Here, Berlin Governance Platform President Gesine Schwan explains the differences between citizens' councils and those developed by the Platform. Municipal development councils (KEBs). It critically examines the limitations of lot-based participation formats and emphasises the advantages of the multi-stakeholder composition of CEBs. With a clear focus on constructive dialogue, a focus on the common good and the strengthening of social cohesion, CEBs offer a promising response to the current challenges facing our democracy.
Soon to be published in a double issue of the INDES.journal for politics and society with the title "Democracy under pressure".
Liberal democracies are under pressure worldwide. Their support from society is declining significantly. In Europe, as in the USA, far-right anti-democratic parties and initiatives are growing in strength and threatening their continued existence.
There are many reasons for this. Against the backdrop of a significant increase in the contrast between rich and poor, many citizens' experiences of powerlessness, which stem from the rapid social change that they no longer feel able to cope with, are particularly noteworthy. In his new book "Trigger Points" (Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux, Linus Westheuer: Trigger points. Conflict and consensus in contemporary society. Berlin Suhrkamp 2023), Steffen Mau summarises this finding as follows: many citizens experience rapid social change as a "disempowering imposition" (347).
Another contributing factor is the development of democracy, in which many citizens do not see enough opportunities to participate in political decisions about their everyday lives. They feel overwhelmed by them. They feel overwhelmed by the political complexity and interdependencies that extend far beyond the boundaries of their municipality and state and have taken on global dimensions. This makes them susceptible to the anti-democratic advances of the far right.
In order to tackle the disappointments in and about democracy, new forms of political participation have developed, particularly at local authority level, which generally focus on information and consultation and the opportunity to offer citizens new experiences of political self-efficacy. The best known of these are the "citizens' councils", inspired in particular by Ireland.
Citizens' councils are councils in which citizens, selected by lot, work together with the help of moderators and experts to find sensible answers to controversial political questions. The way to achieve this is through "deliberation", in which the various political proposals are examined through reasoning and argumentation to see whether they can be accepted by others - whether they are "capable of generalisation" (Habermas) - or whether compromises can at least be negotiated on them.
The lottery procedure makes citizens' councils attractive to many because "anyone" can take part in them. They also aim to be more socially representative than elected parliaments. Whether this expectation will be realised is questionable. The drawing of lots alone does not lead to social representativeness, which is not self-evident but must be demonstrated on the basis of a sociologically and theoretically founded model.
In fact, the authors of the citizens' councils have their own categories of social representativeness in mind when selecting participants for the citizens' council - in addition to the spatial distribution of the characteristics: Gender, age group, educational level and migration background - according to which they select the participants in the concrete composition of the Citizens' Councils in a modification of the lottery procedure. Religious affiliation, urban/rural differences and professional status (self-employed/unemployed), for example, are not taken into account. In this way, the citizens' councils - in their model conception - believe that, unlike parliaments, they can achieve a "mini public", i.e. Germany on a small scale, and thus enter into a legitimisation competition with parliaments.
Citizens' councils with around 160 members in Germany currently produce proposals on selected individual problems. The councils are then dissolved; they are not intended to be permanent institutions. The aim is to transfer the proposals to the political decision-making process, e.g. by parliaments (currently including the German Bundestag) discussing the proposals (e.g. on healthy eating) and transforming them into political decisions. This usually involves specific individual proposals, not long-term priorities or visions.
From the outset, citizens' councils exclude lobby groups from the composition and formulation of political responses because they are seen as the main cause of the weakening and discrediting of democracy. Because they are orientated towards particular interests and, above all, are associated with very different power potentials, they lead to power imbalances in representative democracies - in governments and parliaments. This prevents reasonable, fair and therefore public interest-orientated political solutions. Individual citizens, on the other hand, can come to a reasonable understanding "free of domination".
"Citizens' councils" have become very popular in recent years and have gained publicity. They have awakened new interest in democracy and opened up new ways of participation. Thanks to the drawing of lots, they also enable citizens who have not previously been politically involved to gain instructive experience of political challenges and debates on solutions as participants and bring them closer to democracy. They also offer them important experiences of self-efficacy and broaden the range of reasonable responses. That's a lot.
However, because the members are not elected, they do not have to answer for their proposals to the specific interests of the citizens. They deliberate "free-floating" and have no consequences to fear. As a result, a comparatively "harmless" "seminar atmosphere" can become the ideal image of politics, against which real politics appears all the more easily deficient and delegitimised as it has to deal with the concrete pluralistic interest groups. Why don't they do it just as sensibly in parliament as we do in the Citizens' Assembly? Should parliament perhaps also ban lobby groups? That would, however, strike at the heart of pluralistic society and democracy.
In addition, there is the latent danger of creating competition for legitimacy with the elected parliaments, because the lottery procedure wrongly suggests that it leads per se to a more socially representative composition of the citizens' councils.
Above all, however, citizens' assemblies do not realistically reflect the situation of political consultation and negotiation because they ignore the power dimension in a pluralistic society and democracy and only refer to the reason of individuals. In liberal democracy, this is important above all in normative terms, but must confront the reality of the exacerbated empirical conflicts of interest and unequal power potentials behind them.
Yours Main deficit in terms of democratic theory and policy is therefore that their approach does not provide a political and institutional answer to the central credibility challenge of our liberal pluralist democracies. This lies in the fact that modern societies do not consist of rational individuals (or notables of the 18th century, in which liberal democracy originated), but rather, since the end of the 19th century at the latest, of legal and legitimate pluralistic interest groups (the lobbies). As groups, they try in many ways to successfully feed their goals into the political arena and the decision-making process.
In the 19th century, underprivileged classes and strata were particularly dependent on group formation through freedom of association. In the second half of the 19th century, for example, freedom of association enabled trade unions to form a counter-power against employer agreements (which could be made over private dinners) in opposition to individualistic "old liberalism". Advocacy for a humane migration policy, for development cooperation based on partnership or against poverty in the Global South, for example, also requires such lobbies.
The seriousness of democratic politics in a pluralistic society and the challenge to its credibility therefore lie in the - often non-transparent - disputes between pluralistic groups in the pre-parliamentary sphere about their influence on politics. Because of their very different power potentials, they have unequal opportunities to make their voices heard. This undermines democracy's promise of equality, according to which all people have equal dignity, which is why they must have an equal opportunity to lead their lives in accordance with this dignity and in line with their ideas and interests.
Ernst Fraenkel, the doyen of the theory of pluralist democracy in Germany (Germany and the Western Democracies, Suhrkamp. Expanded edition (1991). With an afterword on the life and work of Ernst Fraenkel. Edited by Alexander v. Brünneck) dealt extensively with this problem in the middle of the last century, which has triggered many controversies. His expectation that disputes in (organised) society would ultimately lead to fair political solutions in a "parallelogram of forces" was repeatedly doubted theoretically and is becoming less and less true empirically today. When five employers' organisations lobby the government against the European Supply Chain Act, this has an effect, even if it had already been negotiated through at European level. Of course, Ernst Fraenkel, who was an in-house lawyer for the trade unions until his emigration in 1938, never assumed that justice would be achieved by itself without political debate. He envisioned the model of collective bargaining.
Today, especially under the conditions of economic globalisation, companies can often evade democratic national regulation, for example. This gives them considerable independence from democratic politics and other groups. In this way, the prerequisite for fair democratic politics is increasingly being lost, namely that there is a balance of power between the lobby groups in societies, from which a balance of power can be achieved in the event of social conflicts. Basic consensus The aim is to create a common understanding of the binding and binding values that must be fought for again and again through political conflicts. On this basis, different political decisions should be made that fulfil a minimum level of justice. The basic consensus holds democratic pluralistic societies together, it provides a line of defence against their disintegration, which would deprive democracy of its foundations.
Without such a basic consensus, democratic politics loses its objective and subjective legitimacy among an increasing number of citizens. Without it, it can hardly bring about solutions that are orientated towards the common good. The social imbalances and contrasts are too great. Democratic politicians are overwhelmed if they are only supposed to make fair political decisions based on their own power in a society in which citizens increasingly assume that it is sufficient, legitimate and the true sign of successful politics to assert their own particular interests. Not only in the face of the right-wing extremists who reject democracies, but also in the relationship between government and opposition, abysses are opening up today, partly as a result of the dominance of power-tactical priorities.
That is why we need procedures and institutions that do not compete with representative democracy but, on the contrary, strengthen its task of serving the common good by "pre-negotiating" political conflicts of interest (Olaf Scholz in an interview in DIE ZEIT from 25 January 2024 p.2). This can lead to a basic consensus between the plural groups and the citizens of society. According to Olaf Scholz, the relevant preliminary organisations - in addition to the parties, these are trade unions and employers' associations as well as all kinds of interest groups, associations and citizens' initiatives - perform this function of internal discussions and preliminary negotiations less than in the past.
An innovative reform should therefore explicitly organise such discussions around a basic social consensus in the run-up to important political decisions, for example. To this end, it is useful to bring together representatives of opposing interest groups in a trialogue between legitimised politics/administration, organised civil society and business (multi-stakeholder composition) for a confidential discussion and - in reasoned argumentation, i.e. deliberatively - to develop a basic consensus (not a solution or decision in detail!!) on the respective topic, on the basis of which the politically legitimised can then make a (reasonably) common good-oriented decision.
According to this principle "Municipal development councils" are organised. They would therefore not only be an extended participation among others, but such an "intermediary institution".
As a rule, CEFs bring together between 30 and 40 people to work together on a specific problem. Recommendations (not decisions!) for the development of their municipality. This may involve the redevelopment of an important brownfield site, the reform of the local authority, the provision of services of general interest, e.g. in the health sector or in housing construction, or the voluntary admission of migrants. As a rule, it starts with a specific topic, but the "entanglements" with other municipal tasks soon become apparent.
Following the generally positive vote by the mayor/administration and the municipal council, the mayor and the chairperson of the municipal council put together a small "steering group" (6-8 people) from the stakeholder groups of politics/administration, organised civil society and business. This group decides on the composition of the KEB. The principle of co-optation by the members of the steering group applies, not a top-down decision by the mayor or the chairperson of the city council. The steering group also narrows down the exact topic and the municipal council adopts a resolution to commission the KEB with this topic.
In four all-day moderated sessions, the three different stakeholders or interest groups from politics, organised civil society and business, as well as the citizens drawn by lot, justify their ideas on the topic and their reasons and discuss them among themselves with regard to their connectivity or their "generalisability" (Habermas). Dimensions and reference points for the definition of the communal "common good" in question emerge, particularly at the level of justifications. These can be used to derive a vision and criteria for its realisation. At the end, the KEB adopts recommendations, if possible by consensus, which are submitted to the Lord Mayor and the City Council.
Like the citizens' councils, the KEB therefore applies the deliberative procedure. However, it brings, unlike the citizens' councilsthe legitimised later decision-makers (mayor/administration, city councillors) and the interest groups/business that are not legitimised by election - and some citizens drawn by lot - come together. They deliberate together and thus get to know the logic of the other stakeholders better.
The KEB meets according to the Chatham House Rule: all arguments should be put on the table, brought into society and discussed there, but not which participant puts forward what. This is important in order to ensure the independence of the participants from their "original groups". However, the participants should also discuss the interim results with them as extensively as possible and bring the citizens' arguments back to the KEB in the course of the process. The conflicts of interest that actually exist in urban society are therefore not simply passed on to the executive or legislature in a promotional manner. presentedbut within of the company carried out. The result - although only a recommendation - has a good chance of being implemented in practice because the decision-makers were also involved in the discussion in the KEB and can identify with the result.
The KEB offers the opportunity to involve more citizens in the preparation of decisions than was previously the case. It puts the different interests and votes on the table and thus makes them transparent. It expands the wealth of perspectives that are included in the decision and thus comes closer to the common good. At the very least, this type of discussion prevents powerful individual interests from simply asserting themselves behind closed doors.
Through reasoned argumentation (deliberation), it also brings the urban community together because it exposes the potential for both differences and possible agreements in the reasons given. Competently and professionally moderated, in an atmosphere of fairness, goodwill and appreciation, it offers the participants, but also all citizens involved in the process, the opportunity to experience self-efficacy and to experience democratic politics in a positive way. Above all, experience has shown that this creates valuable trust between the participants, especially between the administration and organised civil society, whose logics of action are often initially very contrary to each other.
As the KEB is made up of representatives of interest groups, it does not per se attract people who have turned their backs on politics. This requires pre-political organisations and "testing grounds", especially non-political ones, e.g. sporting or cultural initiatives, which invite people and can possibly interest them in politics further down the line. However, the KEB and its wider activities in the municipality create a transparent politicisation that can have a motivating effect on the wider urban society to become politically involved.
Finally, municipal development councils comply with the principle of sustainability because, as an institution, they are set up for the long term - albeit with constantly changing personnel, so that the emergence of an aloof "elite" is avoided. In this way, they can trigger a familiarisation effect for more citizen participation and accumulate a wealth of experience that also involves the economy in particular. In this way, it becomes self-evident in the long term that the economy is also responsible for the framework conditions for its success - in particular social peace, education, infrastructure and welfare state services of general interest, and not only in northern societies. The radical market slogan: "The business of business is business", which is attributed to Milton Friedman, is no longer sufficient in times of economic globalisation.
Citizens' councils are an extension of civic participation that open up new opportunities for many citizens to participate in the political decision-making process. For the participants, they offer a variety of new educational and self-efficacy experiences and the chance to experience politics as a positive debate. They expand the repertoire of "sensible" answers to social challenges and have now gained a broad following.
However, they harbour the potential for disappointment if their results are not taken up in the political decision-making process, for which there are no incentives in their design. Even voluntary commitments on the part of political decision-makers to deal with the results cannot provide any guarantee here, as there have been no prior discussions and votes between them and the citizens' councils.
As individually recruited persons, they are not accountable to anyone, only to their conscience and reason. This makes them completely free, but also loosens their connection to society.
Since they rely solely on citizens as rational individuals and explicitly keep the lobbies of interest groups and their power out of the discussion process, citizens' councils ignore the decisive challenge of contemporary liberal democracies and do not provide any systemically effective answers to it: the power imbalances of (plural and not only legal, but also legitimate) interest groups, which work against the promise of equality of democratic politics. On the contrary, their organisation implies a "trivialisation" of politics, which can suggest a misleading ideal image of politics that does not meet the requirements of modern pluralist democracy.
Municipal Development Councils like citizens' assemblies, expand the opportunities for citizen participation and offer a variety of educational and self-efficacy experiences. These go further than in the citizens' councils because the implementation in political practice is supported by the institutional organisation and the risk of disappointment of having worked for the drawer is therefore considerably lower. At the same time, mutual understanding between organised civil society and municipal administration is growing.
As they are based on the multi-stakeholder principle, i.e. they aim to achieve a basic consensus between the interest groups, they support the orientation of political decisions towards the common good and strengthen the cohesion of urban society through the process of understanding and negotiation, which citizens' councils as a whole do not achieve. Municipal development councils thus address a central theoretical and practical problem of modern democracies at the more manageable level of the municipality, which has increasingly delegitimised them in recent decades: The imbalance between strong and weak interest groups or lobbies, which runs counter to democracy's promise of equality.
Unlike the citizens' councils, which are recruited via a lottery procedure - albeit one that is regulated several times during the composition process - municipal development councils do not appeal to citizens who have turned their backs on politics. At best, they can be reached indirectly by disseminating the results of the CEB discussions and the associated communication and politicisation of urban society. They need to be addressed beyond the KEB.
Unlike citizens' councils, CEBs tend to be set up for long-term institutionalisation and therefore comply with the principle of sustainability.