Deliberative committees combining members of parliament and citizens chosen by lot have been tried out in Belgium since 2019: a mix that is not easy to balance. Dreamocracy has drawn on this experience to design the new joint committee for the Walloon Parliament. Analysis by Victor Lauret, consultant at Dreamocracy.
The experience of recent years has revealed one important fact: citizens selected by lot are capable of producing high-quality proposals on complex issues. Despite this, they have often seen their proposals given little or no consideration by the elected representatives who were supposed to deal with them. The examples of the Citizens’ Climate Convention in France and the G1000 in Belgium are particularly emblematic. Only 12% of the measures taken by the French Convention were taken up unchanged, and none of the G1000 proposals had any real influence on the Belgian political agenda. By reproducing this frustrating pattern, we run the risk of discrediting citizen participation as a possible avenue for democratic renewal (…)
