Governments have been experimenting with innovative practices in the field of deliberative democracy to make the public participate in decision-making. Citizens’ assemblies and mainstream participation are good examples of this. Citizens´ participation needs to be secured and guaranteed through codification and institutionalization. Otherwise, no rights are conferred to citizens and deliberative processes operate at the discretion of public authorities. Experimental practices, without a legal framework supporting them are likely to bring about harmful effects on democracy. Citizens may perceive that their participation is useless if their opinions are not finally considered in decision-making because not legal framework makes compulsory for public authorities to integrate these inputs in the process. To turn these pilot programmes into sustained governmental practices remains a challenge. European countries and even EU institutions are reluctant to introduce codified methods of citizens´ participation in their legal systems. However, institutionalization of deliberative democracy is the key to secure citizens’ rights and also to provide deliberative processes with a set of guaranties and safeguards, such as regular monitoring, transparent reporting, or fruitful feedback.
Deliberative democracy also needs to address an additional challenge. Any legal considerations to deliberative processes must take a future-oriented approach, considering not only to give solution to current unsolved problems, but also the lurking challenges in the context of a changing world. In this regard, it is imperative to consider the intersection of technology and society, which also has a reflection in deliberative processes. These new functionalities allow to scale deliberation up making possible a massive participation by the public in decision-making. The next step is to use AI to analyze these large amounts of citizens´ inputs so that group decisions can be considered as collective intelligence and also as collective will. However, this will raise the problem of how to intertwin this collective inputs with the decision making process. Should this collective will be binding for public authorities who hold the power? Could we consider that deliberative processes hold and supported by AI lead to a form of direct democracy? In such a case, should there be any limits? How should these deliberative methods be introduced in the decision-making process? How should the rights and interests of minorities or marginalized groups be protected? What are the guarantees that should be considered? What methods are more suitable for gathering input? Who owns the process? Should public powers accountability be reformulated when decisions are made following citizens´ inputs? What would the impact on democratic systems of government be? Will these innovations reformulate the basis of democracy?
Up to now, deliberative democracy is more of a concept than an articulated and comprehensive set of rules governing deliberative methods of decision making. Different conceptual frameworks dealing with deliberative democracy have been elaborated and there is also an agreement about some of the principles that have to be considered in any given deliberative process. However, a closer approach suggests that there are still many questions to be answered if EU governments want to put deliberative processes into practice.
