Deliberative minipublics have increasingly been prescribed as remedies to counteract some of the alarming ailments that afflict contemporary representative democracies (Dryzek et al. 2019; Elstub & Escobar 2019). By involving ordinary citizens directly in decision-making, the design features of these democratic innovations have the potential to make decision-making more inclusive, more deliberative, better informed and, ultimately, more legitimate (Harris 2019). However, minipublics remain relatively novel tools in the ambitious – and inherently risky – task of democratic engineering. Most of our empirical knowledge on the effect of minipublics is with respect to the relatively small number of citizens who engage with them as participants. Studies typically show that the opinions of participants are transformed, to varying degrees, after learning about and deliberating on a given topic (Farrar et al. 2010; Himmelroos & Christensen 2014; Niemeyer 2011). They also typically show that minipublic participation has a positive effect on citizens’ perceived ability to participate in, and have an influence on, political decision-making (Farrell et al. 2013; Fournier et al. 2011).

Despite evidence of the potential for minipublics to enhance democratic opportunities for participants at the micro-level, there are concerns that they may exacerbate democratic problems more broadly. The argument against the use of minipublics in political decision-making has been most prominently articulated by Lafont (2019), who claims that they amount to taking ‘shortcuts’ in the democratic process. Since the vast majority of citizens do not – indeed, cannot – themselves participate, minipublics are expected to undermine, rather than strengthen, democracy. This claim is not empirically supported by the limited number of studies that extend their scope to non-participants; that is, the broader public. Among this emerging body of research, a key finding is that minipublics can help to foster favourable attitudes towards the political system, even among those who do not themselves participate (Boulianne 2018; Knobloch et al. 2020). However, while these studies make a helpful contribution to our understanding of the democracy-enhancing function that minipublics serve, they do not provide a clear answer to a crucial question that is pertinent to Lafont’s critique: why would non-participants trust minipublics and the outcomes recommended by their participants?

In this article we attempt to address this question. We begin by outlining what we understand to be the main tenets of Lafont’s ‘shortcut’ argument, before reframing the relationship between minipublics and the broader public. Our main argument is that legitimacy perceptions of minipublics are rooted in the perceived similarity of minipublic participants to non-participants. When citizens perceive minipublic participants to be like them – and when they perceive politicians to be relatively unlike them – they will be more likely to perceive minipublics as legitimate. Similarly, we expect that the relative importance of descriptive similarity will be related to the issue in question. We tested our hypotheses on a representative sample of citizens in Northern Ireland, who were presented with details of a minipublic that took place on the salient and contentious question of the polity’s constitutional future. The survey results provide support for our hypotheses, suggesting that ‘like me’ perceptions connect non-participants to minipublics and their outputs.

Deliberative minipublics embody two core features (Farrell et al. 2019). First, participants are randomly selected. This feature helps to achieve a sample that is broadly representative of the wider population (Fishkin 2009). Second, the citizens who are selected to serve in this microcosmic setting, usually anywhere between 12 and 200, then engage in a process of deliberation, involving learning (from experts and stakeholders) and facilitated group discussions (Setälä & Smith 2018). On a given issue, the combination of these features enables deliberative minipublics to produce (typically advisory) outcomes that reflect considered public opinion. Policymakers may then decide to implement these recommendations on the basis that they provide an estimation of what all citizens would have decided if they too had engaged in the process. With minipublics widely heralded as small-scale applications of deliberative democracy, as one ideal, the centrality of these twin features draws attention to a significant trade-off in the promotion of different democratic principles in institutional design. By inviting only a small number of citizens to engage in structured micro-deliberation, a minipublic necessarily excludes the vast majority of members of the wider – or maxi – public. Thus, representativeness and deliberation come at the expense of mass participation (Fishkin 2009).

For Lafont (2019), the principal consequence of this compromise is a loss of democratic control over decision-making. By defining the ideal democratic system as one of self-government, she argues that it is not possible to be agnostic about citizens’ participation in politics at the macro-level, and thus explicitly criticises the use of minipublics in the decision-making process. Since non-participants have not themselves engaged in a deliberative exercise of the kind involving minipublic participants, they apparently ‘have no specific reason or justification’ to endorse their outcomes (Lafont 2019: 99). If non-participants were to treat minipublic outputs as legitimate, it would amount to ‘blind deference’, leaving the wider public disconnected from decisions taken on its behalf (Lafont 2019: 121). Instead, she develops a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that is centred on the ideal of self-government, leaving no room for ‘shortcuts’ that bypass deliberation involving the mass public.

However, it does not necessarily follow from Lafont’s normative point of departure that minipublics have no democratic utility within a political system’s decision-making architecture, beyond informing wider public deliberation. Let us consider the claim that minipublics ‘erode the fundamental commitment of the democratic ideal of self-government, namely, to ensure that all citizens can equally own and identify with the institutions, laws, and policies to which they are subject’ (Lafont 2019: 3; emphasis added). From this benchmark it is taken that for citizens to own and identify with public policy, they must be directly involved in the deliberation that precedes its implementation. But this is a claim that invites empirical investigation. How, for example, can citizens feel a sense of ownership over policies? What does it mean, more broadly, for all members of the public be able to identify with the political system and its policies? To answer these questions, we must account for citizens’ actual – or raw – perceptions of decision-making.

We suggest that the crucial mechanism connecting minipublics to the wider public is a psychological attachment that develops between citizens (in the wider public) and citizen representatives (in a minipublic). This relational approach to representation is not new (see, for example, Warren 2008). Recognising the inevitability of some division of labour between representatives and the represented, MacKenzie and Warren (2012: 123) argue that such a division of labour is justified on the basis of trust. They further argue that minipublic participants are particularly capable of obtaining trust as information proxies from the broader public due to their selection process on the one hand, which results in the representation of all affected interests, and their deliberative process on the other, which allows all relevant interests to be fairly considered. Crucially, trust in minipublics may stem from perceptions of participants’ similarity, in a broad sense, to the wider public, perhaps coupled with a perception that they promote a convergence of wider public interests (Warren 2008).

Lafont (2019: 115) is not persuaded that these reasons are strong enough to justify citizens ‘blindly’ placing their trust in minipublics, contending that non-participants cannot reasonably trust the outcome of a minipublic without examining its deliberations on the issue in question. Whereas the participants in a minipublic play an active role in digesting relevant information, reflecting on the arguments and engaging in face-to-face discussions ahead of collectively recommending the best course of action for the whole public, non-participants – the vast majority of the public – are left essentially ignorant of the entire process. Blind deference, it is argued, exists ‘if there is no capacity … for control’ (Lafont 2019: 8). However, to assume that trust is blind downplays the first point raised by MacKenzie and Warren: that trust is created not just by the process of deliberation, but also by virtue of who participates in the process. While it is true that citizens cannot control the members of minipublics in the way that they can control representatives – through elections – it is not the case that no such capacity exists; the relationship simply operates on a very different basis.

Whereas elections create bonds of accountability and authorisation between citizens and their representatives, the mechanism of sortition may be understood to eliminate such bonds between minipublic participants and the wider public (Lafont 2019: 119). This is at least the case in a direct, substantive sense. But in another sense, sortition may be understood to create a bond between non-participants and participants. The difference is that this bond is affective, not substantive. It develops when a citizen feels that his or her interests are represented by fellow citizens in a minipublic. By extension, this bond may be broken if the citizen no longer feels represented. Framed in this way, the perception of attachment is a matter of degree – and only individual citizens can decide the extent to which they feel attached to citizen representatives in a minipublic. This is clearly very different to the control that citizens might exercise in elections, but the difference does not necessarily amount to a reduction in control. Indeed, when voters select candidates on the basis of their alignment to their own views, or sanction candidates for poor performance, it is also very much a matter of degree as to whether or not elections effectively facilitate these ends (Achen & Bartels 2016). More importantly, while citizens do not physically cast a ballot to authorise minipublic participants or hold them to account, this is not the same as an absence of control. Approaching the bonds of authorisation and accountability from a psychological perspective, there is no greater form of control than being able to determine one’s feelings.

Our task now is to examine the nature of this psychological relationship between citizens and citizen representatives. Why would non-participants trust minipublic participants to make recommendations about political issues on their behalf? Our main explanation rests on the profile of minipublic participants as a microcosm of the wider population. From the perspective of non-participants, their perceptions of the legitimacy of the process are rooted in the perception that the participants are like them. This is a key element of descriptive or ‘mirror’ conceptions of representation that stress the importance of a representative body being an accurate reflection of the population (Phillips 1995; Pitkin 1967). In a narrow sense, this approach concerns similarity across demographic characteristics, such as gender, age and ethnicity. More broadly, descriptive representation can involve invisible characteristics, such as ‘experiential perspectives’ (Brown 2006: 211; see also Mansbridge 1999). By virtue of random selection, the participants selected to serve in a minipublic constitute a microcosm of the wider population through the distribution of visible and invisible traits.

Lafont acknowledges this ‘mirror’ argument and its multiple claims: participants in minipublics are ‘like’ non-participants in the sense that they are ordinary citizens, they are independently motivated, and they reflect a diverse range of interests, values and policy objectives that exist within the population. These features lead to the assumption that the participants will reach recommendations that coincide with the latent preferences of all citizens if all citizens had the opportunity to participate in the process. We should, thus, trust minipublics in the strong sense of endorsing their recommendations as our recommendations. However, Lafont ultimately argues that the mirror claim collapses when it is combined with the ‘filter’ of deliberation: the post-deliberative opinions of the majority of participants in the minipublic may well differ from the opinions of a majority of citizens. By learning and deliberating about a political issue, minipublic participants will behave more like ‘experts’ than ordinary citizens, and so the sample will no longer be a mirror of the wider public. This creates a disconnect between the raw preferences of citizens and the outcomes preferred by minipublic participants.

There are two important responses to this critique of the mirror argument. The first relates to the theoretical basis of descriptive representation; what it means to be ‘similar’. For Sintomer (2013: 11) representation is less about ‘acting in the name of’ and more about ‘acting as’. Identity representation, for example, can be illustrated by the rhetoric employed by the Occupy Movement of 2011. When demonstrators claimed to be ‘the 99%’, they asserted their ability to speak like the people, rather than for them (Sintomer 2013: 21). The significance of both demographic and invisible characteristics being adequately represented in a minipublic is that it forms a relationship between participants and non-participants through common ex ante experience (Warren 2008). In this way, the descriptive view of representation is not confined to a ‘passive’ similarity between representatives and represented, but entails an ‘active’ component which assumes that representatives are capable of spontaneously responding to new information and new circumstances in a way that is similar to how those represented would have responded (Brown 2006; Mansbridge 1999, 2019). In a minipublic, individual participants do not shoulder the responsibility of representing a certain group or trait as a delegate; rather, they are there as themselves as part a wider group selected on the basis of political equality. From the perspective of non-participants, the agency of the participants need not distort the mirror quality. On the contrary, knowing that it could have been them in the room, in possession of such agency, arguably enhances it. From this understanding of descriptive representation we formulate our first hypothesis:

The second, and related, response to the mirror critique is that we can empirically measure the extent to which citizens perceive minipublic participants to be like them against a more familiar point of reference. In the electoral context, we have long observed that voters often express a preference for a candidate who is like them, and candidates routinely invoke the similarity of their own background and experience to those of their would-be constituents (Mansbridge 2011). This ties into one of the contemporary problems facing representative democracies: it is not just that many citizens feel as though their interests are often ignored, but that their elected representatives are insufficiently like them to adequately understand their interests. Therefore, if citizens perceive minipublics to play a legitimate role in political decision-making, it might not simply reflect their perception that minipublic participants are like them, but it might also reflect a perception that elected politicians are not. In other words, it is a relative question: they may perceive citizen representatives to reflect their identity and experiences more effectively, or at least in a different way, than elected representatives. Thus, alongside H1a we hypothesise:

A refinement of the ‘like me’ argument is that the trait or quality most important to citizens’ legitimacy perceptions will depend on the issue at stake. For example, gender representation might be more important for discussions on the topic of abortion; age might be more salient if the topic relates to pension policy; social class might play a more important role on the topic of social security; and so on. This is, again, based on the premise that descriptive representation on a certain dimension (the profile of the representative) will facilitate substantive political representation (what interests the representative defends, and what decisions he or she makes) (Castiglione & Pollak 2019). In other words, descriptive representation is not confined to the characteristics of (citizen) representatives alone, but is also linked to the presence of one’s interests in the deliberation (Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995). What will matter to non-participants is that there are enough participants who are like them on the particular trait that is relevant to the minipublic’s task, allowing them to be more confident of these participants producing a collective outcome that has, at least, considered their interests and is in the broader public interest. Therefore, we further hypothesise:

Our empirical analysis yields three main findings. First, ‘like me’ perceptions constitute a significant predictor of a variety of minipublic legitimacy perceptions: general support for advisory citizens’ assemblies, trust in ordinary citizens as decision-makers, and accepting the outcome of a citizens’ assembly on a highly salient political issue. A perception that participants are similar to non-participants offers unique explanatory power. Second, and related, the less respondents perceived politicians to be like them, the higher their support for citizens’ assemblies and the higher their level of trust in citizens as decision-makers. However, while statistically significant, this variable had little explanatory power. Third, we find some evidence that respondents prioritise the inclusion of minipublic participants who are similar to them on a series of traits, with the most consistent pattern emerging for the trait that is most closely connected to the issue at stake. But at the same time, the more striking overall pattern is that the inclusion of participants from different groups was considered to be relatively important across all respondents, regardless of their own profile. The key feature was that the participants should be ‘ordinary’ citizens.

Deliberative democrats have long argued that the legitimacy of minipublics rests, in part, on them being a microcosm of the broader population (Fishkin 2009). This article offers empirical evidence that this is the case from the perspective of citizens themselves. Minipublics, by definition, are exclusive bodies. They necessarily recruit only a sample of citizens, leaving most of the maxi-public unable to participate in the structured process of deliberation that helps characterise these democratic innovations. However, this does not mean that minipublics are necessarily detached from the maxi-public. On the contrary, non-participants appear capable of forming a psychological attachment to minipublics through a perception that the participants are like them. This in turn helps to explain the perceived legitimacy of minipublics and their outcomes. It is a bond that is created by the individual in his or her own mind; in this way it differs greatly from conventional bonds of representation which rest on the power of citizens to select and sanction politicians, but this difference does not diminish its contemporary significance.

Indeed, recent research points to fundamental challenges facing representative democracies, with widespread popular perceptions of a gap between the public and politicians. Citizens perceive politicians, and politics more broadly, to be ‘out of touch’ or ‘disconnected’ from public life (see Dommett & Temple 2019; Grill 2007). In contrast, if greater use is made of representatives as ordinary citizens in a minipublic, members of the wider public may consider them more likely to share similar experiences and perspectives, leaving them in a better (if not perfect) position to represent their interests, compared to politicians attempting to do so alone. As Sintomer (2013) puts it, this does not require minipublic participants to act ‘for’ the public; what matters is that they are capable of acting ‘like’ and speaking ‘like’ other citizens.

Therefore, rather than accepting Lafont’s characterisation of minipublics as ‘shortcuts’ that undermine democracy, we instead contend that they can help take conventional representative democratic processes down a more scenic route. This comes with a number of important practical implications for democratic design. The first relates to communication and transparency: non-participants can only generate a perception that minipublic participants are ‘like them’ if they are aware of the minipublic and its selection method in the first place. By extension, this emphasises the importance of making the wider public aware of a minipublic’s activities if it is to help build trust in the broader political system (Boulianne 2018). Second, while it is clear that people value minipublics due to their membership comprising ‘ordinary citizens’, it is less clear how minipublics should operate alongside existing decision-making processes involving politicians. Even though our results imply that minipublics can play a legitimate role in making more or less binding decisions, it is more plausible to envisage minipublics playing a more minimal role as trusted information proxies for other citizens, such as ahead of referendums (MacKenzie & Warren 2012), or supplementing representative decision-making under certain conditions (Kuyper & Wolkenstein 2019; Bächtiger & Goldberg 2020).

Our goal has been to establish whether or not an affective bond can connect non-participants and minipublic participants. While a cross-sectional survey facilitated this initial goal, our findings invite further investigation of the nature and strength of these bonds, such as whether or not certain types of citizens are more likely to hold ‘like me’ perceptions, and whether these bonds can be reflective as well as affective. For example, a survey experiment could examine the extent to which ‘like me’ perceptions might be influenced by exposure to different normative arguments (including Lafont’s) or to variations in minipublic composition. Meanwhile, a longitudinal study in the wake of a minipublic could capture the durability of non-participants’ perceptions of participants, including how these perceptions might be influenced by new information or new signals that emerge over time. Finally, research in other contexts will shed light on the generalisability of our present findings.

While the deeply divided case of Northern Ireland arguably offered a ‘hard’ test for our hypotheses, the absence of a devolved government for over two years at the time of the study may have created a particularly deep sense of frustration with the political system. Having controlled for satisfaction with the way democracy works in our analysis, it is still possible that the political context will have left some citizens feeling more positively disposed towards novel forms of decision-making. On the other hand, it is precisely in these challenging contexts that minipublics might reasonably play a targeted role in helping to restore trust in the broader political system. As this article shows, such citizens’ assemblies do have the potential to play a legitimate role in decision-making, as explained, at least in part, by perceptions that their participants will be like non-participants. It will be through sustained empirical research that we can help discern whether minipublics at some point create undesirable shortcuts, and under which conditions, or whether they can continue to add value to democratic systems.

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