Ireland’s Deliberative Mini-Publics
Democratic crisis is a hot topic in political science at present, and for understandable reasons. But what is often missed in much of the commentary about democracies in peril is the fact that democracies can and do innovate. This chapter deals with one important case of such democratic innovation—the Irish deliberative mini-publics. We start with a discussion of the origins and design of the Irish cases. We then employ the Suiter and Reuchamps (2016) framework to analyse their democratic legitimacy in terms of input (the recruitment process), throughput, (the quality of the deliberative process), and output (the mini-public’s impact in terms of the uptake of its recommendations and acceptance of the process). The Irish processes are powerful real-world examples of the potential systemization of deliberation, showing how deliberative mini-publics can successfully supplement representative and direct forms of democracy.