Will democracy make a comeback in 2024?
Our look back at 2023 and at what comes next
As we head into the new year, DemocracyNext is almost 18 months of age. We’re still the new kid on the block! As a hopeful organization with lofty ambitions, we’re often caught between wanting to push as fast as we can and recognizing that everything that takes time. For us, 2023 was a year of setting in place long-term plans and fine-tuning our goals, forging new connections, finishing projects, and starting new ones—all in pursuit of a more just and joyful democratic paradigm.
Amid the doom and gloom about the state of global democracy, here’s the good news: the deliberative democracy wave “continues to grow.” That’s according to a new analysis from the OECD, which updates the work that Claudia Chwalisz and Ieva Česnulaitytė began as OECD analysts. From 2021 to 2023, the deliberative wave reached five new countries, spanning from Latin America to Eastern Europe to New Zealand:
We’re proud to be a part of this momentum. Just as we did for 2022, here are 10 of DemocracyNext’s highlights from 2023:
We published our flagship 78-page Assembling an Assembly Guide, an illustrated and accessible compilation of our knowledge and experience of how to set up a high-quality Citizens’ Assembly—online and print!
We also launched a new DemocracyNext website.
We launched the International Task Force on Democraticizing City Planning, and we received feedback and inputs from a group of nearly 200 stakeholders from around the world
We co-launched Tech-Enhanced Citizens’ Assemblies Pop-Up Lab with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, harnessing technology to serve democracy rather than undermine it
We democratisied museums! To be more precise, we helped create sortition-based Citizens’ Assemblies with museums in Bonn and Dresden, Germany. The first of many, we hope
We published a paper with the European University Institute and distinguished experts Carsten Berg, Kalypso Nicolaidis, and Yves Sintomer outlining a blueprint for the EU Citizens’ Assembly, and then published an op-ed about it in International Politics and Society Journal. The European Commission has just recommended that EU member states do more introduce Citizens’ Assemblies on important issues
We followed closely the French Citizens’ Assembly on End of Life, made up of 184 citizens who reached 92% consensus over 4 weeks of meetings. We published eye-opening reports from inside the assembly’s proceedings by our board member Hugh Pope and our Strategic Advisor Hélène Landemore served on the assembly’s governance committee. Claudia Chwalisz appeared on France 24 afterward to discuss the assembly’s significance
Claudia spoke with former U.S. President Barack Obama about Citizens’ Assemblies as part of his foundation’s leadership programme. We also participated as an organization in the Biden Administration’s Summit for Democracy
The OECD Deliberative Wave report, written by Claudia and Ieva, was translated into Japanese and Spanish. The latter was an initiative of the Mexican government’s electoral agency itself, which held a press event to mark the occasion
We published op-eds or were interviewed in Fast Company, The Guardian, RSA Journal, Responsible Statecraft, Carnegie Council, Baratunde Thurston’s How to Citizen, Design Emergency, Cultures of Assembly, Tortoise Media, the Seattle Times, The Stranger, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review
We held workshops or met with civil servants and democracy practioners in London, Arhus, Seattle, San Francisco, Bend, Cambridge, LA, DC, Boston, New York City, Lisbon, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, Vienna, Vilnius, Warsaw, India, New Zealand, South Africa, The Hague, Copenhagen, and Brussels
All in all, it was a action-packed year. But 2024 is going to pivotal. In addition to war, peace, and AI, the U.S. presidential election looms large. Soon, we’ll announce an initiative to channel some of the political energy in the U.S. into a more deliberative space. National security and the environment—the relation of the natural world and physical spaces to democracy—will also figure heavily in our work this year. Stay tuned!
✨ How about you? In the comments, we’d love to hear your reflections on 2023, and what you think 2024 holds in store.