Who Participates in Deliberative Democracy (and Does it Matter)? An Analysis of Lisbon’s Citizens’ Assembly

Representative democracy faces declining public trust, eroding the legitimacy of political institutions and parties. Growing civic disengagement and rising support for populist or anti-democratic movements further threaten its stability and capacity for collective governance. Against this backdrop, deliberative democracy has gained traction as a potential institutional solution to restore civic engagement and public support. Yet deliberative institutions face challenges of their own. In this paper, we study one challenge–inequalities in who shows up–in the context of a notable participatory institution, the Lisbon Citizens’ Assembly. We first use original data from assembly participants to study their economic makeup; in a context without stratified selection or reserved seats, participants more often come from white-collar jobs and have more formal education (like elected officials). We then use a pre-registered survey experiment to study how the economic makeup of a participatory institution impacts whether citizens see the institution’s procedures and outcomes as legitimate. We compare (1) an assembly with the economic makeup of the actual Lisbon Citizens’ Assembly, (2) an assembly representative of the city’s class diversity, and (3) a citizen assembly described without any class information. We hypothesize that citizens will tend to favor citizen assemblies as a general concept, but their trust may waver in contexts where the citizen assembly is mostly made up of the well-off.