Looking in from the Outside: How Do Invited But Not Selected Citizens Perceive the Legitimacy of a Minipublic?

Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.

Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics

Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research.

Katechontic Democracy? Carl Schmitt and the Restraining Mediation of Popular Power

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s conception of an ‘illiberal’ democracy is based on seemingly contradictory elements of both ‘populism’ and ‘technocratic elitism’, attempting as it does to wed the popular enthusiasm of mass democracy to a concrete order through the principle of a shared homogeneous identity and the somewhat paradoxical idea of a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’. This amalgamation of authoritarianism and popular sovereignty emanates from what can be described as Schmitt’s ‘katechontic impulse’, a name derived from a Biblical figure introduced by St Paul. The Katechon is the principle or the person that restrains lawlessness or ‘the lawless one’, often interpreted as Antichrist and his reign before the end of days. The chapter shows how Schmitt’s apocalyptic imagery of an ordered popular sovereignty can be illustrated by this politico-theological mytheme and further investigates the implications thereof for contemporary democratic politics.

What the Framers Got Right and What They Got Wrong

This chapter discusses how James Madison, considered the Father of the Constitution, thought the best way to preserve political stability was to divide factions so that none could ever form a permanent majority. Indeed, Madison and the Framers feared political parties, and thought they had devised a political system that would prevent parties from ever forming. They were wrong: As they quickly found out, political parties were necessary for modern mass democracy to function. However, they were also right: Above all, they feared just two parties, one of which would be a majority. Majorities, they understood, have a tendency to oppress minorities. Ultimately, their prescient warnings about a doom loop of toxic two-party politics resonate today. Today, America faces the same toxic partisanship the Framers understood would be fatal to democracy-the partisanship where every single policy confrontation collapses into one single irresolvable partisan conflict, where trust breaks down, and where political disagreement becomes about domination and victory over the other.

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

Popular Imperialism, Democracy, Conservatism and Socialism, 1850–1900

This chapter reviews the political sympathies of soldiers – both officers and rank and file - in the age of high Victorian imperialism and emerging British democracy. It examines the role of the army in growing working class support for popular imperialism, often fuelled by racism. Whilst it acknowledges the overall tendency for officers to support Conservatism, it uncovers tenacious support for Liberalism on the part of some of the officer corps. This extended to many of the rank and file in the post-Chartist period, with post discharge soldiers actively supporting all types of reform movements and taking an active part in the mass democracy brought about by the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts. With the development of socialism from the 1880s this even extended to a significant number of ‘soldier socialists’, surveyed here for the first time.

‘The Cross-Examination of the Physiologist’

This chapter examines the Metaphysical Society’s ‘most notorious paper ever’, T. H. Huxley’s ‘The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection’ delivered in January 1876, which contended that Jesus’s death upon the Cross was impossible to verify and that his supposed Resurrection was more likely to have been merely a naturalistic revival rather than a supernatural miracle. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the chapter reconstructs the composition, presentation, and aftermath of Huxley’s infamous paper, as well as contextualizing it in relation to the wider revival of the so-called ‘swoon theory’ in the 1870s. By doing so, Huxley’s paper also casts new light on the Metaphysical Society’s internal tensions, even between those members who usually worked together as supporters of scientific naturalism, as well as the discordance between its elitist model of authority and the new age of mass democracy in late Victorian Britain.