Democracy Matters

The Democracy Matters project ran two citizens’ assemblies, in Sheffield and Southampton, in autumn 2015. Each assembly comprised around thirty people, who met over two weekends to learn about and deliberate upon options for the reform of local governance and democracy in their areas. The project examined how successfully the citizens’ assembly model can be applied in the UK. It also explored two variants of that model: one in which all members are ordinary members of the public, the other in which a minority of members are elected politicians.

The main output from the project was a report: Democracy Matters: Lessons from the 2015 Citizens’ Assemblies on English Devolution. This outlined how the citizens’ assemblies ran, summarised their conclusions, analysed their effectiveness, and considered what lessons could be learned for similar exercises in the future.

Outputs

Scholarly articles

• ’Pedagogy and Deliberative Democracy: insights from Recent Experiments in the United Kingdom’.  Contemporary Politics 24, no. 2, 210–32 (2018). By Brenton Prosser, Matthew Flinders, Will Jennings, Alan Renwick, Paolo Spada, Gerry Stoker, and Katie Ghose.
• ’Citizen Participation and Changing Governance: Cases of Devolution in England’.  Policy & Politics 45, no. 2 (April 2017), 251-69.  By Brenton Prosser, Alan Renwick, Arianna Giovannini, Mark Sandford, Matthew Flinders, Will Jennings, Graham Smith, Paolo Spada, Gerry Stoker, and Katie Ghose.

Other outputs

• Alan Renwick and Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, discussed the findings in a Constitution Unit seminar in February 2016.
• Alan Renwick summarised some of the core lessons in a blogpost in November 2015.
• Further information is available on the project website.

Project information

The Constitution Unit’s Alan Renwick worked with Principal Investigator Matthew Flinders (University of Sheffield) and colleagues from the Universities of Westminster and Southampton and from the Electoral Reform Society to design and deliver the two assemblies and to research the processes that unfolded. This project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and published its report in March 2016. For full details of the assemblies, see the project website.