Beyond sortition, a savvy practitioner might consider ways to more actively bring in people who are socially disadvantaged. These strategies include minimizing barriers to participation, recruiting through trusted messengers, and partnering with associations in the community. Best practices for more involved deliberative processes often include... See more

“enclave deliberation,” is to have disadvantaged groups make sense of their situations in a more homogeneous and power-balanced setting. Especially in the face of political institutions that consistently disenfranchise lower socioeconomic classes, talking together about their experiences can help these groups develop a language for articulating... See more

RepresentationOne of the most crucial elements of a deliberative process is a deceptively simple question: Who’s in the room?

The group developed a collective identity around being representatives of underserved communities, but the internal diversity of the group still allowed for constructive, transformative discussion (rather than defaulting to groupthink).

Thus, the effectiveness of deliberative processes is threatened by what British political theorist Marit Hammond describes as “processes that may have the appearance of empowerment, but only serve to pacify democratic demands without actually submitting to their bottom-up force.”

the essential work of creating systems that genuinely work for everyone requires us to redistribute resources and grant power to those who have been denied it—something that deliberation can help to achieve alongside other political organizing. Deliberation alone will not create a more equal society, and the outcomes of such processes are... See more

Even the way people give and receive arguments is coded by cultural norms; the default expectation of “rational” deliberation has been challenged by various scholars, who argue that those who regularly engage that way are often whiter, more educated, and more economically well off. As such, deliberative processes still often proceed along lines of... See more

They also facilitated regional enclave discussions (as described in the “Facilitation” section below) ahead of the deliberation to identify feasible policy strategies and co-design the questions that the deliberative poll would ask of the public.

power asymmetries can affect two important stages of the deliberative process (recruitment and facilitation)