Citizens’ assemblies: are they the future of democracy?

A look at the surge in popularity of randomly selected councils that offer an alternative to politics as we know it

When Fauzia Bajwa, a retired software developer who lives in St-Bruno-de-Montarville, Quebec, received an invitation to participate in something called a citizens' assembly, her first impulse was to write the letter off as junk mail. It's a common reaction: most recipients of such a mailing never bother to respond. Then Bajwa looked at it again. The sender was listed as the Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, a nonprofit organization that compiles opinion reports to submit to the Canadian government. Though the mailing's language was vague - the assembly would be on the subject of so-called online harms" - Bajwa's curiosity was piqued. After all, she'd just read a book about online surveillance, and at the time was waking up to a news cycle that seemed to revolve around the tweets of a certain president of the United States. I found it quite concerning that people were using what I initially considered to be a very good and useful tool" - the internet - to put out lies and fake information, so I was already thinking about these issues," she says. She went online and signed up.

Citizens' assemblies, a phenomenon that is gaining in popularity around the globe, date back to ancient Athens, where legislative panels, courts and councils were chosen via random selection. In a practice known as sortition, Greek citizens over the age of 30 were enlisted to debate governmental matters from city finances to military strategy. More recently, citizens' assemblies have convened to hammer out solutions to such issues as homelessness in Los Angeles, the allocation of a $5bn budget in Melbourne, Australia, and the longstanding ban on abortion in Ireland.