From Silicon Valley to public policy, the profound draw towards ‘scalable solutions’ is capturing political and economic life at large. This draw towards scaling has been reflected in recent trends within the study and practice of deliberative mini-publics: from studies investigating the ‘scaling up’ of deliberative effects beyond the forum, to claims that artificial intelligence can support democratic deliberation at the ‘mass’, or even ‘global’, scale. Despite this emerging interest in the concept, the field lacks a critical and systematic understanding of scale, resulting in the absence of a shared vocabulary and problematically failing to guide critical discussion in practice. In this paper, I address this through three core contributions. Firstly, I systematise and conceptualise five facets of scale relevant to the study and practice of deliberative mini-publics: scaling up, scaling out, scaling across, scaling deep and scaling in. Secondly, I argue that scaling, in all its forms, is necessarily political: the pursuit of scale is transformative, raising notable opportunities as well as risks for the practice of deliberative mini-publics. Thirdly, in understanding scale as multidimensional and political, the tools are provided to engage with the concept of scale in a critical and mature fashion. I exemplify this through displaying how my critical and clarifying typology helps to problematise simplistic claims around the potential of AI to scale deliberative practices.
