Party Dynamics and the Conflictual Institutionalization of Citizens’ Assemblies – Lessons from the German Experience

Decreasing trust in electoral institutions and parties has prompted scholars, civil society actors as well as political parties in liberal democracies to support deliberative democratic innovations to revitalize system support. However, deliberative innovations like citizens’ assemblies (CAs) stand in structural tension with the competitive logic of vote-centric and competitive party democracy. While political parties hold a gate-keeping position for the sustainable implementation of deliberative innovations in representative systems, their motives and the dynamics of their interaction regarding CAs is still an understudied phenomenon that only recently gained more attention. We advance the literature in this field by examining the installment of the first official federal CA by the German parliament. This CA represents a case where despite promising conditions the attempt to reach a consensual agreement between all relevant parties for its installment eventually failed and resulted in a politicization of the CA format as such. Conceptually, we apply the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), which emphasizes the conflictual and boundedly rational dimension of policymaking. Within this framework, CA as a democratic innovation can be conceptualized as a procedural policy alternative in tension with party democracy. Notwithstanding these tensions, CAs may be introduced if they are attached to public problems salient among parties. The MSF serves as an analytical heuristic to reconstruct both the existing political routines and relations between actors in this specific institutional context as well as the contingent dynamics between different substantial logics (problem-, policy-, politics- streams) which guide the policy process. Methodologically we apply outcome-oriented process tracing. We empirically reconstruct the central steps of the policy-process in order to explain the conflictual outcome. Among other, we find two major mechanisms that account for the result: Divergent normative ideas about what constitutes a democratically appropriate will-formation, and the perception of the format as part of an ideologically and politically biased project. Based on this, we draw both methodological and substantial lessons from the case that we regard relevant for similar cases as well.