---
title: Deliberative Democracy
last_checked: "2026-05-29"
---

An approach to democracy that emphasises informed reasoning and structured discussion among citizens — not just aggregating existing preferences through voting, but creating conditions where preferences can be formed, tested, and revised through encounter with other perspectives and evidence.

The core claim is that better decisions emerge from genuine deliberation than from raw vote-counting: a group that has thought carefully through a question, heard different views, and reasoned together reaches more considered conclusions than a group asked to vote on an issue they've never discussed.

In practice, deliberative democracy is implemented through mechanisms like **citizens' assemblies**, **citizens' juries**, and **deliberative polls** — where randomly selected participants (sortition) are given time, information, facilitation, and diverse perspectives before making recommendations. This distinguishes it from both direct democracy (which counts raw preferences) and representative democracy (which delegates decisions entirely to elected officials).

## DOD coverage

- [Citizens' Democracy: Presentations and Q&A](../../blog/posts/2017-08-21-podcast.md) — Nicholas Gruen and Hubertus Hofkirchner on deliberative mechanisms, 2017
- [Isegoria: The Way Citizens' Juries Deliver It, How Elections Destroy It](../../blog/posts/2020-03-20.md) — Nicholas Gruen on why elections undermine the quality of public voice, 2020
- [Victoria's Upper House inquiry: the case for a citizens' assembly](../../blog/posts/2026-05-24-vic-upper-house-citizens-assembly.md)
- [Q&A on deliberative democracy for council candidates (Victoria, Australia)](../../blog/posts/2024-09-28-deliberative-democracy-council-candidates-qa.md)


## See also

- [Citizens' Assembly](citizens-assembly.md)
- [Sortition](sortition.md)
- [Isegoria](isegoria.md)
- [Cognitive Division of Labour](cognitive-division-of-labour.md)
- [newDemocracy Foundation](../organisations/newdemocracy.md)
- [MASS LBP](../organisations/mass-lbp.md)
- [Sortition Foundation](../organisations/sortition-foundation.md)
- [Healthy Democracy](../organisations/healthy-democracy.md)
- [G1000](../organisations/g1000.md)
- [Decidim](../organisations/decidim.md)
- Wikipedia: [Deliberative democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy)
