OPINION: Michael Swanson.
We vote every three years, and then, for most of us, democracy largely goes on without us. Most people find themselves watching from the sidelines as elected politicians (often heavily whipped along party lines, donor interests, and the noise of the news cycle) make decisions that shape our lives. It’s a system that works well enough, until it doesn’t. And increasingly, on the thorniest issues of our time (climate change, housing, constitutional reform) it feels like it doesn’t.
With levels of trust in political institutions struggling, an option keeps popping up around the world that might help rebuild some of that trust: what if we handed some of those decisions back to ordinary people? Not through referendums, which tend to reduce complex questions to a binary yes/no, but through carefully structured deliberative and participatory processes. This is where Citizens Juries, and Citizens Assemblies come into the fold, and, I’d be keen to test peoples feelings on this one, the potential for a “Citizens Parliament”.
What’s a Citizens Jury?
A Citizens Jury is essentially what it sounds like: a small group of randomly selected citizens, typically between 10 and 30 people, brought together to examine a specific policy question. Like a court jury, participants hear evidence from experts and stakeholders, deliberate together, and reach recommendations. Unlike a court jury, no one’s fate hangs in the balance; the output is advisory rather than binding.
The model dates back to the 1970s and was developed by political scientist Ned Crosby in the United States. Its strength lies in its intimacy. Small numbers allow for genuine conversation. Participants can change their minds. The process is designed not to confirm existing opinions, but to allow people to form informed ones after genuine exposure to evidence and competing viewpoints.
The limitations are equally clear. A jury of 15 or 20 people is not statistically representative of an entire population. The small scale can make findings easy for politicians to dismiss, and there is a real risk that the process becomes tokenistic which becomes a consultation exercise performed to give the appearance of public engagement while the real decisions have already been made.
Still, it can be highly worthwhile as an exercise in policy testing and as an evaluation mechanism.
What’s a Citizens Assembly?
A Citizens Assembly is bigger, longer, and more ambitious. Typically comprising anywhere from 50 to several hundred participants, it uses stratified random sampling (essentially a demographic lottery) to ensure the group reflects the broader population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education, and geographic spread. Assemblies give members of the public the time and opportunity to learn about and discuss a topic in depth, hearing from and questioning a wide range of specialists, including academics, researchers, people with direct experience of the issue, and various campaigners – it isn’t just limited to hearing from people thinking about the issue, but also those with practical knowledge.
The process typically unfolds over multiple weekends across several months. Participants are not politicians and have no axe to grind. They cannot be lobbied in the conventional sense. They are, in theory, the public at its most thoughtful.
The most celebrated examples have come from Ireland. The Irish Citizens Assembly considered the issue of abortion legislation. The assembly voted 64% in favour of a change in the law to allow abortion, a result closely matched by a subsequent referendum where 66% of the population voted in favour of legalising abortion. That remarkable alignment between the deliberative body and the general public gave democratic credibility to both processes. Ireland used the same model to build momentum for marriage equality, a reform that might have languished for decades in a conventional parliament.
Assemblies have since taken place in Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom, among others. The UK’s Climate Assembly, convened in 2020, brought together 108 people to deliberate on how Britain could reach net-zero by 2050. Scotland ran its own national assembly. Belgium’s Ostbelgien region has gone further than almost anyone, establishing a permanent citizens council with an ongoing mandate.
https://www.The drawbacks of assemblies are real but manageable. There is usually a significant time commitment for participants, which can exclude those with care responsibilities and filter out anyone except those with a very high sense of civic duty or those who are already politically engaged, a problem mitigated by paying participants and covering costs such as childcare.
Money and general cost is the most common concern. Ontario in Canada ran an assembly involving around 40 people over a period of three months for CA$75,000. For large-scale national assemblies costs run higher, though they remain trivially small compared to the cost of getting major policy decisions wrong.
The more fundamental problem is political will. Citizens assemblies produce recommendations, not laws. Governments can (and frequently do) shelve their findings. Without a clear commitment from the outset to act on recommendations, the process risks becoming an elaborate exercise in managed dissent. Such a response from governments would also do additional harm to institutional trust, which I mentioned at the start. With trust already battling to recover, carrying out a Citizens Assembly, only to ignore the findings, would be yet another blow to institutional trust.
What Might a Citizens Parliament Look Like?
Here the speculation gets more interesting.
A Citizens Parliament would take the logic of the assembly to its institutional conclusion. Rather than a one-off advisory body convened at the pleasure of the government, it would be a permanent, parallel chamber of randomly selected citizens sitting alongside, or in some models replacing, an elected upper house. Participants would rotate, serving fixed terms before returning to ordinary life, ensuring the body never develops the professional political class it is designed to counteract.
The idea draws on ancient Athenian democracy, where sortition (selection by lot) was considered more truly democratic than election on the grounds that elections inevitably favour the articulate, the wealthy, and the well-connected. The OECD identified 733 deliberative assemblies between 1979 and 2023, and has documented the growth of permanent assemblies, suggesting this is no longer purely theoretical territory.
In a Citizens Parliament model, the chamber might have the power to initiate inquiries, demand government responses to its findings, and potentially hold veto or delay powers over certain types of legislation, particularly those involving constitutional change, rights, or long-term environmental commitments that elected parliaments routinely sacrifice to short electoral cycles.
Critics will argue that random selection is no substitute for democratic accountability: if a randomly chosen citizen makes a bad decision, who do you vote out? This is a genuine tension, and it points to the most sensible model – not a Citizens Parliament as a replacement for elected representation, but as a complement to it. A body designed not to govern, but to deliberate; to inject the considered voice of ordinary people into a system too often dominated by professional politicians, lobbyists, and media cycles.
As a more theoretical exercise, I also wondered, what if we just moved directly to a Citizens Parliament instead of our current Parliamentary arrangements? No more elections, no more political parties, and no more career MPs. Instead, we would have a randomly selected collection of citizens who serve fixed terms and are tasked with governing the country. Of course, the devil is in the details, but this could be the ultimate conclusion to shifting from a purely representative model, do a highly deliberative and participatory model.
It’s not at all likely to happen, but entertaining to consider!
Where Does New Zealand Stand?
New Zealand’s record with deliberative democracy is modest but not absent. New Zealand has seen a re-emergence of interest in deliberative democracy in recent years, though this ignores several decades of earlier public experimentation including (but not limited to) a Capital Power citizens’ jury in 1996, a Bioethics Council public deliberation on pre-birth testing in 2007–08, and a citizens’ advisory panel on a Wellington cycleway in 2014.
In terms of formal political support, the Green Party has been treasonably explicit. Their democracy policy has called for exploring a Tiriti-based citizens’ assembly to consider constitutional reform issues, including those arising from the Independent Electoral Review, such as a shift to a four-year parliamentary term, political donations, and public funding of election campaigns. More recently, the Greens have called for establishing a citizens’ assembly to put decisions on political donations and public funding of election campaigns directly in the hands of the public.
The Opportunity Party (TOP) has gone further in embedding the concept into its platform. The party announced it would contest the 2026 general election with a policy of introducing a “Citizen’s Voice” consisting of citizens’ assemblies for certain major issues. Current TOP leader, Qiulae Wong, has suggested these assemblies could be used for those really big issues where agreement is difficult, such as the future of superannuation.
Labour has shown interest at the margins, and the Public Service Commission has published guidance on deliberative processes, acknowledging them as a helpful tool for decision makers and politicians when trying to resolve contentious issues, capable of providing insight into public opinion and lending legitimacy to difficult policy changes.
National, ACT and New Zealand First, by comparison, have either been critical of such processes, or just tended to ignore them as a potential option. The irony is that citizens assemblies are ideologically neutral: they have produced conservative outcomes in some contexts and progressive ones in others. What they resist is not any particular ideology, but the shortcuts that all parties take when they’d rather not have difficult conversations.
The Deeper Argument
The case for these mechanisms ultimately rests on a simple observation: our democracy was designed for a different era. MMP has made New Zealand’s Parliament more representative than it once was, but it has not solved the problem of short-termism, tribal partisanship, or the gap between what the public actually thinks (when given time and information) and what politicians claim the public thinks.
Citizens juries, assemblies, and the more ambitious idea of a citizens parliament are not solutions to societies problems. They can be captured, tokenised, or simply ignored. But at their best, they represent something genuinely democratic: the idea that ordinary people, given time, information, and a good-faith process, are entirely capable of wrestling with hard questions and arriving at wise answers.
I swing wildly between being incredibly skeptical of most voters to being incredibly optimistic. Some days I think if people were put in a room together, talking face-to-face, we’d actually have some incredibly beneficial discussions about really gnarly questions…other days I fear it’d descend into a screaming match amongst people so divided they may as well be from opposite poles.
My conclusion though: we could do a lot worse than giving normal people a shot at tackling some of the big issues.
