Vincent Jacquet

Vincent Jacquet coordinates the ERC Starting Grant project CITIZEN_IMPACT (2024 – 2028 ; n° 101077920). To improve and even to save contemporary democracies under huge pressure, a remedy has been attracting a large amount of attention: the strengthening of ordinary citizens’ opportunities to deliberate on and directly participate in politics. Many citizens’ assemblies (CAs) have been implemented by public authorities, especially since the 2010s. Convened through random selection, these assemblies are diversified groups of citizens that deliberate on a public problem and make policy recommendations. In the context of the growing appeal for such mechanisms, CITIZEN_IMPACT asks the following question: are CAs mere window dressing or do they lead to transformations in the functioning of the political system? It offers a systematic account of whether, how and why CAs matter in contemporary European countries by elaborating a new multidimensional conceptualisation of their impact: direct impact on policies, indirect impact on civil society and discursive impact on the public sphere. To address these three dimensions, the research design combines different methods to compare macro national trends and to disentangle complex processes. Hence, CITIZEN_IMPACT provides a new horizon to tackle, both in the scientific community and the broader society, the role and contribution of such participatory and deliberative procedures in contemporary representative democracies.