Crowdsourced democratic deliberation in open policymaking: Definition, promises, challenges

While crowdsourced democratic deliberation is becoming more common in open policymaking, it remains unclear what its value and role is — and should be, and could be — in policymaking. This paper examines crowdsourced democratic deliberation and its features, comparing it to the traditional mini-publics approach in democratic deliberation and to general online deliberation. The paper shows the promise of crowdsourced democratic deliberation as a method for scaling up deliberation to masses, while also illuminating its challenges, rooted in the self-selected and distributed nature of crowdsourcing. The paper concludes that the value of crowdsourced democratic deliberation remains mainly procedural rather than instrumental in policymaking.