#citizensassembly — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #citizensassembly, aggregated by home.social.
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Citizens' assemblies are used in many places around the world. Here is an overview of the 313 mini publics on climate action that we know of.
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In 2026, South Korea created something that had never before existed at national level: a permanent, legally established Climate Citizens’ Assembly.
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“Don’t tell me you are paying enough tax. If you are rapidly getting richer, while every other group in the country is rapidly getting poorer, you are not paying enough tax”
#taxtherich #billionaires #inequality #democracy #citizensassembly #politics
https://youtube.com/shorts/6oZCB3CJd4c -
A doco just came out about Citizens assemblies.... it's so moving! It tracks a real one in the #usa during COvid in 2020...Tough times. You can watch it for free now. I recommend checking it out
https://goodbyepoliticians.movie/
#democracy #politics #citizensassembly #billionaires -
The Irony Of Independence Day
No fireworks tonight in Somerset County, so I'm sitting with Juneteenth, July 4th, and the ugly overlap between the two. -
„We think we reinvented democracy in the 18th century, but we didn’t. We invented a form of legitimate oligarchy based on popular consent - one where power is not truly shared equally. It’s concentrated at the top: among the wealthy, the educated, people with connections and a certain psychological predisposition to want to rule“, political scientist Hélène Landemore says in an interview with @demnext CEO @claudiachwalisz.
https://demnext.substack.com/p/politics-without-politicians-a-conversation
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What if democracy's crisis isn't a bug - but a feature?
When the architects of the US Constitution met in Philadelphia in 1787, they knew the difference between sortition (democratic) and elections (oligarchic) - and deliberately picked the latter. The system wasn't broken. It was built this way.
https://jeremylent.substack.com/p/democracy-was-never-designed-to-work
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The history of this bill is grotesque. Promoted by middle-class luvvies with little apparent awareness of the vulnerability of poor and/or disabled people, it has tackled the problem back-to-front, tacking safeguards onto an inadequate structure.
The failure of Leadbeater's bill gives England+Wales a chance to do this properly: well-funded research and public consultatation, supervised by a #CitizensAssembly to ask whether and how #righttodie can be exercised while protecting against coercion.
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The #EuropeanCitizenPanel in Preparedness has just started. Excited to see and facilitate debate about disasters, cyber attacks, loss of infrastructure with 150 citizens from all over Europe #EuropeanUnion #CitizensAssembly
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@runoutgroover @lightweight or get rid of elections altogether!
#AgainstElections by David Van Reybrouck argues that it is rife with aristocratic overtures anyway. A standing #citizensassembly would be a much better way to represent the whole community. -
Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy!
See Adam Cronkright, director of the upcoming film, "Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy," on January 28, 2026, for the 4th session of the series, “The Lunch Break with Josh and Ted Wachtel.”
Register now! https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ohPiGWjfQsGHEw6rAO1STA#/registration
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Should a Permanent European Citizens’ Assembly be established alongside the European Parliament?
Register now to participate in this this roundtable on October 14th in
Brussels in-person or online! -
Incredibly well researched and highly relevant article from @thetyee about election reform, Citizens Assemblies, and killing First Past the Post voting.
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/05/19/Fresh-Opportunity-Get-Elections-Right/
#BritishColumbia #electionreform #Canada #bcpoli #citizensassembly
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Afterthought: Waste management is exactly the sort of thorny, contentious problem that could be solved in a long term, holistic way by citizens' assemblies.
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If you want to join an international anarchist collective that meets online twice a month, pm me. I'm starting one.
#anarchist #collective #international #CitizensAssembly #revolution
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Spaces for deliberation: Eight spatial qualities for designing deliberative assemblies
Join the launch of a new paper from @demnext
📅 When? April 10th, 2025, 3:30 pm CEST
👩💻 Where? ZoomWhether you're organising citizens' assemblies or interested in democratic innovation, this conversation offers insights for creating environments where diverse citizens can effectively deliberate on society's challenges.
🔗 Register now! https://zoom.us/meeting/register/FY8bzyU_SeOigjyRHv2h7g
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#Oxford #CitizensAssembly votes for “a car-free city centre”
https://oxfordclarion.uk/citizens-assembly-votes-for-a-car-free-city-centre/ #transport
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On 15/16 October 2025, the annual conference of Democracy R&D will take place in Brussels, Belgium.
As the “deliberative wave” moves at different paces across the world, Democracy R&D faces both exciting opportunities and significant challenges- polarization, autocratization, and the rise of populism. This year’s theme „Crossroads“ invites everyone to reflect on the pathways that public deliberation can take to rise to this moment.
Register now! https://www.drd2025.org/
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Democracy By All Of Us
“Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.” – Lucille Ball
This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.With a single act, the Scottish Parliament could radically overhaul our devolved democracy and put people at the heart of holding our legislators to account.
I’m grateful for the coverage The National gave to the the Independence Forum Scotland National Convention last weekend. It was wonderful to see the building activism in the room and delegates certainly kept me on my toes during the Energy World Cafe. The desire to see Scotland bring more of its energy resources into public hands is strong and I was glad to lay out how it could be done despite the limited powers of devolution.
Another question came out of the day about navigating similar limits in another area. One of Common Weal’s calls for the strengthening of our democracy is the creation of a second chamber in the Scottish Parliament that could take some of the weight off of the scrutiny committees, could make sure our laws are fit for purpose and – perhaps most crucially – could oversee the Parliamentarians themselves and hold them to account if and when they fall short of the standards expected of them. In this way it would act very much like the House of Lords down south or the elected or appointed upper chambers in many other countries (Scotland is one of the very few national-scale polities that don’t have an upper chamber – even most of the US states have one) but we want to improve on the highly corruptible model of appointing Lords for life based on their loyalty or political donations (still waiting on Labour delivering on the manifesto promise they made over a century ago to fix that one down south) or even the counter productive model of electing party-loyal people to that chamber (and thus replicating the US model where there is zero accountability when one party controls both houses and zero progress when they don’t). Instead, we want a Citizens’ Assembly where all registered voters in Scotland are entered into a lottery similar to jury duty and are called to serve in the Parliament. Appointments would be by random selection initially but the long list would be adjusted to ensure that the actual Assembly is balanced demographically across age, income, geographic representation and other factors (this model was used to great success in the 2021 Scottish Climate Assembly). Appointments would be generously paid (on par with MSP salaries) and would last a fixed time – we suggest a one year appointment with a third or a half of the chamber rotating out periodically – and there would be the same protections on returning to your job as there are for jury duty or paternal leave. The comparison to juries is a strong one. If we trust our peers to determine if it has been proven or not proven that someone has broken the law, then we are more than capable of determining whether or not the laws themselves are broken.
Sounds great, but the question we were asked at the Convention was whether or not Scotland has the power to set up such a Chamber.
If we were independence, it would be a relatively trivial matter to write the structure of the Chamber into our constitution but until then, the constitutional document we have to follow is the Scotland Act. Yes, the UK does have a constitution – it’s just not written down in one place and unlike the constitution of most nations, Westminster has sovereignty over it rather than being subordinate to it and so can change it whenever it likes.
As the Scotland Act doesn’t mention an Upper Chamber in its framework and as Westminster is extremely unlikely to exercise its power to write one into the Act, how could we set one up pre-independence?
Essentially we act as if we can.
The Scottish Parliament can set up advisory bodies or Commissioners to oversee the work of Parliament and even though we couldn’t mandate that they must follow the advice of those bodies (this was ultimately the source of the failure of the Climate Assembly – the Government decided they didn’t like the advice they were given so largely ignored it), Parliament and Government could collectively agree to follow those instructions – there’s nothing in the Scotland Act that actively prevents them from doing this just as nothing prevents parties whipping their members into voting along certain lines despite that not being an “official” part of our democracy.
Such an “unofficial” upper chamber wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as a constitutionally mandated one but that’s not to say that it would be powerless. Yes, something created by an Act of Parliament alone could be scrapped by one (a constitutional amendment would require a referendum). Yes, the Government could simply stop listening to its advice. This would place it on par with the other Commissioner bodies that exist around the Scottish Parliament. Yes, Westminster could overrule the Scottish Parliament and write a specific prohibition into the Scotland Act or elsewhere. This would place it on par with any other piece of legislation the Scottish Parliament has ever passed. If either of these barriers are enough to stop us, we might as well just give up on devolution entirely.
Scenes playing out across the world right now only serve to highlight how precious and vulnerable the very concept of democracy is and how no single person or even multi-person office can be trusted with more power than it needs. Scotland’s highly centralised form of government needs to be spread out a lot more locally but we also need more scrutiny and accountability at all levels from the top down. The best people to do that are All of Us appointed not to a House of Lords, but to a House of Citizens.
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Local citizens' assemblies need funding as US Treasury suspends payments to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Support @demnext now!
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The @EUCommission has launched a recruitment campaign to randomly select citizens in all 27 EU Member States. The aim of this campaign is to invite citizens to register their interest in joining a European Citizens’ Panel on a new European budget fit for our ambition.
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The better citizen participation, the greater the trust in the government. This is one of the findings of a survey published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in December 2024.
https://www.buergerrat.de/en/news/participation-strengthens-trust-in-governments/
