‘We are no longer afraid of the citizens’
Improving citizen services was the topic of the first Citizens' Jury in the German municipality of Meinersen. On 18 November 2022, 28 randomly selected residents of the municipality formulated nine recommendations on this topic, all of which were implemented.
Citizen services are good, but there is room for improvement
In the opinion of the randomly selected participants, citizen services were already good at the time of the mini-public. However, they should be improved by expanding online services as quickly as possible and providing a 24/7 collection terminal for ID cards and passports. Another idea was to set up a mobile citizen service with home visits by municipal employees. To this end, so-called citizen kits should be procured.
An extension of the administration's opening hours was also proposed. Following the Citizens' Jury, the joint municipality developed a concept for opening hours with two days until 6 p.m. plus a mobile citizen service.
Knocking on doors
For the Citizens' Jury, 100 people were randomly selected from the joint municipality's register of residents and contacted in writing. Twenty-seven residents aged between 16 and 81 accepted the municipality's invitation. The outreach lottery was also used, which supplements the written invitation to those selected by means of home visits. This motivates people to participate who, based on experience, would otherwise rarely or never get involved in participatory processes.
The Citizens' Jury was moderated by Linus Strothmann and Ilan Siebert from the association ‘Es geht LOS’. The democracy initiative promotes sortition and the institutionalisation of mini-publics.
‘A very strong level of commitment’
‘We focused entirely on empowering the administrative staff in the Citizens' Jury,’ says Strothmann, explaining the approach. ‘We held two workshops with them, in which we practised outreach and explained the purpose of mini-publics and random selection to senior administrators. Then there was another workshop in which we worked with the citizens' service staff to develop the questions they wanted the Citizens' Jury to answer. From this, we then developed a concept for the mini-public’ Strothmann continues.
‘Because the employees carried out the random selection process themselves, drafted the questions, sought out participants, sat on the Citizens' Jury as experts and were then also responsible for translating the results into concrete measures, there was a very strong level of commitment,’ reports Strothmann.
Administration shaped process
The administrative staff were able to help shape virtually the entire process. This enabled the administration to recognise the added value of the procedure. The Citizens' Jury was not perceived as ‘something annoying that is required of us,’ but as something that made work easier and was enjoyable.
‘After the Citizens' Jury, the administration drew on our expertise once or twice more in further proceedings, but then essentially carried out the sortition procedure independently,’ says Strothmann, describing the impact of the first mini-public in the municipality of Meinersen. As the Citizens' Jury did not cost much, at €11,000, the municipality could also serve as a role model to other small municipalities.
Mayor convinced by Citizens' Assembly member
The idea for the Citizens' Jury came from Martin Coordes. During the 2021 local election campaign, he was able to convince the then independent mayoral candidate Karin Single of the advantages of randomised citizen participation. After taking office, Single then launched the first mini-public in the joint municipality.
In 2019, Coordes participated in the federal Citizens' Assembly on Democracy. Since then, he has considered mini-publics to be a meaningful concept for restoring resonance between citizens and politicians’. Mutual understanding increases, citizens regain a sense of personal responsibility, and politicians feel that their work is being recognised again. ‘Appreciative interaction with one another is returning,’ Coordes noted in an interview with the association ‘Mehr Demokratie’ (More Democracy).
‘A jolt in the joint municipality’
‘Of course, there was a lot of scepticism among political representatives in the run-up to the event,’ Mayor Single explained in 2024 in an online event organised by Mehr Demokratie. However, during her election campaign, she repeatedly met people who were extremely frustrated.
After the Citizens' Jury, it became clear ‘that participation is growing without costing us a fortune.’ This has led to much greater understanding and cooperation. It is also important to ensure that no one is lost in the system. ‘This is a new value that we have here locally,’ explains the mayor.
There has been a real shift in the municipality, ‘you can tell that citizens now want to get involved.’ There has also been a lot of positive momentum in the town hall: ‘We are no longer afraid of the citizens.’