Citizens' Jury System

A deliberative democracy institution in which randomly selected ordinary citizens, with expert assistance, engage in deliberation to produce policy recommendations.

Citizens' Jury System

Overview

The Citizens' Jury System is a deliberative democracy technique in which ordinary citizens selected by random lottery review expert explanations and materials over a set period and, after sufficient deliberation, produce recommendations on a specific policy or issue. It differs from opinion polls or public hearings in that it involves 'ordinary citizens,' rather than elected representatives, in the decision-making process. Centered on the Anglosphere and Europe, and also in South Korea, it is used as a public deliberation tool for sharply contested issues such as nuclear power, climate, and bioethics.

Concept and Origins

The name Citizens' Jury is inspired by judicial proceedings in which a jury hears evidence and delivers a verdict. Its institutional prototype is Germany's 1971 'Planungszelle' (planning cell) and the Citizens' Jury model developed in 1974 by Ned Crosby in the United States through the Jefferson Center. Subsequently, various variants emerged, including Denmark's Consensus Conference and James Fishkin's Deliberative Polling, forming a family of institutions.

Operation

Selection: Representativeness is secured through stratified random lottery that takes gender, age, region, occupation, and other factors into account. The size typically ranges from 12–30 people (small-scale) to 100–200 people (citizens' assembly type).
Learning: Balanced background materials are provided, and experts on both sides are invited in equal numbers for question-and-answer sessions.
Deliberation: Small-group discussions and plenary meetings are repeated to organize the issues. During this process, professional facilitators distribute participation evenly.
Recommendations: In the final report, consensus or majority and minority opinions are stated together and delivered to policymakers.

Representative Cases

Ireland opened the way for constitutional amendment discussions on abortion and same-sex marriage through its Citizens' Assembly in 2016–2018, while France operated a 150-member 'Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat' (Citizens' Convention on Climate) in 2019–2020 and adopted climate policy recommendations. In South Korea, a notable case is the 2017 Public Deliberation Committee on Shin-Gori Nuclear Reactors No. 5 and 6, which conducted a public deliberation combining deliberation and opinion polling with 471 citizen participants; since then, it has spread to policy deliberation by local governments and public institutions and to agendas such as education, the environment, and care.

Strengths and Limitations

Among the strengths are that information-based deliberation alleviates polarization of public opinion, reflects the voices of marginalized groups, and increases social acceptance of contested issues. On the other hand, limitations include controversy over representativeness (whether a random sample represents the entire population), the lack of agenda-setting power and binding force of results, the possibility of political mobilization in the deliberation process, and the burden of cost and time.

Recent Trends

In 2024–2025, there is a clear trend for citizens' juries to become a standing institution rather than a one-off experiment. In some regions of Belgium, France, and Germany, the introduction of 'Permanent Citizens' Assemblies' is being discussed and implemented, and the European Union is regularizing European Citizens' Panels to incorporate citizen deliberation into policymaking. The OECD also recommends deliberative citizen participation as a mechanism to supplement representativeness and continues to compile cases from various countries into a database.

Technological changes are also notable. As online deliberation platforms and generative AI-assisted summarization, translation, and mediation support are introduced, accessibility improves for citizens who have difficulty participating offline; at the same time, establishing ethical norms to prevent algorithmic bias and information distortion has emerged as a task. In South Korea as well, along with local-level public deliberation, citizens' jury models targeting youth and future generations are spreading, and institutional measures to increase the policy uptake of results—such as establishing a basis in ordinances and codifying the principle of respecting deliberation outcomes—are being discussed.