Comparing Discourses About Citizens' Assemblies in Six National Public Debates: One Design for Multiple Political Conceptions

Over the past decade, citizens' assemblies (CAs) have gained prominence. The scholarship mainly conceives them as a standardized remedy for the diffuse crisis of representative democracy. Some also argue CAs have the potential to (re)shape discourses in the public sphere. However, whether CAs shape the public debate and how such innovations and their impacts are conceived remain underexplored. More precisely, how are they connected to political conflicts, ideological cleavages and popular mobilization? To explore this question, we conduct a comparative analysis of public debates surrounding CAs in six European countries: Belgium, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. We use an interpretive qualitative approach to compare the narratives attached to such mechanisms in two newspapers per country over a fifteen-year period (2010 – 2025). Our findings demonstrate significant variation in how CAs are discussed across national public debates as well as evolution over time. They are portrayed in very different ways depending on which actors promote them (e.g. the executive, an opposition party, a group of activists) and their resonance with other political dynamics (e.g. a political deadlock or struggle ideological divides). This paper accordingly addresses the integration of democratic innovation into contemporary political systems.