Page 113 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

Step 3: Size Or, “How many people do we need?” The starting point for this consideration is working backwards from the decision from the perspective of an everyday person: how many people do you need to see were involved? Trade-off decisions and the kind of in-depth engagement that suits them, require people take the time to consider competing viewpoints and deliberate together. The depth of this engagement makes it suitable to small groups. Conducting a deliberation with over 300 people is possible but has many challenges that outweigh the benefits. (In practice it involves breaking the group into smaller units of 30-40 people for the majority of the time and bringing them together once they have explored sources and key areas of agreement as a smaller group). A lot of people use the term ‘mini-public’. It indicates an assembly that is a population-in-miniature, as these people will ‘stand in’ for a much larger population. The aim is to satisfy an important deliberative democracy principle: representativeness – “is someone like me a part of the decision?”. We think this is best achieved through stratified random selection. 111