Features LAST DECEMBER, WHEN U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN hosted a global virtual summit to discuss the renewal of democracy, the issues on the agenda were predictable: the threat of foreign agents interfering in elections, online disinformation, political polarization, and the temptation of populist and authoritarian alternatives. While foreign policy has only been put on the agenda of citizens' assemblies a few times, there is no reason to think that ordinary citizens would be less equipped to make decisions on these issues as well. The next historical step in the evolution of representative government was to go from parliamentary democracy - where the legislative assembly was seen as a place of deliberation among individually superior minds - to party democracy. In fact, in 81 percent of the 55 examples of randomly selected bodies for which OECD data is available, public authorities accepted at least half of the recommendations that citizens developed in these processes. [Extracted from the article]
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