POSTPONED – School of Political Science & Sociology Seminar Series: Deliberative mini-publics in the democratic system

by Jane Suiter (Dublin City University)

Democracy is more than deliberation and deliberative mini-publics  do not make a democracy. Yet mini-publics are proliferating not just in Ireland but in Scotland, Belgium, France and elsewhere. This paper uses the example of the Irish Constitutional Convention and Citizens’ Assembly to ask  how mini-publics  can  be located within a broader democratic system and  looks at (potential) linkages of mini-publics with other democratic practices and actors such as voting, referendums, parliaments, political parties, social movements, media, or the public sphere in a   ‘hybrid’ form of representative democracy which can accommodate and couple both electoral and sortition driven representation.

Jane  Suiter is an Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. Jane’s expertise lies mainly in the area of the public sphere; and in particular participation and deliberation. Her current research focus is on  citizens’ assemblies and on disinformation. She is Senior Research Fellow on the Irish Citizen Assembly (2019-2020) (2016-2018) and the Irish Constitutional Convention (2012-2014) and a founder member of We the Citizens (2011), Ireland’s first deliberative experiment. She is a member of the Research Advisory Group on the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute of Democracy at Penn State and theDCU President’s Award for Research. Her latest book (with David M. Farell) is ReimaginingDemocracy: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Frontline published by Cornell University Press. She has published in 30 plus journals including Representation, International Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Politics and the International Journal of Communication.