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Deliberative minipublics—participatory processes combining civic lottery with structured deliberation—are increasingly presented as a solution to address a series of problems. Whereas political theory has been prolific in conceiving their contributions, it remains unclear how the people organizing minipublics in practice view their purposes, and how these conceptions align with the theory. This paper conducts a thematic analysis of the reports of all the minipublics convened in Belgium between 2001 and 2021 (n = 51) to map whether and how justifications coincide with the theory. The analysis reveals an important gap: minipublics are in practice predominantly presented as contributions to policymaking, while more deliberative functions remain peripheral. Some common practical purposes also remain under-theorized, in particular their capacity to bridge the gap between citizens and politics. This desynchronization, combined with a plethora of desired outcomes associated with minipublics, indicates the creation of a minipublic bubble which inflates their capacity to solve problems.

The integration of deliberative democracy within larger schemes of policy-making of collaborative governance is a key challenge. Such integration potentially means changes in the role and in the power relationships between the actors of collaborative governance. Indeed, it brings in citizens – who were traditionally not formally involved – along with stakeholders – who were traditionally involved. Through the case of a large-scale education reform in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium, this paper seeks to explore how these actors react to the use of deliberative mini-publics and regard their legitimacy.

Several studies have investigated the impact of mini-publics on public policy. These works do not however integrate the fact that decision-makers have preferences before a minipublic, and that these preferences affect the way a mini-public can impact public policy. The article develops a model to measure the influence of mini-publics on public policy, called the Sequential Impact Matrixes (SIM). This framework distinguishes multiple types of influences that a mini-public can exert on decision-makers following the latter’s initial sets of policy preferences. The model suggests that a minipublic can exert five different kinds of influences on decision-makers, namely a continuous, enriching, innovating, shifting, or an inhibiting influence. The framework is applied on the Citizens’ Panel ‘Make Your Brussels Mobility’ and it shows that most of the Panel’s recommendations were in line with the decision-makers’ initial preferences, whereas influences altering these preferences are rarer.

Youth parliaments have been conceived as means to reconnect young people with politics, give them a voice in public debates, and ultimately boost the legitimacy of parliaments as democratic institutions. However, to contribute to the overall quality of democracy, youth parliaments must also reflect certain democratic principles in their own organisation. This paper identifies five principles to assess the democratic credentials of youth parliaments: the quality of representation, quality of participation, openness of the agenda, meaningful impact, and enlightened understanding, and applies them to the Belgian Jeugd Parlement Jeunesse (JPJ). Our results show that the JPJ offers a safe space for open and respectful political discussion among youngsters, but faces difficulties in generating impact and guaranteeing representativeness among the participants. The latter limits the JPJ’s potential to close the widening gap between young people and politics.

As academic and political interest in citizen participation and democratic innovations is growing, the question of their impact on public policy remains essential to assess their genuine contribution to the normative project of democratization. Impact assessments of consultative participatory mechanisms are commonly conducted with a congruency approach-a desk-based research method which assesses impact based on the textual correspondence between a citizen-created idea and public policy documents. This method, however, lacks reliability and uniformity, and this paper therefore seeks to standardize its application and ways to improve the accuracy of its results by proposing two methodological add-ons. First, a sequential impact matrix that considers the preferences of decision-makers before a consultative participatory mechanism to see the extent to which decision-makers take up citizen ideas that align with or diverge from their own agenda. Second, a mixed method that combines a congruency approach with interviews of actors involved in the follow-up of the participatory process to balance their experiences with the congruency approach's main findings. The variants of the congruency approach are then applied to a deliberative minipublic-the citizen panel 'Brussels-Make Your Mobility'. This analysis shows how these methodological strategies alter the impact assessment's results, and its findings suggest that the use of a sequential impact matrix with a mixed method not only produces an accurate and reliable measurement but also generates valuable insights into the diffuse ways in which minipublics can exert substantial influences on the institutional structures and the political decision-making.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11077-022-09450-w.

Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.

Le 13 décembre 2019, le Parlement de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale et l’Assemblée réunie de la Commission communautaire commune (COCOM) ont adopté une modification de leur règlement commun, visant à introduire la faculté de créer des commissions délibératives composées de députés et invitant des citoyens tirés au sort à participer à leurs travaux. Suivant une logique similaire et mettant en place un dispositif quasi identique, le 20 décembre 2019, l’Assemblée de la Commission communautaire française (COCOF) – communément appelée le Parlement francophone bruxellois – a également instauré la faculté de créer des commissions délibératives entre parlementaires et citoyens tirés au sort. Il s’agit là des concrétisations d’une volonté exprimée lors de la constitution des exécutifs bruxellois issus de l’élection régionale du 26 mai 2019. L’initiative de créer de telles commissions délibératives mixtes est inédite, aussi bien en Belgique que dans les autres parties du monde. Elle s’inscrit dans le sillage des expériences participatives et délibératives qui sont menées depuis deux décennies et dont le nombre va croissant. Ce Courrier hebdomadaire retrace le processus de conception du dispositif, détaille son fonctionnement et ses structures, et évoque les tout débuts de sa mise en œuvre concrète.

This Special Issue uses Cristina Lafont’s latest book Democracy without Shortcut to stimulate a focused debate about the role of minipublics in democratic systems and the normative and practical prospects of a participatory and deliberative democracy. This Editorial Introduction provides an overview of current and emerging debates on minipublics research, locates Lafont’s work in these debates, and presents a summary of contributions in the issue.

Assemblées citoyennes, conférences de consensus, conventions citoyennes, jurys délibératifs ou panels de citoyens se sont multipliés depuis la fin des années 1970. On regroupe sous l’expression « mini-publics » ces différentes formes d’assemblées de citoyens tirés au sort qui délibèrent sur un sujet politique déterminé afin de formuler une série de recommandations d’action publique. Les dispositifs de mini-public procèdent d’une volonté de renouveler les pratiques démocratiques en permettant aux citoyens de s’impliquer plus directement dans les débats de la vie publique, au-delà des échéances électorales et des canaux traditionnels. Au point d’être parfois considérés comme l’un des meilleurs modes de démocratie participative et délibérative. Comme de nombreux pays à travers le monde, la Belgique connaît son lot d’expériences de mini-public depuis le début des années 2000. Ce Courrier hebdomadaire en dresse le répertoire et en tire un bilan. Cet exercice apparaît fort utile à l’heure où diverses assemblées parlementaires du pays créent des commissions délibératives réunissant des élus et des citoyens désignés sur la base d’un tirage au sort. L’étude permet notamment de mettre en perspective cette évolution institutionnelle récente en montrant que, depuis une vingtaine d’années déjà, de nombreuses autorités publiques ont recours à des mini-publics, et ce à tous les niveaux de pouvoir, en particulier en Wallonie et en Région bruxelloise.