Winner of the Glenn Joy Award
An exciting and recent development in the history of democracy is the use of mini-publics for political decision-making. Mini-publics are assemblies composed of
randomly selected citizens and convened for the purpose of arriving at a collective
decision through deliberation. Most prominently, mini-publics have been used in
Ontario and British Columbia to arrive at proposals for electoral reform which were
subsequently put to popular referendums, and in Ireland a mini-public has been
convened to deliberate about the repeal of the country’s constitutional ban on
abortion, which was also subsequently put to a referendum. Additionally, mini-publics have been employed in Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Poland,
and the US state of Oregon for various public purposes. These applications have
been precipitated by the great deal of positive attention which mini-publics have
received from political scientists over the past thirty years.
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