But this also reveals what is wrong with expecting the same from undecided or uninformed voters. By expecting citizens to blindly defer to the political decisions of a group of randomly selected subjects, the widespread use of mini-publics for decision-making will decrease, rather than increase, citizens' ability to appropriate and identify with the laws. and policies to which they are subject, as required by the democratic ideal of self-governance. In fact, the long-term effect of making political decisions based on the weighted judgments of the participants in the mini-publics instead of the actual judgments of the citizenryit is that the latter will have difficulties to understand itself as a participant in a democratic project of self-government.
Institutionalizing mini-publics with the hope that they think and decide for the rest of the citizenry would not be a way of increasing citizen C Level Contact List control over the political process, quite the contrary. From a democratic point of view, the fundamental difference here lies in whether the mini-publics are conceived with the objective of empowering citizens or of ignoring them . In order for mini-publics to have a democratizing effect, it is necessary to think of ways to use them to improve the participation and influence of the citizenry as a whole.in the political process.
From this perspective, mini-publics could fulfill two important democratic functions: first, they could contribute to improving the quality of public deliberation, so that citizens can also reach a balanced opinion on important political decisions to which they are obliged to obey, and Second, they could contribute to making the political system more receptive to public opinion considered on the political decisions in question. In my book Democracy without ShortcutsI offer a detailed analysis of various ways in which mini-publics could perform these important functions.
