The Deliberative Referendum: An Idea Whose Time has Come?

• Author: Frank Hendriks,Charlotte Wagenaar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221140898
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221140898

Administration & Society

2023, Vol. 55(3) 569 –590

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997221140898

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Perspectives

The Deliberative

Referendum: An Idea

Whose Time has Come?

Frank Hendriks1 and Charlotte Wagenaar1

Abstract

While deliberative citizens’ assemblies and plebiscitary referendums have long

been perceived as antithetical, the idea of combining the two democratic

instruments for better connecting administration and society has come to the

fore in both theory and practice in more recent years. In this article, three

ways of linking citizens’ assemblies to the referendum process are distinguished,

exemplified, institutionally compared, and reflectively discussed. The three—the

referendum-preparing, referendum-scrutinizing, and referendum-elaborating

citizens’ assembly—come with their distinctive features, potential merits, scope

limits, and related design questions. Fitting the “square peg of deliberative

democracy” into the “round hole of direct democracy” and embedding hybrid

design in diverging political systems are overarching challenges of institutional

design. The article concludes that considering recent developments in theory

and practice, the idea of a deliberative referendum linking citizens’ assemblies

to direct voting on issues, seems an idea whose time has come, but also comes

with challenges and questions that design thinkers and practitioners have only

begun to tackle and answer.

Keywords

democratic innovation, direct democracy, deliberative democracy,

referendum, citizens’ assembly, hybrid reform

1Tilburg University, Department of Public Law and Governance, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Frank Hendriks, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, 5000 LE, The Netherlands.

Email: f.hendriks@uvt.nl

1140898AAS0010.1177/00953997221140898Administration & SocietyHendriks and Wagenaar

research-article2023

570 Administration & Society 55(3)

Small-Group Deliberation and Mass Voting: From

Antithetical to Synergistic?

In discussions about democratic innovations—instruments intended to forge

effective connections between administration and society in democratic sys-

tems—much attention is paid to two specific types of citizen participation

and collective will formation: referendums, in which the whole electorate, the

“maxi-public,” can vote directly on a policy issue, and citizens’ assemblies, in

which an—ideally representative—sample of the population, a “mini-public”

deliberates on a policy issue (e.g., Elstub & Escobar, 2019; Gastil & Richards,

2013; LeDuc, 2015). Neither innovations focused on direct voting in referen-

dums nor those focused on extensive deliberations in mini-publics are ideal

on their own (Geissel & Gherghina, 2016, p.88: Hendriks, 2019, p.448). By

connecting such innovations, we might be able to create synergies between

their relative merits, the benefits of which are potentially greater than the

benefits of each separate innovation (McKay, 2019; Saward, 2001, p. 363;

Tierney, 2013). A referendum proposal may for instance receive more sup-

port and policy impact when a citizens’ assembly has been involved in

designing, reviewing, or interpreting the proposition (Fishkin et al., 2015;

Gastil et al., 2014, 2018; Suiter & Reidy, 2020). Vice versa, the addition of a

referendum to a citizens’ assembly process may add focus to deliberations,

and may help to prevent the deliberations of the citizens’ assembly’s disap-

pear into thin air (e.g., Farrell et al., 2019, 2020; Fournier et al., 2011).

The idea of linking citizens’ assemblies and referendums may seem an

idea whose time has come, but it also comes with questions and reservations.

The referendum and the citizens’ s assembly emanate from two very different

strands of democratic theory and practice, and have long been perceived as

antithetical (LeDuc, 2015, p. 139; El-Wakil, 2017, p. 59; Landemore, 2018,

p. 320; Parkinson, 2020, p. 485); with the mini-public founded on a belief in

patient small-scale deliberation, and the referendum geared at swift aggrega-

tion of mass votes.1 The domain of referendums and other plebiscitary for-

mats seems one of “thinking fast”—reflexively, quickly translating individual

inclinations to a collective signal—whereas the domain of citizen’s assem-

blies and other deliberative formats seems one of “thinking slow”—reflec-

tively, patiently weaving a rug of shared meaning (Kahneman, 2011). “The

twin objectives of voice and votes too often pull in opposite directions,” as

LeDuc (2015: 147) explains. And then the question is indeed, as he nicely put

it: “Can the square peg of deliberative democratic theory be pounded into the

round hole of direct democracy?” In trying to answer this question construc-

tively, Leduc is among a slowly but surely growing group of theorists who

explore the scope for integrating deliberation in direct voting, either through