Citizen assembly selection is the recruitment method used to compose a citizens' assembly — a deliberative body of ordinary residents convened to consider a policy question and issue recommendations. Unlike elections, which rely on competitive voting, assemblies are usually populated through sortition: a lottery from a pool of eligible residents, weighted to ensure the final group is descriptively representative of the population on dimensions such as age, gender, geography, education, ethnicity, and sometimes attitudes toward the issue.
The standard procedure has two stages. First, organisers send invitations to a large random sample drawn from a civic register (electoral roll, postal address file, or random-digit dialling). Second, from those who respond positively, a stratified random draw selects the final cohort — often 50 to 160 people — matching demographic quotas. This two-stage design corrects for self-selection bias while preserving randomness.
Prominent real-world cases illustrate the method:
- Ireland's Citizens' Assembly (2016–2018) on the Eighth Amendment used 99 randomly selected citizens plus a chair; its recommendations led to the 2018 referendum legalising abortion.
- France's Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat (2019–2020) drew 150 members by lot from phone numbers, stratified across six criteria.
- The UK Climate Assembly (2020), commissioned by six House of Commons select committees, selected 108 participants from 30,000 invitations.
The OECD's 2020 report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions catalogued nearly 300 such assemblies and identified random stratified selection as the defining design feature.
Debates around selection focus on inclusivity (how to reach under-represented groups), incentives (stipends and childcare to enable participation), and legitimacy (whether sortition confers democratic authority comparable to elections). Critics argue assemblies lack the accountability of elected bodies; proponents counter that randomness avoids campaign-finance distortions and produces more reflective judgement on complex issues.
Example
In 2019–2020, France's Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat selected 150 citizens by lottery from randomly generated phone numbers, stratified across age, gender, education, region, and socio-professional category, to draft climate policy proposals for President Emmanuel Macron.
Frequently asked questions
Both use random draws from a civic register, but assemblies add demographic stratification quotas to ensure descriptive representativeness, whereas juries typically use simple random selection followed by case-specific voir dire.
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