Citizens’ assemblies are having a moment. Growing distrust in governments and experts has revived the ancient Greek method of empowering the public to participate in politics.
The model is now gaining traction around the world. In the UK and France, for example, citizens’ assemblies have been convened to deliberate responses to climate change.
But selecting the members of these bodies is a complicated task. Ideally, citizens’ assemblies should be both representative and randomly selected. Balancing these two requirements is challenging as the volunteers tend to be unrepresentative of the whole population.