Deliberative mini-publics have become an increasingly prominent feature of climate governance across advanced democracies. In the United Kingdom, their rapid expansion has been accompanied by the emergence of a professional deliberative field composed of facilitators, recruitment agencies, advisory bodies, expert witnesses, and network organizations. While existing scholarship debates whether professionalization enhances deliberative quality or introduces risks of marketization and elite capture, there is limited empirical evidence on how influence, standards, and authority are structured within this field. This article addresses that gap by mapping the actors involved in the design and delivery of UK climate mini-publics using qualitative social network analysis. The analysis examines how professional ties shape the circulation of expertise, standards, and backstage decision-making. The findings identify important and influential actors within the network, and their place within the wider industry. Here, we highlight the unequal concentration and clustering within the network. Rather than finding clear evidence of elite capture, the analysis reveals a form of structural dependency. Responsibility and authority are frequently transferred from commissioning bodies to facilitators, concentrating influence in a small number of actors. While these actors often act as safeguards of deliberative integrity, this reliance also introduces fragility, risks of stagnation, and uneven standards across the field. The article concludes that professionalization is neither inherently corrosive nor unproblematic. By foregrounding the networked architecture of deliberation, the study contributes a new perspective on how democratic innovations are governed, stabilized, and constrained in practice.

Contemporary democracies face growing public disaffection and mistrust. Governments have tried to revert these trends by promoting participatory governance. Prior studies established how deliberation can empower citizens. However, whether these effects hold in real-life initiatives initiated by partisan governments remains unclear. We test the ability of citizens’ assemblies to foster democratic attitudes in a natural experiment leveraging the random selection of participants to Lisbon’s citizens’ assemblies Participation led to an increase in issue knowledge and salience, external political efficacy and institutional trust. However, it did not impact internal political efficacy nor helped citizens better recognize the challenges of collective decision-making. The results hold for two assembly editions and reveal the potential of government-led participatory initiatives to reconnect citizens with democracy.

Carbon competence refers to individuals’ knowledge and understanding concerning the causes and impacts of greenhouse gas concentrations. Using a robust and expansive version of the concept, this essay poses the question of whether contemporary democratic theory demonstrates carbon competence. I argue that prevailing approaches reveal low carbon competence in two respects: implicit or explicit underestimation of the scope and severity of the ecological crisis, and commitment to normative strictures that actively discourage the possibility of rapid decarbonization. As exemplary models, I foreground the work of Nadia Urbinati, Cristina Lafont, and Hélène Landemore.

This article analyses how courts can preserve legitimacy and institutional stability when called upon to intervene in consultative referenda on secession. Its central claim is that visible impartiality is a precondition for the democratic credibility of potential subsequent deliberative settlements. Put differently, constitutional negotiation in multinational systems depends upon an institutional setting that is clearly objective and in which the rule of law is applied free from any reasonable perception of bias. The article critically examines three recent judgements from the Italian and Spanish Constitutional Courts and the UK Supreme Court, arguing that in each case, publicly available documents raise significant questions as to whether the panel composition met the international standard concerning the appearance of judicial impartiality. The first section conceptualises judicial objectivity as a pragmatic activity with normative implications. The second section examines the current jurisprudence to demonstrate that the standard for recusal is the appearance of bias. The third part applies this standard to the selected cases.

Legal cases in the policy area of religion—concerning religious exemptions, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, or religious education—are fiercely contested. Although democratic theory has long debated the role of religion in court, the normative challenges of religious strategic litigation have yet to be discussed. I conceptualize religious strategic litigation as a political practice in which groups take legal action based on norms concerning religion in order to pursue broader political agendas. Challenging the notion that religious strategic litigation is special, that is, that it raises particular concerns of democratic legitimacy, I argue that it shares its problematic features with strategic litigation in other policy areas. Democratic theory should focus on how strategic litigation in any policy area can potentially disempower citizens.

Extensive research has examined whether political satire promotes or suppresses political discussion, but far less attention has been paid to how it shapes discourse quality. This study investigates the impact of political satire on discourse quality by scrutinizing the substance of online discussions in a non-democratic context. Drawing on manual content analysis of discussions on a major Chinese social media platform surrounding China’s controversial policy to raise the age of retirement, we analysed original posts and subsequent replies (N = 3,400) to assess the impact of satire on online political talk. The results show that political satire significantly decreases topic relevance and rationality, while exerting no significant effect on civility, and virtually precludes argument reciprocity. These findings contribute theoretically by shifting the focus from whether satire stimulates political engagement to how it influences the substantive quality of deliberation. They also invite a reassessment of the often-overemphasized optimistic role of political satire, highlighting its potential to erode rational and constructive discourse.

This paper traces and assesses the trajectories of democratic innovations (DIs) in Germany across levels of governance and over time since 1990, providing novel and original data. We focus on three types of DIs that have been applied in Germany: direct democratic instruments, participatory budgeting, and deliberative mini-publics (DMPs). DIs proliferated differently across the different levels of governance (local, state, and federal), with shifting peaks in popularity and differing evolutions in process design and regulations. Going beyond description, this paper discusses the trajectories of DIs by applying a theoretical framework based, firstly, on Elstub and Escobar’s concept of DIs as providing opportunities for citizens (in participation, deliberation, and influence) and, secondly, on Warren’s system-oriented approach on democratic functions (these being empowered inclusion, collective will-formation, and collective decision-making). This framework provides a useful tool for analysing how the trajectories of DIs in Germany have affected citizens’ opportunities. Combined, these trajectories show a movement towards opportunities for inclusive participation, deliberation, and will-formation of a few citizens in DMPs, rather than opportunities for empowered participation or influence on political agendas and decisions.

The article advances debates on just transition by addressing both conceptual and practical dimensions of justice and development. It proposes an integrated evaluative framework that bridges justice and development perspectives, which are often treated separately in the literature. – Drawing on the capability approach, the framework links normative evaluation with participatory co-production, thereby supporting the design of more transformative just transition policies. Based on an extensive review of the literature, the article identifies seven dimensions of a comprehensive conception of social-ecological justice – distributive, epistemic, restorative, planetary, intergenerational, ecological, and procedural – and distinguish two ideal types of development – growth-driven development and social-ecological development. We argue that the extent to which the dimensions of justice are realised, both in number and degree, determines the scope and depth of shifts from growth-driven to social-ecological development and thereby shapes the transformative potential of just transition policies. The article applies this framework empirically through an evaluation of the International Labour Organisation’s approach to just transition. By grounding the analysis in a capability-based conception of justice and development, our framework positions co-production as central to processes of transformation that seek to be just. As part of this co-production process, the article calls for a more engaged and ethically grounded scholarship that contributes actively to the collective pursuit of just and sustainable futures.

Scholars have proposed integrating deliberative democracy processes and new technologies within party structures to address the legitimacy crisis of political parties. However, for established political groups, this is not an easy road to take. The paper delves into these issues by presenting the case study of Agorà Democratiche within the Italian Democratic Party (PD), the major center-left party in Italy. Agorà aimed to engage party members and like-minded citizens in shaping the party’s agenda through deliberative assemblies. This adoption by Agorà introduced a new form of political participation that led thousands of citizens to voice their opinions. However, it encountered several challenges. The paper argues that democratic innovations do not always yield the desired outcomes for political parties. Participatory and deliberative processes might be hard to implement in established political groups that are accustomed to old political schemas. More specifically, I pinpoint four main obstacles encountered by Agorà Democratiche: the ‘culture of verticality’ within the party, an unfavorable external context, the lack of institutionalization of the programme, and the ambiguous role played by technology. If not handled carefully, new technologies and deliberative processes can worsen the existing crisis within political parties by falling short of expectations and further undermining the organization’s credibility.

This article investigates citizens’ refusal to take part in participatory and deliberative mechanisms. An increasing number of scholars and political actors support the development of mini‐publics – that is, deliberative forums with randomly selected lay citizens. It is often argued that such innovations are a key ingredient to curing the democratic malaise of contemporary political regimes because they provide an appropriate means to achieve inclusiveness and well considered judgment. Nevertheless, real‐life experience shows that the majority of citizens refuse the invitation when they are recruited. This raises a challenging question for the development of a more inclusive democracy: Why do citizens decline to participate in mini‐publics? This article addresses this issue through a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of those who have declined to participate in three mini‐publics: the G1000, the G100 and the Climate Citizens Parliament. Drawing on in‐depth interviews, six explanatory logics of non‐participation are distinguished: concentration on the private sphere; internal political inefficacy; public meeting avoidance; conflict of schedule; political alienation; and mini‐public's lack of impact on the political system. This shows that the reluctance to take part in mini‐publics is rooted in the way individuals conceive their own roles, abilities and capacities in the public sphere, as well as in the perceived output of such democratic innovations.

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome.

A significant shortcoming in contemporary deliberative systems is that citizens are disconnected from various elite sites of public deliberation. This article explores the concept of ‘coupling’ as a means to better link citizens and elites in deliberative systems. The notion of ‘designed coupling’ is developed to describe institutional mechanisms for linking otherwise disconnected deliberative sites. To consider whether it is possible and indeed desirable to use institutional design to couple different sites in a deliberative system, the article draws on insights from a case study in which a mini‐public was formally integrated into a legislative committee. The empirical study finds that it is not only feasible to couple mini‐publics to legislative committees, but when combined, the democratic and deliberative capacity of both institutions can be strengthened. To be effective, ‘designed coupling’ requires more than establishing institutional connections; it also requires that actors to step outside their comfort zone to build new relationships and engage in new communicative spaces with different sets of ideas, actors and rules. This can be facilitated by institutional design, but it also requires leaders and champions who are well‐placed to encourage actors to think differently.

Deliberative forums, such as citizens’ assemblies or reference panels, are one institutionalization of deliberative democracy that has become increasingly commonplace in recent years. MASS LBP is a pioneer in designing and facilitating such long-form deliberative processes in Canada. This article provides an overview of the company’s civic lottery and reference panel process, notes several distinctive features of MASS LBP that are relevant to addressing challenges to democratic deliberation, and outlines possible areas for future research in deliberative democracy applied in both private and public settings.

This article attempts to view the idea of a “crisis of democracy” through a lens of individualization of the society. As the consequence of the impact of the individualization on existing liberal democracy, new forms of niggling democracy have been emerging. This article maps varieties of such emerging democracies in contemporary Japanese society.

Can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem‐based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real‐world case: a deliberative mini‐public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini‐public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini‐public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini‐publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.