"Why isn't everyone doing this?"

Webinar Watch: People Powered's "1000 Citizens Assemblies Later … What Has Changed?"

“Impact on policy may not happen the first time. But if these are done regularly … I would love to see citizens’ assemblies be a normal thing and have the [city] council people and politicians commit to listening to what the citizens have to say,” said Shelly Kuhl, one randomly selected member of a recent citizens’ assembly. “Maybe the next time it happens, you will see some changes, the word starts to get out and it has a snowball effect.”

“1000 Citizens Assemblies Later … What’s Changed?” - a 23 July 2026 webinar organised by People Powered featuring Melisa Ross (Global Citizens’ Assembly Network), Maria Milosh (University of Chicago), Miles Brackenbury (Federation for Innovation in Democracy - North America), Ryan Gem (People Powered), Shelly Kuhl (Lexington civic assembly).

Even if it’s only to hear the spontaneous contributions of Shelly Kuhl, chosen by lot to be a member of 2026’s civic assembly in the US city of Lexington, Kentucky, it’s worth tuning into this webinar on what the movement for randomly selected citizens’ assemblies has achieved so far.

Listening to the whole well-disciplined hour shows how much broader, deeper and clearer the movement for citizens’ assemblies has become. The first big assembly of the modern era was held in Vancouver, Canada in 2004, and, over the past decade, the pace picked up . The speakers are great examples of how thoughtful people active in the movement are too. (And if you want to jump straight to Shelly Kuhl’s comments, I’ve bookmarked where she starts here.)

My main takeaways from the webinar were:

🔢 The big number. The global number of 1,000 citizens’ assemblies is a guess: even the sortition movement has lost track of how many have been held around the world. The OECD gave up counting them in 2023, when it said the number held since 1979 reached 716.

The webinar title reckoned that there more than 1,000 have now been convened, surely a big underestimate. In Germany alone, there were 58 citizens’ assemblies held in 2025. Their use is spreading globally from electoral reform to assisted dying to museum management.

What people call a citizens’ assembly is becoming more diverse too, under various names like civic juries and mini-publics. All have the same principles: random selection of a group of 12 to 250 people from a community, like a court jury; assembly members then listen to experts, deliberate, and put propositions to the vote; finally they turn whatever gets supermajority support into recommendations, taking minority positions into account.

🌱 Impact. The jury is still out on how to measure what a citizens’ assembly actually changes, in other words, impact.

Quick policy change sometimes happens, but is rare; for longer-term changes, some think it may be too soon to reach firm conclusions. What has changed is a new certainty that the chances of a citizens’ assembly to change policy depends mostly on the choice of topic and the engagement of the decision-making establishment. Subjects for deliberation should be:

• Truly on the agenda

• Feasible in terms of political will

• Inherently divisive for a community, which usually means traditional elected bodies are already stuck

• An instance where a clear recommendation from a citizens’ assembly can give policymakers a mandate to act and protection if they do so

One speaker focused on the mini-public’s “transformative power, at the individual and local level”. Many studies, he said, show strong evidence that participants become more knowledgeable, more interested in politics and gain understanding of government. But another speaker warned such studies often self-reported by organisers and don’t often look at long-term results.

📐 Design of citizens assemblies is improving. Key challenges are:

1. Getting citizens’ assemblies to break out of their shells and to communicate with the communities that are affected by the topic

2. Involving elected or institutional policymakers in ways that raises empathy and trust on both sides

3. Being selected by lot to join a citizens’ assembly “really resonates” with participants, but bonding needs reinforcement by organisers’ attention to things outside the assembly room like making time for breaks, shared meals and individual outreach

4. Making sure expert briefings include debates and Q&A sessions, not just lectures

5. With most citizens’ assemblies being convened in wealthier countries, further streamlining to save money and improve results will be essential if the movement is to grow in poorer parts of the world

✅ Evaluation. The organisation of a citizens’ assembly is now judged across several areas:

1. How accurately its participants represent the diversity of their community

2. Whether the assembly’s mandate and remit are clear

3. Whether participants have the right amount of time to do the job

4. Whether the information and expert briefings reflect all points of view on the topic well

5. The quality of deliberation and its facilitation

6. Whether participants were free to formulate their proposals

7. Whether public authorities commit in advance to consider and respond to these proposals transparently

🗳️ Sortition, or the actual process of randomly selecting citizens, is still imperfect because citizens’ assemblies are little known and response rates to invitations are so low. Remedies will need to include:

1. The topic in the invitation should clearly be worth the participants’ time;

2. More focus on removing practical barriers to participation by ensuring that there are attractive offers of support like per diems and child care

3. A focus on follow-up and encouraging participants to pass on their their experiences by word of mouth

4. Organisation of alumni groups

5. A good flow of information about impact from the organisers over the months and years after a citizens’ assembly, especially to citizens’ assembly alumni

6. More integration of assemblies with local community structures

7. Better outreach to communities to share news about debates and results.

🤝 Depolarisation. Lexington’s civic assembly participant Shelly Kuhl underlined something that is increasingly viewed as a key side-effect of citizens’ assemblies: the way structured deliberation naturally defuses partisan divides, and participants get to know people from all sides of the community.

The Lexington assembly’s main recommendation was to change remuneration for city council members from part-time pay to the full-time average wage – still a significant rise – and Kuhl said she had argued strongly against the outcome. (By 6 August, the recommendation had cleared the first council hurdles to go on municipal ballots in the autumn of 2026). But she remained hugely enthusiastic for this method of taking such decisions, despite not ever wanting to even talk about politics before she got the invitation to join.

Diversity of viewpoints was “all over the place … but you felt like you were in a safe space,” Kuhl said. The civic assembly “was such a big deal to me. I got to be heard. I got the big thumbs down, but that’s ok. No one held it against me. No one was being ugly … everyone can see that humanity in each other, that is going to affect everyone involved … the thing I just keep coming to coming back to time and time again is like, wow, why was this [civic assembly] the only one? Why isn’t everyone doing this?”