de Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies

Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are flourishing around the world. Quite often composed of randomly selected citizens, CAs, arguably, come as a possible answer to contemporary democratic challenges. Democracies worldwide are indeed confronted with a series of disruptive phenomena such as a widespread perception of distrust and growing polarization as well as low performance. Many actors seek to reinvigorate democracy with citizen participation and deliberation. CAs are expected to have the potential to meet this twofold objective. But, despite deliberative and inclusive qualities of CAs, many questions remain open. The increasing popularity of CAs call for a holistic reflection and evaluation on their origins, current uses and future directions.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies showcases the state of the art around the study of CAs and opens novel perspectives informed by multidisciplinary research and renewed thinking about deliberative participatory processes. It discusses the latest theoretical, empirical, and methodological scientific developments on CAs and offers a unique resource for scholars, decision-makers, practitioners, and curious citizens to better understand the qualities, purposes, promises but also pitfalls of CAs.

Min Reuchamps is Professor of Political Science at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. His teaching and research interests include federalism and multi-level governance, democracy and its transformations and innovations, participatory and deliberative methods, as well as relations between language(s) and politics and in particular the role of metaphors in political discourse. He has published over twenty books and edited volumes on these topics. In the wake of these works, he initiated the COST Action ’Constitution-making and deliberative democracy’. He is regularly invited to observe and assess democratic processes as well as to appear in the media and in the public debate. In Belgium, he actively contributed to the design of the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue of the Parliament of the German-speaking Community and of the mixed parliamentary committees for the Parliament of the Region of Brussels, the French-speaking Parliament in Brussels and the Walloon Parliament, as well as the federal online platform for the future of the country.

Yanina Welp is Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute in Geneva (Switzerland) and co-founder of the Red de Politólogas. Between 2008 and 2018 she was a principal researcher at the Centre for Democracy Studies and co-director of the Zurich Latin American Centre (2016-2019), both at the University of Zurich. She finished her Habilitation in 2015 at the University of St Gallen. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) and two Bachelor degrees in Social Communication and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Recent representative publications include the The will of the people. Populism and Citizens Participation in Latin America (De Gruyter, 2022), and the edited books The Politics of Recall Elections (Palgrave, 2020) and El diablo está en los detalles. Referéndum y poder político en América Latina (The Devil is in the Details. Referendum and Political Power in Latin America, PUCP, 2020).

Julien Vrydagh is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart working on the ERC funded project ＂Designing Democracy on Earth and Mars＂. He has a joint PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the UCLouvain. He is also a research associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His PhD thesis investigated the influence of deliberative minipublics on public decisions. His broader research interests include democratic theory, citizen participation, deliberative democracy, systems thinking, and public policy. He has recently published articles in European Political Science Review, Policy Studies, Representation, the Journal of Legislative Studies, and the Journal of Deliberative Democracy.