has been initiated by one either one political party or one department, but its recommendations might be touching numerous departments, you might need some continuity and follow up and so on. The move to institutionalise has really been about how we make this a normal way for certain types of decisions to be taken, and we transcend some of the typical politics as usual to be able to do that.

How have the processes, procedures, and types of institutions evolved over that time, particularly with respect to the more permanent assemblies?

I’ve been working on this for quite a long time. I’m not always involved in the actual facilitation of these things, but I’ve been involved in the design of a lot of assemblies and particularly all of the world’s first permanent ones. That’s actually the focus of DemocracyNext as well, that we’re only kind of involved in projects where there is a desire to do something that is a more than one-off initiative. I think what’s been interesting to see is, well, first of all, there’s more than one way you can do that. Even from the OECD, it was very much a principles-based approach, and we know what kind of good practice principles there are that can guide the design, but there are many different ways in which you can put that in practice. All of the different institutionalised models to date have slightly different designs, and I think they’ve also been pushing the bar in terms of impact and opening an imagination to how things could be different.

What I think is the most impactful example to date in terms of the level to which citizens have been empowered, but also I think where that relationship between citizens and elected officials and public administration is also the strongest – because it’s not about trying to suggest we need to replace the existing system or get rid of politicians or anything simplistic like that. It’s more about how can we be evolving our governance systems to be more effective and more democratic.

So, in Paris, since 2021, they’ve set up the permanent citizens’ assembly, which is in its third cycle. Every September, there are 100 new people who are randomly selected from across the city of Paris. They don’t have to necessarily be French citizens. It can be anybody who’s living there. That group of 100 people will work from September until July of the following year. So it’s quite a hefty commitment.

During that time, they’ll actually be split into usually two working groups, one of the working groups is going to devote more time to actually drafting the text of this legislation. And another working group is going to spend a little bit of time coming up with more general policy proposals on another issue. So for the issue around the citizen bill, the Paris city government proposes three different topics on which it feels like there is really a need to take some action and that they’re open to really taking action on a citizen bill that comes out of this process. In last year’s cycle, the three options were around municipal policing, advertisement in public space, and around homelessness. On each of these three, the 100 citizens in this assembly got a briefing in terms of, these are the trade-offs, this is the nature of the problem that you would be working on. So they deliberated and they voted, and last year they voted to work on homelessness. So one of the working groups worked on homelessness, and then for the other working group, the assembly members had a more bottom-up deliberation to come up with different ideas of what topic they would want to work on – a bit more of an agenda-setting role. They decided to work on proposals for greening the city even more.

That working group developing the bill had five plenary sessions, 11 working group sessions in small groups and seven site visits. Then, at the end of that, they had an initial set of around 40 recommendations, and that wasn’t even the end of the process. After, they had three sets of workshops together with elected officials and with members from the public administration, and they also had meetings with the two relevant committees that work on this topic. Then, together with elected officials and members from the public administration, they refined and decided together the exact wording in the text of the citizens’ bill, which then went through the formal process of being submitted by the vice mayor of participation to the city council and was voted on and adopted.

I think that probably conveys how this is quite different to like, let’s just have an open public consultation and hear from everybody about what we should do on this issue. Maybe there are 10,000 responses, but it’s very different to ask 10,000 people about such a complex issue and the nature of what you get from that versus actually having a structured process where people hear from many different experts, consider the trade-offs, the difficulties, how they’re going to pay for their proposals and really go into the depth of those things that are hard to decide on. And then they work to that high level of consensus together.

The details show it goes beyond the abstract ideas and principles, and why I’m maybe so animated by wanting to advance these ideas and encouraging more local governments and governments more widely to be experimenting with really changing the relationship that they have with their citizens.

How has this been received within the Paris city government? Has there generally been a positive reception of these citizens’ assemblies there?

Generally, yes. Even to set up the existence of this citizens’ assembly, the Paris City Council had voted to. The way it’s institutionalised in Paris is that there’s an internal regulation that sets out how the Paris City Council as an institution functions. And so they amended that document to also include the existence of the Citizens’ Assembly and its relationship with the Council, then had to be voted on by a majority vote to be adopted. That’s what changed back in 2021. It wasn’t unanimously voted on, but there was more than a majority that supported this – and more than just the parties that were part of the coalition in government at the time as well.

There has been a little bit of questioning by some members of the city council, which I think, to be honest, has been the case in many places, to some extent as well, but there is general widespread support for this. I think it also comes through the action of actually being something that’s effective and leading to very detailed, concrete, thought-through, evidence-based policies. It’s quite hard, I think, to argue against the existence of this.

Where do you see opposition to citizens’ assemblies? And assuming that you do see some, how do you tackle that?

I’ve tended to work mostly with those who are leading the change and are already energised and want to do something, especially when it comes to the institutionalisation agenda. There’s also been a huge amount of effort in every place that I’ve been involved in to make sure that efforts are made to engage with the opposition, to get a full city council on board. So actually, Paris is a little bit of an exception because in most other places, there has been full support also from the opposition. There’s been very little resistance, at least amongst elected officials for assemblies. I think many politicians also realise the value of having something like this, and also how it helps to transcend some of the typical political party divides.

For example, one of the other places that I worked in to institutionalise a local citizens’ assembly, was a much smaller place, 20,000 people in the Basque Country in Spain. Again, we had full support from both the city council and the opposition. After they had their very first assembly process take place, there was an election and a change in government, and it was the former opposition that was now in government. But because they’ve been involved in the whole process, they were the ones taking the lead on the actual work to institutionalise and pass new legislation that would establish this assembly permanently and have been leading the other follow-on assembly processes that have taken place.

In terms of this not becoming something that becomes politicised and associated just with one political party, that’s been a really important learning and takeaway over the years. It is rather achievable, and this change has also been both led by, but supported by, elected officials from all sorts of different political parties. There was a recent paper that just came out looking at this based on the OECD data, at least for all the European countries, which showed that it’s really been a very even split in terms of political leaning.

In terms of ‘Where does opposition sometimes come from?’ This really depends on the context. I think sometimes it can come a bit more from civil servants than elected officials, and I think it’s quite a normal and natural first instinct of a reaction. It’s like ‘Well, you know, we are experts on these topics and we are here to make decisions and do stuff on this.’ Also, sometimes the opposition can come from civil society actors or NGOs that are working on certain issues – and again from that same space of like, ‘we know these issues inside out and we’re advocating for a certain position, so why are we going to ask just like everyday people who might not know something from the beginning.’ But going back to something I said earlier on in the conversation, when we’re dealing especially with maybe some of the more contentious issues, where people are a bit divided, and I guess no matter what you do as a city government, somebody’s going to be unhappy. You need to have a process in place that balances this need for expertise, for evidence, for data, but also for people’s values and people having the space to deliberate, to weigh all of that together and be able to actually take decisions off the back of that. You do need the expertise from the civil servants, you do need input from civil society, but at the end of the day if you want to also be able to take action on an issue where there’s maybe deadlock or people are quite divided, then having a legitimate process in place is really helpful for that.

Many of our local government audience will be dealing with these types of thorny issues, so I’m certain that they’ll be able to sympathise with that. Back to your original interest in democracy and early research, particularly looking at populism, what would you say are the warning signs that a democracy might be in a bit of trouble?

That’s a big question! Funnily enough, the research and polling I was doing at the time was when I was living in London in the UK. I think some of the warning signs of a bit of trouble have actually been there for quite a long time now. Actually the book that I wrote off the back of that research was called ‘The Populist Signal Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change’, because it felt like there were all these signals across all kinds of data in terms of people’s trust in government but also trust in one another, trust in institutions, their sense of agency, and voice in being able to have an impact on things. In the academic literature that sometimes gets called ‘political efficacy’. I personally think that the sense of disillusionment that many people feel is quite legitimate and you know, the kinds of reforms that often get proposed or talked about, like to do with changing the electoral system for example, or maybe campaign financing reform and so on. They might be marginally better but when you look across Europe and when you look across like other parts of the world to countries that have all sorts of different kinds of beautiful proportional representation systems and wonderful campaign finance rules and all sorts of other stuff, they have the same deeper problems. When it comes to people’s sense of distrust, disillusionment, lack of belonging, lack of voice, lack of really being able to influence. I mean, why did take back control resonate with so many people as a phrase? People feel like they just don’t actually have a sense of being able to influence the direction in which things are going, whether that’s locally, nationally or otherwise.

That’s where my interest comes in, asking ‘What can we do about that?’ I don’t think that the kinds of reforms that are tinkering on the edges are going to fix it, and I’m not really convinced by the sort of mass participatory initiatives either. Let’s just open some big consultation where we hear from thousands of people, those are being done to tick a little bit of a box. Whereas I think we need some really meaningful change that could actually start shifting power and changing who is deciding and how we are taking decisions together. I don’t think this is going to be some sort of overnight short-term change. That’s also why I’m interested in particular in institutionalisation, because I don’t think it’s going to be solved with just with one assembly once with 50 people. But you can start to imagine how things could start to shift as this becomes a more normal way of making decisions at different levels of government on all sorts of issues. There’s no shortage of issues that merit some deeper public deliberation on them.

It’s part of the work we’re doing at DemocracyNext on how we bring these same principles of sortition, deliberation and rotation into the governance and decision making of other kinds of institutions and organisations of daily life, like in our schools, universities, workplaces and our financial institutions. I think there’s a wider set of reforms and new types of shifts in governance and decision making that we could be applying that would start to really shift what people’s notion of democracy even is, but also open up more opportunities for people to have a meaningful say while knowing that also other people like them are involved.

To me, that’s part of the beauty of sortition as well, because we can’t all be involved in every decision all the time, nor should we. We have our lives and our families, etc. But with sortition, the idea is that maybe once or twice in your life, you devote those X amount of days and months to doing something, knowing that other people like you are also doing that. And sortition in itself really captures the essence that everybody has the dignity and capacity to be playing that meaningful role, that it’s not reserved just for some elite or some group of people to do this, that it’s really for everybody.

How have citizens’ assemblies, particularly the idea of sortition, encouraged participation by groups that are otherwise potentially marginalised?

When you look into the research about who tends to participate in all sorts of political and other kinds of activities, it tends to be more highly educated and certain demographics, i.e. men more than women, etc. Whereas with sortition, the idea in practice is that there are two stages to a sortition process. In the first instance, there’s a very large number of invitations that will go out, maybe between 10 and 30 thousand people, depending on the scale of the community. This is typically a physical letter in the post, and it details the issue that people will be deliberating on and how this process will work in terms of how many meetings. There is also information about how people are paid to be part of these assemblies, child care is provided, things that help to break down those barriers to participating, as well as maybe FAQs around stuff like, do I need to wear a suit? All the things that kind of hel,p as many people say, yes to that initial invite in the first place. Then, amongst everybody who says yes, there is still some bias. But you’ve also reached a lot of people who don’t typically vote or participate in a political party or go to town hall meetings or anything like this. So you have reached people who are not your usual participants dominating in other realms of public life today.

Amongst that group, you do a second lottery process, but this time the technical word is stratifying, which just means having a process to ensure that the final group is broadly representative when it comes to things like gender, age, maybe education level, geography. At the end of the day, it’s a political decision to decide by which criteria we want this group to be representative as well. So it tends to vary a little bit, but those are typically the sorts of things that people decide.

How do citizens’ assemblies work to combat mis/disinformation? I.e. the idea that people have these ingrained, potentially biased information sources that can be quite complex when dealing with these big issues.

It’s a really good question, and this interaction with dis/misinformation is complex in a number of ways. Actually, part of the beauty of a citizens’ assembly is that this whole group of people actually has access to the same information, and it’s based on that same information that they’re deliberating and deciding about. They hear from a wide diversity of sources and have time to request additional information if needed, so that typically happens.

Of course, that doesn’t help to counteract in a larger scale way like other trends around this but I think one thing that’s really interesting is that when you look into issues around disinformation and look into like who is spreading this and what is motivating people to do so in the first place actually it correlates quite highly with things like people who tend to be quite lonely, isolated and who lack a sense of belonging. So by doing something to tackle those deeper roots of why people even share disinformation in the first place, I think we will have a better chance of dealing with some of these issues more widely as well. I’m not suggesting citizen assemblies are a silver bullet for dealing with disinformation. So don’t like misquote me there, but the whole process is only positively contributing to various aspects and concerns of like helping people have shared, reliable information around a complex issue.

Also, all of the information that gets shared with an assembly gets publicly shared, usually on a website, and includes presentations by experts and stakeholders. Those are recorded and also publicly available. Not that it’s a huge mass of people that’s necessarily watching this, it’s mostly for the benefit of journalists, but also anyone who might want to try and learn a bit more about a topic or might be sceptical, can go and just find all the information that people were presented with.

We have seen issues that have been of high societal importance and maybe controversy get more attention. So, for example, in Ireland, there was an assembly quite a while ago on issues to do with abortion and whether the constitution should be changed. There were around a hundred thousand people who watched the live streams during that assembly process. So not an insignificant number. It’s not that much for every assembly and certainly not on the local ones, but still, that information is there, and I think depending on what the communication campaigns are around these assemblies, there’s a positive potential in terms of contributing to addressing this issue too.

What technologies do you see that could be used to develop our relationship with democracy?

The tech question is quite a big one in the field right now. We’re publishing a paper around five dimensions of scaling deliberation and how that interacts with AI. I think one of the things that we’ve noticed is that more widely, there have been very different approaches to this question, with different philosophies and different things being tested. I think where I sit is that the most interesting questions relate to wanting to think about how technology can help to enhance the quality and, therefore, the transparency, legitimacy, trust, and trustworthiness of these assemblies, rather than necessarily from a mindset of efficiency or wanting to make them shorter or faster or replace human facilitators. Whereas I think of some of the divergences in the field, there are people who are really working on all of those things. Perhaps we are in an early stage, and it’s worth testing and seeing what’s possible. But in terms of why I even believe in citizens’ assemblies and addressing the problems with democracy, I don’t think there’s a magic shortcut to those deep problems that we have in terms of people’s sense of belonging, distrust and polarisation. I think we need people to spend a lengthy amount of time in person together doing the hard work of finding common ground on the collective issues that we face. I don’t think there’s a benefit to trying to make that process faster somehow, or skipping parts of it.

For example, we’ve been working at DemNext with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication on this pop-up lab on tech-enhanced citizens’ assemblies to test out different ways in which we could, for instance, record all of the conversations that are taking place. Again, with caveats in terms of recordings from small group conversations still staying private to a wider public and only being accessible to researchers and to the group that’s within the assembly.

Because one of the issues in terms of quality-wise is that in a citizens’ assembly, typically there’s a dynamic where you’re going back and forth between a plenary – i.e. a group conversation with everybody – and small group conversations all the time. I think a lot of richness gets lost from all of those small groups. You don’t always have the same consistent and very objective reporting process for capturing all of the information. I think there are ways in which we can be using technology to have a more objective but also fuller process of capturing that data, but also being able to share back highlights and the voices of people that were actually part of it. Those are some of the things that we’re experimenting with. There’s obviously also stuff around like AI summarisation and those sorts of things. But again, that requires evaluation in terms of how it’s capturing really the accuracy and representativeness and some of the nuance in what’s said.

I also think it can be beneficial when it comes to the wider outputs of what gets shared. For example, typically at the end of an assembly, you might have a pdf report that’s 176 pages long and that’s needed for the legislative process, but if you’re trying to get some wider communication with the public, I think having more voice-based outputs would help. Also, you can do interesting research that was not possible before we started trying to record the entirety of these deliberations. You can actually have a better sense of the genesis of each of these ideas and how the conversation flows around them, and pull out some of the voice highlights from what took place.

We’re working on how we could be using technology in thoughtful ways to try and make this an even better kind of process, while still really being thoughtful and intentional about the human aspects that matter. Maybe it could be possible to replace the human facilitators, but like do we actually want to do that?

Lastly, Claudia, what are your hopes for the future of local democracy?

My hopes for the future of local democracy is a vision of a deliberative place where it’s not just at the, let’s say, city council level where you have a permanent citizens assembly but where on an ongoing basis you have new groups of people who are actually drafting local legislation together with elected officials. You also have these assemblies that are taking place in schools, universities, museums, workplaces and other kinds of organisations.

That this starts to become a new normal, that there are new networks that emerge, that the positive ripple effects get spread even wider. I didn’t mention this earlier, but one of the animating forces for me is also seeing how, because of the fact that sortition also brings in so many people who don’t typically participate, it really activates that sense of agency among so many people who end up going on to form new local associations, who might get involved more in local politics or run for office or decide to change jobs or do things that have a more direct impact also on their communities. If we imagine the ripple effects of a deliberative place where these kinds of assembly processes and deliberation become a new norm, then I can imagine how, over the longer term, there’s a really positive effect in terms of shifting those relationships – like relationships between decision makers and citizens, also those who become decision makers themselves on a more ongoing basis.

With all those metrics around belonging, polarisation, trust, and social cohesion, I really want to be able to do some bigger studies around places that are starting to head in this direction. What are the impacts of this? Again, we don’t have the data now because nowhere, as far as I know, is actually doing this. But my hypothesis is that that would be a really impactful change towards a positive direction.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.