In 2019, We Do Democracy conducted the first Danish deliberative citizens’ assembly based on the OECD principles and has since worked with deliberative participation methods in Denmark and abroad. We have done this with municipalities, regions and publicly owned organizations. With this summary, we want to share our knowledge after the first five years so that customers, partners, public institutions, knowledge institutions and other democracy actors can get a glimpse of the results and the societal effects that the projects have had. In this way, we hope that together we can create the democratic changes we dream of.
- Our count, for example, allows practitioners to account for an average enrollment rate of 2.5% among citizens who have been directly invited to participate.
- It tells municipalities that 84% of participants have strengthened their experience of being a citizen in the municipality across four municipal citizen gatherings in Copenhagen, Greve and Næstved.
- This begs the question to researchers why the information received during the citizens’ assembly is generally rated less neutral than our facilitators (78% perceive the information as very neutral or neutral, while 87% say the same for the facilitators).
With this roundup, we hope to spark more conversations, investigations and experiments in democracy in Denmark.
Read the release here: Deliberative democracy in Denmark
If you have any questions about the release, please send them to klara@wedodemocracy.dk
