Global Collaboration Institute reposted this
If there’s one constant after more than a decade of working in democratic innovation and participating in hundreds of conferences, it’s the persistent reference to Switzerland. Switzerland is often regarded as a democratic paradise, particularly for its systematic involvement of citizens in decision-making processes. YES, but… As an opinion piece highlights today, Switzerland heavily relies on quantitative participation, such as "votations populaires". However, it lags behind in leveraging tools like citizen assemblies, which are based on sortition to represent diversity and collective deliberation to transform individual preferences into common solutions. Such mechanisms remain rare in the Swiss democratic landscape. While many democracies could learn a lot from Switzerland’s systematic approach to citizen involvement, Switzerland itself could draw inspiration from its (not direct )neighbors—Germany, France, Belgium—who have institutionalized more qualitative and deliberative participation mechanisms. What if democratic innovation was also about exchanging models and learning from one another?
