Citizen assemblies will help save democracy (in Russian)
DOXA, June 2025
In this article I explore how citizen assemblies — randomly selected, demographically representative groups of citizens who deliberate on public issues — offer a promising response to the global crisis of representative democracy. It's written in Russian (with a pinch of hot takes on participation in autocracies). This topic is still on the margins of Russian-language discourse and I’d love to help change that.
Some of the inspiring cases I cover:
🇮🇪 Ireland’s 2016-18 citizens’ assembly, which paved the way to legalizing abortion (classic!)
🇫🇷 Paris’ permanent assembly and its policy decisions on homelessness, accepted unanimously by the city council
🇺🇦 And the first mini-public experiment in Ukraine, held successfully despite and during the war.