NRW, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg with the most procedures

"Nowhere in the world are there more lot-based citizens' councils than here in Germany," says project manager Prof Dr Detlef Sack from the University of Wuppertal. The new citizens' councils database includes around 300 procedures since 1972, when such procedures were still called planning cells. As far as the number of lot-based citizens' councils is concerned, there was an enormous increase in the 1920s: Whereas an average of six citizens' councils were held in Germany every year in the 2010s, there were almost 30 per year between 2020 and 2023. "80 per cent of these take place at municipal level," says Sack. They are most frequently held in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and deal with topics such as urban planning, infrastructure, sustainability, social issues, the environment and construction. However, citizen participation, climate and transport are also particularly common topics.

At federal level, there has so far been a citizens' council ("Nutrition in Transition") set up by the Bundestag, whose consultation phase ended at the end of January. The IDPF is responsible for the accompanying research - the parliamentary connection phase will be evaluated until the beginning of 2025. The scientists are therefore looking at whether and how the results are implemented politically. In addition, there were nine nationwide citizens' councils organised by federal ministries or civil society actors and almost 20 processes at state level.

Data is available for various purposes

The aim of the database team is to include new citizens' assemblies and past, previously unknown processes in the new database on a weekly basis. Interested parties thus have access to current data and can obtain an overview of when and where citizens' assemblies have taken place on which topics and under which specific conditions (e.g. number of people, selection criteria), or where there are ongoing processes and where further processes are planned. The cooperation partners present a current evaluation in the first data report "Citizens' assemblies in Germany".

Until now, procedures for lot-based citizen participation have not been recorded and documented in a centralised and standardised manner. The IDPF is expanding its existing database infrastructure with the new Citizens' Councils database . Since the 2000s, the IDPF has been systematically recording direct-democratic procedures in Germany with the Citizens' Petitions database in cooperation with the Mehr Demokratie association. The databases offer a valid starting point for scientific analyses, which are not only available for research at the University of Wuppertal: As open access databases with a citizen science interface, they can also be used by civil society practitioners, politicians, administrators and the media. For example, the editorial team of Zeit Online recently reported on the impact of citizens' initiatives using data from the University of Wuppertal.

What are citizens' assemblies?

The database summarises loose-based citizen participation processes with different names under the term citizens' assembly. Sometimes they are called citizens' councils, sometimes citizens' forums, sometimes planning cells, sometimes citizens' dialogues, sometimes future dialogues. But they always have four things in common: Firstly, the participating citizens are drawn at random. Secondly, they discuss a political topic. Fourthly, the participating citizens present their findings, usually in the form of recommendations, often in the form of a citizens' report. For example, the German Bundestag's first citizens' assembly "Nutrition in Transition" drew up nine recommendations for action, including the introduction of free school meals. The citizens' report comprised around 50 pages.

From 2018 in particular, a trend towards stratification became apparent in the selection process for participants. This procedure, which combines simple random selection with targeted recruitment of participants according to certain characteristics (such as age groups or place of residence), dominates with a share of around 76 per cent. It is good practice to select participants based on the actual distribution in the overall population according to gender, age groups, place of residence, migration background and level of education. According to experts, this approach guarantees the highest possible diversity of participating citizens and minimises undesirable distortions that could arise from the voluntary nature of the invitation to participate.