deliberative democracy – PSA Parliaments

Eight Ways Parliaments Can Rebuild Trust Through Citizen Engagement

By Jessica Benton Cooney.

This post was originally published on Medium by Inter Pares (https://medium.com/@interpares/the-new-playbook-f9b72f919c7b)

Trust in democracy is declining worldwide, and parliaments — the essential link between citizens and state decision-making — are no exception. While citizen engagement is more critical than ever, practical, actionable guidance for how parliaments can effectively involve the public has been hard to find.

To meet this urgent challenge, International IDEA’s Inter Pares — Parliaments in Partnership project and the International Parliament Engagement Network (IPEN), with support from the European Union, co-created a series of eight interactive Guides on Citizen Engagement for Parliaments.

These guides are more than a resource; they are toolkits built on extensive global research, with the aim of shifting the focus from “citizens as spectators” to “citizens as active participants.” Recognizing that citizen engagement is core to democratic resilience, these guides offer a wide range of actionable, evidence-based frameworks for meaningful interaction, deliberation, and co-creation.

For members of parliament, parliamentary staff, civil-society and international development partners, and scholars, this suite provides a holistic roadmap for innovation, helping parliaments worldwide redefine their role in this challenging era. Read on to learn more about the guide series.

A Complete Toolkit for Citizen Engagement

Each of the eight guides tackles a vital dimension of engagement. Together, they form a comprehensive playbook for parliaments ready to reconnect with the people they serve.

Principles of Parliamentary Public Engagement: This foundational guide establishes the core framework for all engagement. It identifies and explains eight key principles — including purpose, inclusion, and impact — that ensure programs move beyond box-ticking to become ethical, strategic, and genuinely integrated into the DNA of legislative work.

“At the heart of the lack of engagement with parliaments is a growing lack of understanding how they are important in a functioning democracy. I’m excited how these guides tackle rebuilding this trust and how they show us to think smart about the use of our resources.” — Caroline Wallis, Research lead/Kaiarahi Tira Rangahau, Parliament of New Zealand

2. Youth Engagement: Essential for democracy’s future, this guide focuses on creating two-way, meaningful partnerships. It reviews models from youth reference groups and specialized committees to youth parliaments, aiming to empower young citizens as “agents of change” who contribute to political life and debate now, not just as future voters.

“The guide is timely for the National Assembly of Zambia, reinforcing its commitment to deepen public participation and ensure that the voices of the youths are not only heard but truly shape the future of the nation.” — Bridget Kalaba, Deputy Director, Parliamentary Reforms Department, National Assembly of Zambia

3. Petitions and Citizens’ Initiatives: Learn how to transform formal citizen demands into constructive action. This guide provides practical steps for designing petitions and citizens’ initiatives systems that are accessible, transparent, and outcome-oriented, ensuring public concern can directly shape the legislative agenda and hold the institution accountable.

“The Citizen Engagement Guides offer fresh and practical insights that I can’t wait to share with my team at the Brazilian Senate. They’re a powerful tool to help us strengthen civic participation and rethink how we connect people to the legislative process.” — Alisson Bruno Dias de Queiroz, Coordinator of the e-Cidadania Program, Federal Senate of Brazil

4. Education Programmes: Moving beyond basic civics, this guide details how parliaments can develop high-quality, targeted programs to deepen public understanding of their work and relevance. Investing in these initiatives strengthens legitimacy and fosters a more informed citizenry equipped for participation.

“Supporting young people’s democratic participation is not just a right — it’s a smart investment in a sustainable democracy. The Education Programme Guide streamlines the organization of our 28-year long internship program for university students, helping us better engage youth and build a more resilient democratic society.” — Natália Švecová, Director of the Parliamentary Institute, Chancellery of The National Council of The Slovak Republic

5. Public Consultations: This resource is vital for ensuring decisions are informed by the needs of society. It presents four main consultation approaches — from online forums to discussion-based methods — and offers guidance for implementation, making consultations a strategic tool for improving the quality and legitimacy of legislation.

“Public consultations play an increasing role in contemporary parliaments. The Public Consultations Guide offers an invaluable toolkit for building positive and interactive relationships between citizens and parliamentary institutions. A lot of interesting and inspiring practices are showcased from several parliaments around the world. The Guide is an indispensable support for everybody committed to help parliaments to better represent and engage with citizens.” — Giovanni Rizzoni, the Head of Unit for Parliamentary Cooperation and Capacity Building at the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

6. Parliament as a Space and Place: This guide examines how the physical buildings and virtual platforms of parliament can be leveraged to foster connection. By making the institution more welcoming, accessible, and understandable through its spaces, within parliamentary estates and in communities, parliaments can build emotional attachment and a crucial sense of belonging among citizens.

“At the base of the German Bundestag (Parliament) Dome, the plenary chamber can be seen from above, so every visitor can watch into an ongoing plenary session… This symbolizes the awareness of and responsibility towards the population and the voters.” — Anna-Maria Pawliczek, Senior Officer, Division Int 4, International Exchange Programs, International Parliamentary Cooperation, German Bundestag

7. Deliberative Engagement: Focused on quality over quantity, this guide explores methods like citizen assemblies and juries. It provides a framework for designing processes that bring diverse groups together for intensive, informed discussion, incorporating nuanced, evidence-based public input into complex policy areas.

“I’m really excited about the citizen engagement guides, especially the Guide on Deliberative Engagement, which is packed with practical insights on embedding public deliberation into parliamentary work — this is exactly what I aim to do in my work here at the Scottish Parliament.” — Alistair Stoddart, Senior Participation Specialist, Scottish Parliament

8. Engaging Underrepresented Groups: This guide provides frameworks for proactive inclusion, focusing on strategies to identify and overcome barriers faced by marginalized and seldom-heard communities. This commitment to deep inclusion is critical for fulfilling parliament’s role as a representative body that reflects the entire society.

“Inclusion is the cornerstone of sustainable development. In the true spirit of leaving no one behind, it is critical to facilitate the engagement of the underrepresented. Their voices matter. The guide on Engaging Underrepresented Groups is a practical and vital resource that will facilitate this important process.” — Kagiso Molatlhwa, Programme Specialist, Youth and Gender, UNFPA Botswana. Former Executive Director, Botswana Council of NGOs (BOCONGO)

Turning Engagement into Effective Governance

These guides represent a timely, well-grounded, and pragmatic toolkit for legislative institutions globally. They address critical worldwide democratic challenges and offer a new playbook for all parliaments, regardless of their size or resources. They are founded on the principle that the health of democratic society depends on the strength of the relationship between its institutions and its people. Citizen engagement is, therefore, not an optional reform, but the essential work of democracy itself.

Through embracing this framework, legislative bodies can move beyond simply restoring trust to become stronger, more legitimate, and better equipped to govern in an increasingly complex world.

For both practitioners and scholars, the series offers a rich resource to reflect on how engagement can be effectively shaped, measured, and embedded in parliamentary culture.

*The guides were developed by Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds and Chair of IPEN, and Juliet Ollard, Senior Research and Engagement Officer, IPEN, in partnership with Inter Pares. The project team drew from extensive academic research and parliamentary practices from across the world — including many interviews with parliamentary officials and academics, and the expert advice of the International Advisory Group and the IPEN Executive Team.

About the author

Jessica Benton Cooney is the Senior Communications Consultant for Inter Pares, which is funded by the European Union and implemented by International IDEA. Previously, she was the Team Lead and Senior Strategic Communications Specialist for USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance.

By John Keane

During the past two decades, more than a few green-minded scholars have championed ‘deliberative democracy’¹ or ‘deliberative ecological democracy’, understood as ‘decentralised, organic and grassroots democratic practices that embody ecological values and give greater weight to the interests of nonhumans and future generations’ (Schlosberg et al., 2019). These green theories of deliberative democracy are less than convincing. They suffer multiple flaws. Their sense of history is poor. There is little or no recognition of the way their protests against the fetish of elections and search for new mechanisms of public accountability squarely belong to the age of monitory democracy. Many speak as if they are ancient Greeks; ignoring core features of classical Greek democracy such as slavery, discrimination against women and the worship of deities, they like to say that ancient Athens is the protype of a new 21^st-century form of citizens’ assembly democracy ‘where people come together and their voices are heard and translated directly into policy’ (Russon Gilman & Eisenstein, 2023).

There are additional flaws. Deliberative democrats’ penchant for ‘inclusion’ and ‘participation’ through small-scale, face-to-face deliberative forums begs difficult strategic questions about scalability, including whether micro-level schemes (featuring a few dozen human participants) can be replicated in time-space-variable nested ways at the national, regional and global levels, without relying on structures of human and non-human representation that are deemed antithetical to citizen ‘inclusion’ and ‘participation’. Deliberative democrats downplay the conceptual and normative challenges posed by the ‘artificiality’ of small-scale, pilot scheme experiments in which indefatigable citizen deliberators, supposedly with a plenitude of free time on their hands, are expected to behave as if they are rational and reasonable and dispassionate communicators in a good-natured scholarly seminar.²

Structural constraints on the efficacy of deliberative experiments are typically underestimated, or ignored outright. How or whether the big money and big power of corporations, military-industrial complexes and other vested interests wedded to the old carbon-fueled energy regime is to be reined in by citizens’ assemblies isn’t made clear. What’s more, champions of deliberative democracy typically suppose that there is, or could be, a ‘general will’ consensus about the meaning of ‘ecological values’ crafted through calm, reasoned, democratic deliberation. Resembling 19^th-century Christian democrats and champions of the parliamentary road to socialism, ecological democrats fancifully suppose that democratic means (public deliberation in assemblies) have a secret affinity with cherished substantive ends (ecological values). Following in the footsteps of ancient democrats, they dislike faction and disagreement. They prefer ‘harmony’. They are convinced that rational, face-to-face deliberation produces synthesis from division and actionable, working agreements geared to policy implementation. Inspired originally by the work of Jürgen Habermas, many ecological deliberative democrats secretly want to recapture the spirit of assembly democracy. Convinced that green politics heralds the rebirth of ‘participative democracy’³, perhaps even the end of elections and politicians, they misread and downplay the strategic and normative importance of courts, general elections, media platforms, integrity commissions and other power-monitoring institutions. Generally, they seem blind to the ubiquity and functional necessity and positive effects of representation within political life.⁴

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

See John S. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (New York 2013); and the introduction to Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (New York 2002), where the ‘essence of democracy’ is said to be ‘deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even self-government’. What is called ‘authentic deliberation’ is ‘the requirement that communication induce reflection upon preferences in non-coercive fashion’. It is claimed that the emphasis on deliberation in this sense renews concern with ‘the authenticity of democracy: the degree to which democratic control is substantive rather than symbolic, and engaged by competent citizens’ (pp. 1-2 ff). ↩︎
Kevin J. Elliott, Democracy For Busy People (Chicago 2023). ↩︎
Examples include Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Melbourne 2010), which speaks of a ‘globally participative democracy’ (p. 252) using the example of the Vote Earth campaign during the 2011 Copenhagen negotiations, a partnership between Google Earth and WWF’s Earth Hour which managed to distribute electronic ballot boxes across thousands of web portals, then to urge people to ‘vote Earth’ in support of a robust outcome of the negotiations, guided by the visionary principle (as Flannery puts it) of ‘online elections, organised by the people, of the people and for the people’ (ibid); and ‘From Another Angle: Democracy, with Claudia Chwalisz’, (Carnegie Council Podcasts, April 18, 2023). ↩︎
The merits and weaknesses of the theory of undistorted communication of Jürgen Habermas are detailed in my Public Life and Late Capitalism (Cambridge and New York, 1984). ↩︎