The Democratic Legitimacy of the Micro-Deliberative Shortcut: A Defense of Randomly Selecting Legislators

Abstract

The recent increase in the use of minipublics composed of randomly selected citizens for political purposes has been an exciting development in the history of democracy. The real-world instantiations of these bodies, such as the Ireland Citizens' Assembly, and the Citizens Convention for Climate in France, have been precipitated by the enthusiastic scholarly attention minipublics have received over the past several decades from philosophers and political scientists.

Some of these philosophers and political scientists have argued that elected legislators should be replaced by “deliberative minipublics.” Such legislatures would be composed of randomly selected citizens. Several of the arguments made by these theorists in favor of empowered minipublics focus on the epistemic properties of bodies composed of randomly selected citizens. ¹ These theorists argue that such bodies, when they are fit into the appropriate institutional structure, make more informed decisions that are more conducive to advancing the public interest. Others have focused their advocacy around the egalitarian character of deliberative minipublics. ² Others claim that distributing legislative power by lot is a potent means of preventing corruption. ³ Some have focused on the potential for empowered minipublics to act as a means of republican education and mobilization. ⁴

One of the most compelling and extensively developed criticisms raised against legislative minipublics comes from Cristina Lafont, articulated first in “Deliberation, participation, and democratic legitimacy: Should deliberative mini-publics shape public policy?” and subsequently in her book Democracy Without Shortcuts. In the context of defending a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, Lafont argues that minipublics should not be given decisive legislative power because democratic legitimacy requires both that the whole public deliberates, and that the whole public's opinion be decisive. When a minipublic deliberates, Lafont grants, their decision is a good indicator of what the public would have wanted if it had deliberated—but in fact, the public has not deliberated. ⁵ Giving this counterfactual version of public opinion power over the law is an attempt to take what she calls the “micro-deliberative shortcut” to democracy. ⁶ Lafont's book has been the subject of extensive commentary, ⁷ and because of the strength of the case Lafont makes against minipublics, her objection looms large over the advocacy for empowering deliberative minipublics. In this article, I aim to answer Lafont's objection, and defend the “micro-deliberative shortcut.”

In section one, I analyze Lafont's argument against the use of empowered minipublics in the context of her participatory conception of democracy. Lafont's objection comes in two parts. First, an argument against the political legitimacy of minipublics resting on her contention that ordinary citizens are asked to “blindly defer” to them. Second, an empirical argument that if legislation were done exclusively through empowered minipublics, public policy would be shifted far out of alignment with the policy preferences of ordinary citizens over time. In section two, I address the empirical argument, and give three reasons to suppose that Lafont's speculative outcome of legislation by empowered minipublics would not come to pass. In section three, I address her argument that citizens blindly defer to empowered minipublics. I argue that the concept of blind deference is overly broad such that any political system which involved representation or majority rule would involve blind deference. In section four, I address Lafont's participatory conception of democracy more directly. I argue that the “correspondence first” concept of legitimacy which this conception relies on cannot support the conclusion that democratic participation is normatively important, and that for this reason we should reject it. In section five, I consider a broader question raised by Lafont's critique, about whether the decisions of minipublics can be democratically legitimate if they contradict public opinion. I note that in many cases, there will be no ‘public opinion’ on the question before a legislative minipublic. I discuss the implications of this fact for questions concerning the democratic legitimacy of legislation by minipublics.

In this section I will argue that the essence of Lafont's argument against empowered minipublics is that if they are used, the decisions of the lawmakers will not correspond to the decisions that those whom they represent would have made. ⁸ This is a two-part claim, about the legitimacy of minipublics as lawmakers on the one hand, and about the effects of empowered minipublics on deliberation in the broader public sphere. I shall go on to argue in Sections 2 and 3 that both of these arguments fail.

Lafont's main objective is to argue for a participatory conception of democracy that does not use “shortcuts.” ⁹ She argues against the use of empowered minipublics as a reform to presently existing electoral democracies. James Fishkin, in critiquing Lafont's argument against empowered minipublics, frames himself as agreeing with Lafont that ideally, every member of the public would deliberate about matters of public policy, arrive at something resembling a consensus about what to do, and that this would be enacted into law by political representatives. Fishkin advances the claim that the second-best alternative, when the first-best alternative is circumstantially impossible because the public has not deliberated, is to have policy be decided by empowered minipublics. ¹⁰ When there must be some trade-off between deliberation and participation, we should maximize deliberation while maintaining citizen equality using empowered minipublics. Fishkin argues, and Lafont accepts this characterization of her view, that for her it is the reverse: we must do what the public in aggregate wants, even when they have not deliberated. ¹¹ In other words, correspondence between public opinion and public policy is of paramount importance on Lafont's view. Lafont seems reticent to accept the legitimacy of any compromise on correspondence for the sake of achieving other democratic objectives.

On Lafont's view, minipublics will predictably sabotage this correspondence, and for that reason they are not legitimate as political representatives. There are two parts to this argument. The first concerns the legitimacy of minipublics as political representatives directly and the second concerns their impact on the deliberative system.

First, let us consider Lafont's empirical argument. If Lafont were correct that minipublics would sabotage progress towards full deliberative democracy, then Lafont would have a strong case against empowered minipublics. But there are at least three important reasons to believe that her speculative outcome of the long-term effects of empowered minipublics would not come to pass.

First, Lafont says that the misalignment problem for empowered minipublics “is a direct consequence of assuming that this use of minipublics would be successful,” ²⁵ in that the minipublic is redundant except where it acts contrary to public opinion. On the contrary, the direct consequence of this sort of success is only that initially after the law is passed, the law does not align with public opinion. This cannot establish that over the long term this lack of alignment would persist—that contention is speculative. To provide some countervailing speculation: citizens may not necessarily drift farther and farther out of alignment with the laws they live under because the experience of living under such laws could potentially persuade citizens to endorse those laws. Given that Lafont is happy to grant for the sake of argument that the members of the minipublic act in a public-spirited way and are competent as legislators, her case that over time citizens would remain in the dark about why most of their laws are justified despite experiencing these good laws in action seems overstated.

Second and more potently, Lafont's argument here seems to hinge on the idea that if legislative decisions were made by empowered minipublics, all of the reasons we have to want to transform public opinion under more participatory forms of democracy would disappear. But that would not be the case: people who wish to change the law or prevent it from being changed have important reasons to persuade their fellow citizens to agree with them. The values and beliefs of ordinary citizens are the starting point from which an empowered minipublic proceeds in its deliberation. Deliberation about whether or not abortion ought to be legal will proceed differently, and perhaps reach a different conclusion, in minipublic composed of a random selection of Indonesian citizens (74% of whom believe abortion should be illegal) than one composed of random Swedish citizens (87% of whom believe abortion should be legal). ²⁶ For this reason, and because who will be selected to sit on a minipublic is not predictable, organizations which wish to effect political change will wish to sway public opinion to their side to change the starting point of the debate. Furthermore, because their aim is to persuade those citizens who will go on to deliberate (rather than citizens who will go on to vote in elections and referendums) these organizations would have to furnish ordinary citizens with good reasons to support their legislative program that stand up to deliberative scrutiny. ²⁷ This change in incentives for advocacy organizations may well bring us closer to Lafont's deliberative democracy rather than farther away from it.

Finally, if Lafont is correct that democratic legitimacy depends on the alignment of citizen's preferences with their laws then that by itself is a powerful reason for the government and civil society organizations to try to bring that alignment about, using public information campaigns. ²⁸ As Lafont acknowledges, the deliberation of empowered minipublics can provide us with a powerful resource that is useful for changing public opinion. In Chapter 5 of Democracy Without Shortcuts, Lafont endorses the use of non-empowered minipublics to enhance deliberation in the public sphere. On Lafont's view, the epistemic qualities of minipublics make them good candidates to fulfill important functions “that are not very different from those that traditional media outlets fulfill.” ²⁹ They would do so by making the most relevant arguments for and against political decisions, by filtering out irrelevant or manipulative considerations while highlighting “key information, potential trade-offs, and long-term consequences of the available alternatives as evaluated from the various political perspectives that resonate with the citizenry of a political community at a given time.” ³⁰ We should expect that their arguments will resonate with the citizenry “Precisely because their participants are a mirror of the people as a whole.” ³¹ If Lafont can accept that non-empowered minipublics are capable of being persuasive and informative in this way, she should likewise accept that through a concerted effort to inform the public about the deliberations of empowered minipublics, they could fulfill the same function and bring about closer alignment between public opinion and the minipublic made public policy.

Several other commenters on Lafont's work have made similar observations about the potential persuasiveness of minipublic deliberation. William Talbot claims that minipublic deliberation would be “must-see reality TV” because ordinary citizens would be able to see themselves in at least some of the deliberating members of the minipublic. ³² Tinnevalt argues that in providing arguments from the perspectives of ordinary citizens for and against certain policy proposals through their deliberations, the empowered minipublics could take over the important functions that political parties perform for deliberation in the public sphere. ³³ Fishkin claims that because empowered minipublics would produce all of these resonant arguments, even citizens who are not persuaded will ordinarily be able to see that their perspective was taken seriously by those deliberating. ³⁴

While Lafont does contest the claims made by Tinnevalt that the role minipublics could fulfill is the same as the role fulfilled by political parties, ³⁵ her main line of defense against arguments such as these is to fall back on the first argument described in the previous section: her legitimacy critique of deliberative minipublics. In Response to Talbot, Lafont says that if empowered-mini publics “are allowed to pass legislation that goes against the actual opinion of large majorities, then the legitimacy of their authority cannot be based on the democratic ground of an overall responsiveness to citizens' demands.” ³⁶ This form of decision making is not democratic because it expects “citizens to blindly defer to the decisions of minipublics' participants.” ³⁷

Now that we have seen why Lafont's empirical argument that minipublics will sabotage the development of deliberative democracy over time is not conclusive, we can evaluate her blind deference argument. We must ask: what exactly is “blind deference”, and why is it democratically illegitimate?

This definition has two important aspects: (1) citizens maintain control over their representatives (the control requirement), (2) and it is for that reason that we should suppose that the decisions the representative makes are the ones that the agent who is deferring would have made if they had thought about it.

I want to consider two interpretations of the control requirement and argue that both have fatal implications for Lafont's legitimacy critique of legislative minipublics. On the strong control requirement interpretation, if citizens are not in control, then citizens blindly defer. On the weak control requirement interpretation, control is instrumentally valuable because it gives us a strong reason to suppose that the decisions the representative makes are the decisions their constituent would have made if they had thought about it, and any other means of ensuring this would be just as good.

If we set aside the concept of “blind deference” Lafont's participatory conception of democracy may contain a more straightforward criticism of the legitimacy of empowered minipublics. Empowered minipublics may often pass laws that the public, in aggregate, does not support. According to Lafont's theory of democratic legitimacy this by itself is democratically illegitimate, and so because we should expect empowered minipublics to do this more often than contemplatable alternative democratic systems, they are worse. In this section, I argue that Lafont's conception of democratic legitimacy ought to be rejected.

Here Lafont identifies seeing the laws which one is subject to as one's own with having a preference for those laws, which is to say, believing that those laws are substantively good. She also identifies deliberation as instrumentally valuable for the sake of bringing about these changes in preferences. This suggests that the law is maximally legitimate when there is consensus among citizens that the law is good, and proportionally less legitimate when citizens disagree with one another about the substantive merits of the law. Lafont makes clear that it is this relationship between the attitudes of citizens and the law that matters to democratic legitimacy. ⁶⁸

If so, then Lafont's objection to giving minipublics decisive power over public policy as a second-best alternative to deliberative democracy when the public has not deliberated follows quite automatically from this conception of what democratic legitimacy requires. The “raw” public opinion will be superior in terms of democratic legitimacy as a basis for decision-making to the minipublic in any instance where they disagree.

However, this conception of democratic legitimacy, on which political alienation (citizens not “identifying with” the law) is the primary evil to be avoided, cannot single out democratic forms of government as uniquely or even especially democratically legitimate. This is a problem for Lafont, as she clearly intends for her concept of democratic legitimacy to do this. To see why Lafont's concept of legitimacy fails to achieve this, consider this thought experiment. Imagine a very charismatic king, who is exceedingly successful at persuading his subjects that his decisions are right. This king is ideologically committed to the superiority of autocratic rule, and very stubborn, so the opinions of the people on matters of state do not figure into his decisions about what the public policy on any matter shall be. However, once he has made up his mind about what to do, he implements the policy, and sets out to convince his subjects that his chosen policy is for the best. In fact, this king is such an excellent rhetorician and shrewd censor of dissenting opinion that his public information campaigns always convince at least 80% of the public of the virtues of his preferred course of action.

Despite Lafont's ambition to single out democratic forms of government as uniquely democratically legitimate, this understanding of democratic legitimacy implies that this king's policies are very legitimate. The citizens living under the king's government would not be alienated from the law, and it is the king's propaganda that facilitates this. ⁶⁹ As this thought experiment shows, if deliberation's meaning is that it is instrumentally valuable for bringing about changes in preferences that enhance democratic legitimacy, then the value of deliberation at least theoretically could pale in comparison with incompatible policies, such as censorship of dissenting ideas.

Lafont clearly does not intend to argue that popular monarchy is democratic, stating: “authorship in political decisionmaking is an inextricable component of the democratic ideal. Certainly, political systems in which citizens are never allowed to make any important political decisions (e.g. by voting) do not count as democratic.” ⁷⁰ However, it is difficult to see how a conception of democratic legitimacy rooted in popular identification with laws rather than democratic procedures can support this conclusion.

Lafont's “correspondence first” concept of legitimacy leads us to the conclusion that in the non-ideal circumstance where citizens have not deliberated, and where the king's government would do a better job maximizing correspondence and hence minimizing alienation than a procedurally democratic legislature, that the king's government is more legitimate. Furthermore, Lafont's argument implies that fewer citizen's “blindly defer” to the king than they would to a less convincing elected democratic legislature. This should not be an acceptable result to deliberative democrats.

Lafont claims that “requiring that literally all those subject to the law would simultaneously be the authors of the law as well” would be so demanding that it cannot be action-guiding for a complex society such as ours. ⁷¹ Instead Lafont embraces the relaxed requirement that citizens first and foremost “should not be subject to laws that one cannot see oneself as an author” [emphasis added]. ⁷² For Lafont, democratic legitimacy is determined by how citizens feel about the laws they live under, not their role in creating them. Lafont confronts the fact that under representative democracy ordinary people manifestly are not the authors of the laws that govern them by requiring only that people can “identify with the political decisions to which they are subject, and endorse them as their own.” ⁷³ Lafont claims that her conception of democratic legitimacy shows that “political systems that have structures of representation where citizens participate in decision-making count as “democratic” even if, as is the case in all contemporary democracies, that participation is rather limited.” ⁷⁴ Unfortunately it shows more than this. It cannot show that these limited structures of participation are required.

For the same reason, this concept of legitimacy cannot support an objection to empowered minipublics. If Lafont's problem with empowered minipublics is not their procedural legitimacy, but instead that their use would lead to citizens being alienated from the laws that govern them, then a variety of solutions would seem to be available to persuade citizens to agree with the minipublic's plolicies after they are enacted, as I have argued in Section 2.

But perhaps more effectively than any of these correspondence-achieving mechanisms mentioned in Section 2, the government could use propaganda and censorship to cajole the public into getting behind the policies which the minipublic has chosen. In my view, it would certainly not be democratic to stifle public debate outside of empowered minipublics by silencing dissenters and flooding the media landscape with information that manipulates the public into identifying with public policy. However, through this “propaganda shortcut” strategy, we would get public policy that is based on what the public would have wanted if it had deliberated, and alignment between public policy and public preferences. Lafont's account has no resources to explain why this shortcut should be rejected.

Lafont rejects accounts of democracy that prioritize the value of democratic procedures (which she calls the “procedural shortcut”) and accounts of democracy that prioritize the value of citizen equality (which she calls the “micro-deliberative shortcut”) in favor of an account of democracy which prioritizes the value of avoiding alienation. She accuses these conceptions of democracy of “bypassing the actual beliefs and attitudes of its own citizens” and aiming to “make a political community better than its members[…] by leaving their citizens behind.” ⁷⁵ What Lafont does not see is that the very enterprise of trying to pick a second-best alternative to full deliberative democracy is the enterprise of picking which “shortcut” is tentatively acceptable on the path to further democratic development. The “micro-deliberative shortcut” bypasses the actual beliefs and attitudes of citizens only in the same way that Lafont's “correspondence shortcut” bypasses deliberation: tentatively. Lafont has chosen to make correspondence top priority, before deliberation and before procedural democracy, and she has chosen wrongly. As I have shown, this choice leads to deeply counter-intuitive results for democratic legitimacy, and cannot support the critique of the legitimacy of empowered minipublics that she would like to make.

If what I have said above is correct, then Lafont has not given us good support for the conclusion that legislation by deliberative minipublics is politically illegitimate. Additionally Lafont has not provided us with a reason to suppose that when there is a conflict between actual non-deliberative public opinion, and counterfactual deliberative public opinion, that a body which enacts the counterfactual public opinion acts undemocratically. Nevertheless, there is a sort of intuitive force to the idea that actual non-deliberative public opinion ought to prevail over counterfactual deliberative public opinion, even if Lafont's argument fails to provide us with a justification for this claim. Might it be that Lafont's conclusion that actual public opinion must always prevail is correct even if her argument cannot support it?

This is a very broad question that I cannot adequately address in this paper. There is one facet of this question of particular relevance to Lafont's work which I can profitably address here: it may be that conflict between minipublic opinion and public opinion would be rare in practice, because there is no meaningful ‘public opinion’ on most of the concrete political questions that empowered minipublics would address through legislation.

Lafont's framing of this problem presumes that for any given political issue about which a minipublic deliberates only two outcomes are possible: (1) the minipublic agrees with public opinion on the matter, or (2) the minipublic disagrees with the public on the matter. In the second case, there is conflict, and public opinion must prevail. In the first case, there is no conflict, and the minipublic is essentially redundant. ⁷⁶ However, a third outcome is possible, and indeed it may be the most common outcome: the minipublic's opinion neither agrees nor disagrees with the public opinion, because there is no meaningful public opinion on the question that was put to the minipublic.

In a very important sense, policy preferences are rarer than what much of the discourse about public opinion might lead one to believe. As Michael A. Neblo discusses in Deliberative Democracy Between Theory and Practice, there is an extensive body of evidence showing that by and large citizens respond to different ways of framing the same political question in different and sometimes opposite ways. This leads many empirical political scientists to the conclusion that most citizens express “non-attitudes” about a wide range of political subjects when polled. ⁷⁷ Per Neblo, “the term non-attitudes refers to citizens expressing preferences that are not “real” in the sense of being stable over time and across more or less arbitrary ways of asking questions—they exhibit a high degree of context dependency.” ⁷⁸ If citizens do not have “real” preferences about how so many political questions should be answered, then there cannot be an aggregated preference about these issues. A referendum vote whose success or failure hinges upon how exactly the question on the ballot is worded does not seem to produce a meaningful democratic result. I agree with Neblo that for an attitude to qualify as a preference, whether or not you endorse it, it should be insensitive to arbitrary features of the context, formulation, or procedure eliciting the preference from you. ⁷⁹

Lafont, in Democracy Without Shortcuts, is inclined to conceive of deliberation as a process of opinion-reformation for the citizens who go through it. ⁸⁰ They go into it with one set of policy preferences, and come out of it with a different, more enlightened set. This is why (Lafont claims) the minipublic fails to adequately represent the views of the real public. In fact, as Neblo's discussion shows, deliberation is far more often a process of opinion formation, rather than reformation. This is why deliberation about the issue in question, even very small amounts of it, dramatically reduces the effects of framing which cause citizens to express non-attitudes. Through deliberation citizens develop stable “real” preferences precisely because it is through deliberation that citizens learn things and work-through their commitments in a way that stably connects their underlying values to their policy preference. ⁸¹

Other commenters on Lafont's work, such as Fishkin, Buchstein, and Talbot, have noted that “no opinion” is possible, and suggested that in such scenarios the use of empowered minipublics would be superior to the use of elected legislators or empowered experts. ⁸² Talbot in particular notes that when citizens have certain broad-scope policy preferences, deliberation is likely to lead to the acquisition of related narrow-scope policy preferences. His example is the elimination of the “carried interest” loophole. ⁸³ If it is the case that most Americans want the rich to be taxed more and have fewer loopholes to avoid taxation, and it is the case that eliminating the carried interest loophole would result in higher taxes for the rich by eliminating one such loophole, then it seems likely that a minipublic, motivated by the values of ordinary citizens and knowledge from deliberation, would wish to eliminate it. The extension of the values of ordinary citizens into areas where ordinary citizens have no opinion seems to Talbot to be a democracy-enhancing function of empowered minipublics. Buchstein similarly notes that in situations where ordinary citizens have no opinion and action is required, expert commissions and elected politicians will often have conflicts of interest or be out of touch with the values of ordinary citizens that make them bad choices to fill in the gaps in public opinion. In contrast, a minipublic, being in touch with the values of ordinary citizens, seems like the perfect candidate for the job. ⁸⁴

In responding to Buchstien and Talbot, Lafont raises two issues. First, that in the absence of public opinion to set the agenda, we cannot legitimately legislate in these no-opinion areas. Second is the claim that the empowered minipublic essentially has no democratic credentials to make decisions in these areas anyway. The reason why Lafont thinks that acting on issue areas where there is no public opinion is illegitimate is that “agenda-setting is a quintessential political function that needs to be subject to democratic control.” ⁸⁵ From this we can see that the first response is essentially dependent on the second: empowered minipublics cannot set the agenda because empowered minipublics are not a manifestation of democratic control. In the face of Talbot and Buchstien's arguments, why does Lafont believe that the empowered minipublic would be illegitimate? She frames the issue as a dilemma: “either it matters that the decisions in question are aligned with the will and experience of the citizenry or it does not.” If it does not, we should just use experts instead of minipublics. By contrast, if it does matter “that such decisions track citizens’ experiences and will[…] then minipublics offer no “shortcut” to get there. The citizenry needs to get informed and form both a considered opinion and will upon issues that have important political consequences.” So in sum, the problem for Lafont is that alignment with public opinion matters, and there is no public opinion here. Her solution is that the whole public must deliberate to form an opinion. As I have earlier noted, this move by Lafont is essentially a rejection of the legitimacy of second-best alternatives in general. Lafont's here suggests that the answer to the question “how should we make decisions on matters where the public has not deliberated and so has no opinion” is “postpone making a decision until they deliberate.” As Buchstien and Talbot suggest, this will often be impossible given the breadth and depth of issues that require political decision-making.

What should we do when there is no public opinion? Lafont seems to suggest that a decision by a body of experts would be equally good to a minipublic decision, and that a decision by an elected legislature or referendum would be preferable to both. ⁸⁶ I would argue that in these cases, the minipublic's connection to public opinion is far stronger than any of these alternative mechanisms. In cases where the aggregated public opinion is a non-attitude, we can have a randomly selected deliberating legislature decide and have a legislative decision that follows considered public opinion, or we can legislate by referendum or leave the matter up to elected politicians and have a decision with a deeply unclear connection to public opinion. If it is the case that variations in the question of a referendum or poll would produce different results, an empowered referendum can't credibly claim to be responsive to the “will of the people.” Furthermore, It would be impossible to design an elected legislature that always voted in line with public opinion if public opinion across a wide array of issues did not exist.

In cases where the public has not deliberated, there is no conflict between counterfactual deliberative public opinion and actual public opinion. All that we have is counterfactual deliberative public opinion, and no opinion at all. In such cases, given that there is no conflict, neither of Lafont's arguments about the legitimacy of empowered minipublics would seem to apply. In cases where there is no public opinion, there would be nothing wrong with going with the second-best alternative: what public opinion would have been if they had thought about it.

If “no opinion” is the public opinion on many concrete political decisions, it may be that conflict between “raw” public opinion and the “considered” public opinion of a minipublic is quite rare. In cases where there is a “raw” public opinion (rather than a non-attitude), it will at least sometimes be about matters where the public has deep moral clarity. For example, it would be deeply surprising on the question of whether or not the provisions of the criminal code forbidding murder ought to be repealed, citizens polled were highly sensitive to framing effects. But in cases of moral clarity, it seems quite implausible that deliberation would change the minds of ordinary citizens such that a minipublic would disagree with the public in aggregate. Adding this together with the fact that opinion polls mask the fact that the aggregated public opinion is often a non-attitude, then it could be the case that apparent cases of conflict are often illusory.

None of this should be taken to show that it is impossible for a minipublic's opinion to be in conflict with actual public opinion. It will not always be the case that the aggregated raw public opinion is “no opinion.” ⁸⁷ In cases such as these, much further argument would be required to draw meaningful conclusions about what democracy requires. However, if my reply to Lafont's argument in the previous sections succeeds, it should not be taken as a foregone conclusion that actual non-deliberative public opinion is more legitimate than the decisions made by minipublics.

Lafont's objections to empowered minipublics are all essentially based in the claim that the decisions made by the legislature must correspond to public opinion. As I have shown, Lafont's claim that decisions made by representative bodies that do not correspond to public opinion in this way are undemocratic because they involve “blindly deferring” to representatives, is not credible. Neither is her contention that mini-publics will result in alienation over time, nor is the theory of democratic legitimacy that both of these objections rely on. This leaves advocates for empowered minipublics with one very formidable obstacle fewer to the conclusion that legislation by deliberative minipublics would be democratically legitimate.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.