Who set the agenda?

Which memories and experiences are you taking with you to Copenhagen?

What I will probably not need in Copenhagen are the muscles I built cycling up the hill to the university’s campus! But I hope to keep in touch with Zukunftskolleg fellows, whose diverse methods, research questions and engagement with civil society have greatly inspired me. And I will certainly take with me the experience of being part of an inclusive and supportive research community like the Zukunftskolleg.

The sense of becoming part of a team was fostered from the very first week of my fellowship, by an “end of the summer semester and welcome” lunch at Selma’s with the staff and fellows on my first week on campus. The resources and the time (three hours on a Zoom call, thank you so much, Anda Lohan!) that was invested in showing us new fellows how the University of Konstanz functions and its many support facilities also played a large role in helping us to become autonomous members of the community. And I felt able to count reliably on continuous and extensive support to develop my research – sometimes conditional upon accepting certain German bureaucratic challenges – in terms of financial resources, IT services, coaching sessions, and so on.

One more thing I will remember is how fruitful the extensive inclusion of fellows’ expertise, propositions and requests in the functioning and development of the institute can be – be it to select the topic of a symposium, to review applications for the fantastic ZUKOnnect Fellowship, or to foster the setting up of emergency support measures for researchers affected by the war in Ukraine (which ultimately led, thanks in great part to the hard and impressive work of a number of mobilized fellows and of the Executive Committee, to the creation of the first such fellowships at the University of Konstanz). I hope to be able to draw on these (and further) experiences and observations to reproduce such an environment in the future.

You are studying citizens as agenda setters in democratic systems. How should citizens contribute to political agenda setting in democracies?

Indeed – that citizens should be involved in setting the political agenda is widely considered a core aspirational principle of democratic systems, both in democratic theory and in recurring demands from social movements. But what this abstract principle really means, and how it should be translated into practice, remains largely underspecified. 

During this year, I have been able to map different meanings that have been attributed to the concept of “agenda setting” in academic literature. For instance, to set the agenda sometimes means to determine the processes through which political decisions should be made; to define the problems on which a polity should focus; to determine which problems should be prioritized; and to design the solutions to specific problems that should be considered by decision-makers. 

These different understandings of the concept of agenda setting correspond to different types of agenda-setting empowerment granted by various traditional and innovative political processes to citizens. To take one example: a nowadays common way to use mini-publics – deliberative assemblies composed of randomly selected citizens – in politics is to let citizens develop policy recommendations, namely, possible solutions to answer to a pre-defined issue. Here, the randomly selected citizens have no agenda setting power in terms of defining the issue on which they focus; but they do have agenda setting power in terms of defining what set of solutions should be considered by decisionmakers to cope with this pre-defined challenge. Is this kind of empowerment sufficient to meet the requirement of citizens’ agenda setting? Or should randomly selected citizens, or maybe even citizens who were not randomly selected, also be able to define the problems on which mini-publics focus? And what does democratic agenda setting require in terms of what happens to randomly selected citizens’ recommendations? These are the questions to which I will turn.

You are also currently writing a book about government with the people. What can we expect from it?

The question that the book takes up is: Should referendum and initiative processes – so-called mechanisms of direct democracy – be included in our democratic systems? Democratic theorists have widely rejected the intensifying calls for “More direct democracy!” coming from a diversity of parties and social movements in many places in the world – promoting, rather, the translation of democratic principles into practice through conventional representative systems structured around elections. Yet, objections to popular vote processes generally display important weaknesses: they conflate referendum and initiative processes with a model of “direct democracy,” assumed to be fundamentally opposed to that of “representative democracy”; they ignore that there are different kinds of referendums and initiatives; and they pay almost no attention to the ways in which these processes interact with other political processes and impact on democratic systems at large. As such, answers to the question of whether or not we should promote the inclusion of referendums and initiative processes, which could in turn inform the evaluation of existing practices and the design of new ones, are currently lacking.

The aim of the book is to propose both new answers to existing objections to these processes and to refine our positive understanding of the value of democratic systems that include them. It does so by focusing on what I call “blended systems,” which include a specific kind of popular vote processes – bottom-up referendums, which empower non-elected actors to demand a popular vote on laws or policies recently adopted by legislators – and defending these systems as a better way to realize widely supported democratic principles than conventional representative systems.