The Effects of Mixed Membership in a Deliberative Forum: The Irish Constitutional Convention of 2012–2014
| Author | Jane Suiter,David M Farrell,Kevin Cunningham,Clodagh Harris |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719830936 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719830936
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(1) 54 –73
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719830936
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The Effects of Mixed
Membership in a
Deliberative Forum: The
Irish Constitutional
Convention of 2012–2014
David M Farrell1, Jane Suiter2,
Clodagh Harris3 and Kevin Cunningham4
Abstract
The Constitutional Convention was established by the Irish government in 2012. It was tasked
with making recommendations on a number of constitutional reform proposals. As a mini-public,
its membership was a mix of 66 citizens (randomly selected) and 33 politicians (self-selected). Its
recommendations were debated on the floor of the Irish parliament with three of them leading
to constitutional referendums; other recommendations are in the process of being implemented.
This article uses data gathered during and after the operation of the Convention to examine
this real-world example of a mixed-membership mini-public. The focus is on how the inclusion
of politicians may have impacted on the Convention’s mode of operation and/or its outcomes.
We find little impact in terms of its operation (e.g. no evidence that politicians dominated the
discussions). There is evidence of a slight liberal bias among the politician membership, but this
had little effect on the outcomes.
Keywords
deliberation, mini-publics, citizens’ assemblies, sortition
Accepted: 23 January 2019
The use of deliberative mini-publics is proliferating, though for the most part they have
tended to operate at the local or municipal level, leading to questions over whether
deliberation can ever be ‘scaled up’ (Bächtiger and Wegman, 2014; Dryzek, 2010;
1University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
2Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
3University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
4Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Corresponding author:
David M Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin 4, Dublin, Ireland.
Email: david.farrell@ucd.ie
830936PCX0010.1177/0032321719830936Political StudiesFarrell et al.
research-article2019
Article
Farrell et al. 55
Niemeyer, 2011). The early real-world examples of deliberation on a larger scale – the
citizens’ assemblies of British Columbia, Ontario and the Netherlands – proved unsuc-
cessful in terms of policy outcomes (Fournier et al., 2011). It is suggested that one major
reason for this was a disconnect between the citizen members and the wider political class
who were excluded from the deliberative process and who therefore neither paid much
heed to it nor supported its outcomes.
The post-2008 Great Recession and its political fallout triggered a new round of debate
over the potential of deliberation in processes of constitutional reform: the argument that
was made was that this could help to bridge a perceived gap between citizens and politics
and to initiate a process of democratic renewal (Contiades and Fotiadou, 2017; Reuchamps
and Suiter, 2016). New initiatives (some government sponsored others privately organ-
ized) have been popping up as far afield as Australia, Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland,
Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and in parts of the United
States. These new initiatives provide fresh opportunities to test the merits of deliberative
approaches.
This article focuses on the Irish case. The Irish Constitutional Convention of 2012-
2014 (www.constitutionalconvention.ie) was a mixed-member deliberative forum,
including lay citizens and members of parliament as members – a version of the ‘directly
representative democracy’ advocated by Neblo et al. (2018). Established by the Irish gov-
ernment in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country’s history, the Convention
was tasked with reviewing a number of areas of constitutional reform. While the
Constitutional Convention was not without its critics (Carolan, 2015), most academic
commentary on it has been positive (e.g. Flinders et al., 2016; Honohan, 2014; Suteu,
2015; Van Reybrouck, 2016; White, 2017). And with some reason: it was successful as a
deliberative process (Suiter et al., 2016); a large portion of its recommendations have
been or will be implemented (Arnold et al., in press; Farrell, 2018) – including, most
dramatically, a successful referendum on the hot topic of marriage equality in 2015
(Elkink et al., 2017); and the political elite clearly judged it successful as seen by the deci-
sion of a new Irish government (elected in 2016) to establish a fresh citizens’ assembly
(www.citizensassembly.ie) which operated between 2016 and 2018.1
It is felt generally by scholars writing on this process that a factor behind the success
of the 2012-2014 Irish Constitutional Convention was its mixed membership, 66 ran-
domly selected citizens working side-by-side with 33 professional politicians, with the
latter anchoring the process in the political system, making it more likely that the conven-
tion’s recommendations would receive a fair hearing. It is this mix of two types of mem-
bers that is the focus of this article, which speaks to a debate in the academic literature on
membership in mini-publics (e.g. Smith, 2009; Smith and Stephenson, 2005; Vandamme
et al., in press; White, 2017). Our objective is to assess how the inclusion of politicians as
members may have impacted on the operation of the Convention (i.e. on how it worked)
and/or its outcomes. In one sense at least (as we discuss below), the inclusion of politician
members may have helped in grounding the process, thus enabling the Convention’s rec-
ommendations to have a fair hearing in wider political and governmental circles. The
question at the heart of this article is whether this may have been at a cost to the delibera-
tive process that underlay the mini-public design of the Convention.
We make use of data gathered during and after the operation of the Convention to
examine whether the mixed-membership deliberative forum was as successful as it may
have appeared. We find little impact in terms of the operation of the Convention (for
instance, no evidence that politicians dominated the discussions). There is evidence of a
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