Party Dynamics and the (Un)sustainable Institutionalization of Citizens’ Assemblies – Lessons from the German Experience

Over the past 20 years, we have witnessed an increasing trend towards an institutionalization of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) on all polity levels in many world regions. As one of the most prominent versions of lottery-based deliberative mini-publics, they have been introduced by various political actors, including (governing) political parties. This trend could also be observed in Germany where the coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals implemented a parliamentary-initiated CA at the national level for the first time in 2023. According to the original plan of the governing coalition, at least three CAs should be held during the legislative term – gradually paving the way for the systemic integration of this instrument into the representative system. In 2024, after the completion of the CA on “Nutrition in transition”, chancellor Scholz announced that he would like to see a CA on the evaluation of the anti-Corona-pandemic measures. However, neither this idea nor another CA was initiated by the federal parliament within the remainder of this legislative term, apparently halting the trend towards systematizing CAs in Germany at the national level. This paper asks why this is the case? While a Corona evaluation theoretically constitutes an ideal-typical issue for which a CA could mobilize the diversity of experience-based perspectives of the whole citizenry, no political majority could be reached to implement this plan despite the rather positive evaluation of the first CA on “Nutrition in transition”. In order to explain why this chance was not used by the political parties in government and opposition in the federal parliament, we conduct “explaining-outcome process tracing” (Beach & Pedersen 2019). We follow the basic assumption that important mechanisms linking the (rather favorable) initial conditions and the missing decision of the parliament to implement a further CA must at least partly be found in the experiences German political parties made with the initiation and implementation of the CA on “Nutrition in transition”. Therefore, we analyze the full life cycle of this first and so far only official parliamentary-initiated CA at the German national level with a special focus on competing partisan positions and resulting political dynamics. We use and compare data from party manifestos for the national elections in 2021 and 2025 and from observations of a) parliamentary debates before the start of the CA, b) the process of the CA during September 2023 to February 2024, and c) the behavior of political parties during the parliamentary committee sessions debating the recommendations of the CA (June 2024-December 2024). Relating the results of the analysis to insights from other studies about the role of political parties in initiating and implementing CAs and similar democratic innovations, we explain why there was no second CA set up by the German parliament despite its initial commitment. By discussing the lessons to be learned from this case, the paper contributes to the scholarly debate about how the motives of political parties and partisan competition influence the prospects of democratic innovations to be effectively and sustainably integrated into representative democratic systems.