Fact-checking and expertise in transnational citizen assemblies: the case of the European Citizen Panels

The burgeoning literature on the role of expertise within mini-publics and citizen assemblies has mostly focused on its impact on deliberations: experts’ input may increase or decrease the quality of deliberations, which then influences the content and soundness of recommendations (Goodin & Niemeyer 2003, Mehltretter Drury et al. 2021). This paper expands our understanding of the role of expertise in deliberative processes by looking beyond deliberations’ outcomes to examine more broadly how expert input is incorporated in process design (Lightbody & Roberts 2019, Lopez-Rabatel & Sintomer 2020). To do so, it draws on an in-depth case study of the European Citizens’ Panels (ECPs) to ask how participants’ conceptions of expertise impacted the assembly’s institutional design and the quality of deliberations during the ECPs. The ECPs were part of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE), an innovative exercise of transnational deliberative democracy initiated by the European Union between April 2021 and May 2022. The ECPs were composed of 800 randomly selected citizens from all 27 EU Member States. This paper focuses on Panel 2 entitled ‘EU democracy, values, rights, rule of law, security’ in which 200 of the sorted citizens were asked to reflect and provide recommendations on these topics. The paper focuses specifically on the ‘fact-checking’ committee which coordinated expert input during the panels held in December 2021 in Florence, Italy. It adopts an innovative methodology which combines ethnographic field notes, grey literature produced during the CoFoE and 29 semi-structured interviews with citizens, facilitators, note-takers, experts and oversight body members, thus allowing for an in-depth case study of how participating citizens and non-participants alike were included in the process. The analysis highlights two different conceptions of expertise and four critical ‘moments’ for expert input which were systematically under-problematized in process design. In doing so, it raises questions regarding limitations of institutional participation if it is done without the creative and meaningful participation of citizens in process design itself. This paper will contribute to this Section by feeding into two larger debates on institutional participation. First, it problematizes the relationship between expertise and democratic innovations to participatory governance. Second, it interrogates how are transnational participatory innovations embedded in the larger institutional and civic (eco)system of the European Union.