Scaling deliberative democracy has to be about more than the numbers

In democracies worldwide, public deliberation is gaining attention as a way to strengthen legitimacy, foster trust, and solve complex problems. In citizens assemblies and other deliberative processes we have a powerful answer to the breakdown in trust in our elected representatives and the wider crisis of democracy that we are seeing right now.

Yet deliberative democracy in the UK is still fairly peripheral to the main discourse. The reason given for that is often about scale - that we need to engage more people to increase legitimacy of processes and therefore build greater trust in decision making and cohesion in communities. The possibility of new technologies allowing 100s of people to deliberate in a relatively low cost way makes the scale question loom larger. AI is a potentially exciting opportunity but it needs to be viewed in the context of the actual challenges that we are trying to address. 

This is not a new debate, as Nicole Curato reminded us in the recent DemNext Scaling Democratic Innovations webinar. She stressed the need for “democratic innovations to become embedded in political systems” . That is a complex challenge that is about more than numbers. The work of DemNext, and others including ScaleDem reinforce this, providing a nuanced and systemic view of scale. Taken together their two models - Democracy Next’s five dimensions of scale and Scale Dem’s four give us six different elements of scale:

1. Bringing more people into deliberation (direct or indirect) (scaling out)
2. Increasing the number of deliberative processes across places and institutions
3. Embedding deliberation at higher levels of governance (regional, national, global) and influencing law and policy to ensure long term adoption (scale up/ high)
4. Increasing the impact of deliberation, ensuring decisions shape policy and public discourse and that it shifts power (scale deep). 
5. Rooting participation in culture (scale deep)
6. Enhancing deliberative quality — inclusiveness, fairness, trust, and depth of reasoning (scale in)

These six align with thinking on how systems change. That’s reassuring, especially if we see the purpose of scaling deliberative democracy as changing the system by which countries, communities and institutions make decisions, as we do at Involve. We need our democratic system to have renewed purpose - putting real power in people’s hands, making inclusive decisions, protecting rights and freedoms and increasing equity. We need to change the structures, organisation, culture, mindset and relationships within the system to support that purpose. If our purpose for scaling is different, then the emphasis and strategies will change too. 

Whatever we are scaling we need to be laser focused on why. Scale is not a goal in itself, bigger is not always better. As DemocracyNext describe so powerfully - Scaling deliberation isn’t just about adding more. It’s about strategically balancing the different elements  — using technology where it helps, but grounding everything in civic infrastructure and democratic values. 

So what does this tell us about what we do to scale better decision making and more inclusive culture in the UK? In their latest paper, Scaling Democractic Innovations, DemNext present a way forward based on supporting connecting, relational and governance infrastructure. In their recent seminar Kelly McBride, Director of Capacity Building and Standards at Involve said “scale is not just about better process it’s an infrastructure challenge”. So we need to get serious about all these elements of scale and ensure that they add up to the scale of connection and deliberation that we need in these changing times. 

That means creating dedicated participation units inside government such as the Office of Mass Participation set up by Zohran Mandani in New York, and advocated for in the Scottish Government; building capacity to radically increase those who can hold these conversations; fostering deep connection between conversations at a national and local level; forming long term partnerships with civil society who know their places and communities; focusing on what we do around any participatory process to move from one offs to longer term power shifts; and creating a culture where people expect and are able to shape decisions about their futures.

As practitioners we need to act as catalysts for this exciting change. We need to ensure that we don’t just default to the numbers, but instead find a set of solutions to the problem that we are trying to solve and build a system that combines all the elements of scale for democratic renewal.