Amid growing discontent with representative democracies, new forms of direct citizen political participation are becoming more popular. In this context, proposals have proliferated to insert deliberative mini-publics in the political process, such as citizen assemblies, citizen juries or deliberative surveys. In fact, many democracy theorists see these mechanisms as the best hope for bridging the many representation “gaps” that plague traditional party systems, gaps that have produced alarming levels of citizen apathy and disenchantment with democracy. However, despite the interest that these new forms of citizen participation have aroused, little has been analyzed about the specific nature of the political representation that they imply.
In what sense are the citizens who participate in C Level Contact List assemblies supposed to be representatives of the rest of the citizenry? Can they act at the same time as full citizens and as representatives of those who do not participate? In this essay, I argue that the notion of representation that underlies many of the proposals to insert mini-publics into the political process has some important similarities with the notion of representation as "embodiment. ") of the people typical of populism.
After analyzing some differences between the populist and lotocratic varieties (by lottery) of representation as "incarnation", I highlight two characteristics that they share and that are highly detrimental to democracy: exclusionary majoritarianism and the assumption of political homogeneity of citizenship. Against this point of view, I defend a way of understanding the relationship between the participants of the mini-publics and the general public that avoids the problematic features of the conception of representation as embodiment. Finally, based on this alternative understanding, I draw some practical consequences regarding current proposals for political uses of mini-publics. In particular, Populism and representation as the embodiment of the people According to the Oxford English Dictionary , populism "attempts to appeal to ordinary people who feel their concerns are ignored by established elites." Populism's appeal to ordinary people seems to stem from a concern for inclusion.