Daring More (Deliberative) Democracy? Conditions and Potentials of the Introduction of Citizens’ Assemblies by the German Federal Parliament

This paper analyzes the current introduction of citizens' assemblies by the German Bundestag – a democratic innovation initiated by the governing coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals. After a few rather informal experiments with the format in recent years the first "Bürgerrat" formally established by the parliament is scheduled to start its work in September 2023. The new sympathy for citizens' assemblies on the part of the relevant parties is anything but self-evident. On the one hand, the attempt to regain lost trust among the population, to set an antidote against the influx of right-wing populist parties or to deal constructively with polarized problems, but also to use an instrument that is supposedly more controllable than other forms of innovation like plebiscites, could be motives that make it seem rational for political parties to support the introduction of citizens' assemblies. On the other hand, these advantages are counterbalanced by obvious tensions between the logics of representative electoral democracy and lottery-based citizens' assemblies. The introduction of the latter may lead to a competition for legitimacy and increase the complexity of the decision-making process. Moreover, a trust-diminishing effect can be expected if democratic reforms raise false expectations that they do not fulfill and instead prove to be an instrumental placebo. However ambivalent the motives for this innovation may be, one finding of the research literature seems clear: The success and democratization potential of citizens' assemblies depend to a large extent on the (open and supportive) attitude of the relevant political actors and their more or less institutionalized uptake of citizens' recommendations. Against this background, the paper poses the question: What democratization potential does the introduction of citizens' assemblies in the German political system have? To answer this question, the paper discusses in a first step the results of research on the linkage of citizens' assemblies with procedures and actors of representative democracy. In a second step, it reconstructs the motives and expectations of relevant political actors in Germany based on interviews, programmatic statements and documents. In a third step, these views of the political parties are compared with the positions of the research literature and, on this basis, the democratization potential of citizens' assemblies after their introduction by the Bundestag is critically reflected. Thus, the article analyzes a democratic innovation in the making and contributes to the academic debate on the potential of citizens' assemblies with its insights into the German case.