If you haven’t encountered civic assemblies (sometimes called citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries or, by the cool kids, rabbles), I warmly invite you to introduce yourself.

But this three-part essay is not for such introductions; it’s for exploring, briefly, the various strategies for proponents to drive civic assembly uptake.

Each essay will look at the plusses and minuses of a group of strategies with a different relationship to the political establishment. This one considers strategies that entail working with politicians. Next we’ll talk about working around them: routes to empowerment that sidestep elected leaders. And then finally, for lack of a better preposition, working ahead of them: doing all the table-setting work moving from ignorance to awareness to support to advocacy to leadership in the movement.

Eventually I’ll argue that any deep success in working either with or around politicians will require getting ahead of them. But now I’m just getting ahead of myself.

With Politicians

By far the most proven strategy to date is working with existing political leaders, many of whom see a considerable political upside to civic assemblies. In 2004 in British Columbia, the first modern citizens’ assembly tackled electoral reform, a dicey issue for partisan politics. The French Citizens’ Convention for Climate was convened in 2019 as a now-we’re-listening response to the yellow vest protests. In both cases, civic assemblies offered politicians political cover. BC politicians couldn’t change election rules without looking dodgy. French leaders were dying to quell riots triggered by controversial policies. The assemblies help shield both.

In fairness, some politicians do also acknowledge civic assemblies’ capacity for creative problem solving and community building. But the key point is that these assemblies can be, to a politician’s mind, useful.

In the world of democracy advocates, the idea of utility to politicians can induce anything from gains in confidence to losses of lunch. Most gamely celebrate the assemblies themselves – especially their healthy deliberation, productivity, and cultivation of “civic love”. But many rabblers, especially those of us seeking deeper reform, lament that assemblies convened with politicians’ blessings can typically only offer advice – advice that politicians are free to ignore. All too often, the politicians embrace that freedom. In their final session, French conventioneers graded the government’s implementation of their proposals, giving them, in essence, an F (2.5 out of 10).

Of the many hundreds of civic assemblies convened to date, the vast majority are one-offs with no real power. Only a handful, as in East Belgium and Paris, have institutionalized into permanent, recurring bodies. Only a fingerful, like the political redistricting commission in Michigan, have genuine (if narrow) political authority. But as long as we pay attention to attention getting, even one-off assemblies can help drive support for democratic lotteries and citizen deliberation.

Surely, given assemblies' political utility, the strategy of working with politicians can be further deployed for more assemblies, more institutionalization, more process experimentation, and more attention. Hopefully, many of these will work as deeply and effectively with elected leaders as the 2024 Parisian assembly whose Citizen Bill on Homelessness was passed directly – as in, without edit – into law. Plausibly, savvy opportunists may even occasionally find ways to open doors for more authentic decision-making power. But sadly the path to deep structural reform is not clear.

At any rate, up to a point, the strategy clearly works. But, to be sure, it’s a heavy lift. DemocracyNext, an international leader in studying and supporting efforts to deploy this strategy, published an analysis of organizations that effectively drive civic assembly adoption. The success stories, they said, share certain qualities, including and especially charismatic leaders who devote immense energy to cultivating long-term political relationships. It takes one to woo one.

This strategy requires stamina, networking, organization, and a heavy dose of schmooze. And, for any hope of deeper reform, a rare mix of serendipity and clever opportunism.

With Political Candidates

An oft-discussed but unproven (and risky) approach to promoting civic assemblies involves promoting politicians who vocally support them.

The appeal of jumping into electoral politics is that campaigns can capture the world’s political attention. Charismatic communicators in prominent races who center their campaigns on civic assemblies could get a lot more people excited about citizen democracy. And successful candidates would have a mandate to convene.

But this strategy comes with the considerable risk of turning civic assemblies into a partisan issue, particularly in the polarized US, where early implementations have concentrated in blue states and cities. If political candidates associated with the Democratic Party start to trumpet democratic lotteries, we may swiftly see more press like the recent New York Sun article headlined “The Newest Word From the Left — Sortition.” The snub is as sloppy as the pub is obscure, but it does sound an alarm: the more democratic lotteries (or sortition) are seen as lefty, the harder it will be to promote its adoption in red states or the country at large.

To be clear, partisan polarization around civic assemblies wouldn’t necessarily kill local implementations. If elected Democrats in Denver or Republicans in Round Rock got behind civic assemblies, they’d likely succeed in convening them. But the more “all politics is national,” the more we ignore national perception at our peril.

I personally found the idea of campaign attention seductive enough to propose a faux-third-party frame, the “Riff Raff party,” though I worry the frame would offer little resistance to the messaging might of America’s partisan machinery if attacked. (As if to assuage that worry, the idea has had no uptake at all.)

We have only so much control here. Even if the advocacy community tried to stay out of electoral campaigns, the choice isn’t entirely ours. As the political upsides become clearer, more politicians may promote assemblies on their own; a tiny few already have. In any event, advocates should work hard to earn and maintain civic assemblies’ reputation as nonpartisan (or independent or cross-partisan or transpartisan or, eventually, post-partisan.)

It’s no small feat to roll in American electoral politics without getting muddy.