Citizen Assemblies offer a way to repair democracy. They use the same trusted process that Australian courts use to select juries – random selection from the electoral roll – in which ordinary citizens come together for short periods to carefully participate in important decision making, then return to their normal lives. The process of random selection is known as ‘sortition’.

We can attribute the earliest forms of democracy to Ancient Greece. The word “democracy” is derived from two Greek words that mean people (demos) and rule (kratos). In ancient Greece the selection of the people’s representatives was done by lot or sortition.

CAs are an example of ‘deliberative democracy’, in which people are brought together for the purpose of deliberating upon a topic, and coming to an agreed, shared conclusion. As US researcher James Fishkin says, ‘it combines representativeness of the population… with deliberation.’ If proper techniques are used to randomly select a smaller representative group, such a process produces ‘a representation of what the public would think’, were it to be polled in its entirety.¹

The evidence from over 30 years of trials and experimentation around the world is clear. We know that through Citizen Assemblies, society can tackle hard social and economic issues, and together make decisions in the public interest – not just in the interests of the wealthy, but for everyone.

A good explanation of how CAs work can be found on the website of the UK Electoral Reform Society.

Examples of CAs around the globe