In today’s episode, I speak with Professor Graham Smith and Professor Brigitte Geißel about the evaluation frameworks they have each developed to assess the value of democratic innovations.

I ask each of them how their frameworks apply to deliberative mini-publics and they provide quite different assessments of the value and effectiveness of deliberative mini-publics as democratic innovations.

Professor Smith’s framework identifies four democratic goods:

1. inclusiveness
2. popular control
3. considered judgement and
4. transparency.

Professor Geißel’s analytical framework comprises five criteria:

1. inclusive participation
2. meaningful participation
3. legitimacy
4. effectiveness and
5. citizen enlightenment.

As you can see, there are some similarities between these frameworks. However, the conclusions each person draws about the value and effectiveness of deliberative mini-publics is quite different.

In next week’s episode (the final one for Season 1) I talk to three other academics who take a critical perspective on the operation of deliberative mini-publics:

• Professor Cristina La Font from Northwestern University in the US,
• Associate Professor Caroline Lee from Lafayette College in the US and
• Associate Professor Genevieve Fuji Johnson from Simon Fraser University in Canada.

I hope you’ll join me then.

Check out this episode!