Avram R. is a member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America. Views are his own.
ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, then New York City Mayor-elect and NYC Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani invited New Yorkers to speak to him.
“The Mayor is Listening," an homage to “The Artist is Present,” featured Mamdani sitting down in one-on-one conversations with 142 constituents for three minutes a piece at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. The event likely built more trust with an incoming administration in 12 hours than many million-dollar ad campaigns could. It was also shrewd politics, part of Mamdani’s larger strategy to maintain public attention in the lead-up to his mayoralty: building power and putting pressure on the New York City Council to enact Zohran’s affordability agenda.
This exhibition was brilliant and typical Mamdani, an imaginative but common-sense approach to an old issue: public trust and engagement. It showed a level of respect for regular New Yorkers — that the incoming mayor valued their perspectives for informing their government, a principle that has characterized Mamdani’s campaign.
“The Mayor is Listening” should be celebrated. But as laudable as it was, there were some shortcomings. Each New Yorker only spoke to Zohran for three minutes — not a lot of time to go into the details of an issue or to engage in a thoughtful dialogue. Also, despite the best efforts of Mamdani’s staff, the event’s demographics were skewed towards people in their 30s and 40s who were mostly already strong supporters.
Most importantly, there is the question of whether this type of public communication will be sustained. While “The Mayor is Listening” was imagined as a part two to Mamdani’s walk through Manhattan, both of these events took place before he took office. Can this kind of public engagement become normalized so Mamdani and public officials in New York (and beyond) continue to bring citizens into systems of co-governance?
When it comes to answering these questions, Mamdani does not need to reinvent the wheel. Programs that increase public trust and build broad support for good policy already exist. Participatory democracy initiatives, particularly civic assemblies, are democratic innovations for better, more representative governance. They are also tools socialists can use to galvanize pressure for policies that might otherwise die in status quo electoral and advocacy efforts.
Democratic socialists in office, and the DSA more broadly, would be wise to champion civic assemblies and participatory democratic reform.
It’s March 2028, and you just arrived at Turkey Thicket Recreation Center. You look around and see a room that looks like Washington, DC. Of the 40 people there, 16 are Black, five are Hispanic or Latino, 15 are non-Hispanic white, and four are Asian American/Pacific Islander, mixed race, or Indigenous. Twenty are women, 19 are men, and one is genderqueer. Sixteen are homeowners, one is unhoused, and the rest, the majority, are renters. You take a deep breath and prepare for the first of several days of learning and discussion with your neighbors.
Three months ago, you received a postcard from the DC government inviting you to shape the future of the District’s housing policy in DC’s first civic assembly. You were skeptical. After all, why would the District be reaching out to you? You have, at best, cursory knowledge of housing policy. Despite your uncertainty, you returned the postcard and were randomly selected to join the assembly.
Several weekends of work later, you and your fellow assembly members have produced more than a dozen recommendations, approved by at least 75% of the representative body. The time you have spent learning and deliberating these recommendations together with the representation of perspectives in the room makes you confident that the assembly’s recommendations are strong expressions of the popular will of DC residents. For the first time, you feel empowered as a citizen — you’ve built deep connections with your neighbors and, working together, you have found real solutions to a pernicious problem.
Civic assemblies are a growing form of participatory and deliberative democracy. Participatory democracy and deliberative democracy are alternative visions to representative democracy. Participatory democracy seeks to empower more citizens and include them in governance, that is, decision-making. Deliberative democracy seeks to improve the quality of public discourse by elevating the role of reason through structured deliberation. Many in both the participatory and deliberative democracy camps support civic assemblies as a democratic innovation that both empowers citizens and emphasizes reason.
Participants are paid a living wage for their time in the assembly so that wage workers can join, child care is provided to ensure parents and guardians can participate, and translation for sign language and regional languages is provided as needed. In learning about an issue, participants may hear from academics and advocates, but testimony is equally solicited from people with lived experience of the issue.
An assembly is typically called by a legislative body; the body authorizes legislation which requires a response to the assembly’s recommendations within a reasonable time period. While the recommendations are advisory, the assembly carries power in its democratic legitimacy, which it creates through its representativeness and fair deliberation.
I joined DSA because my experience organizing a labor union taught me that collective power is the essential means of democratic change. Unions are little democracies, after all, and for democracy to be meaningful, the demos must have power.
Civic assemblies share a similar ethos and faith in collective wisdom. They empower people beyond the ballot box. They expand what political equality means beyond the equal rights to vote and speak. They claim a further equal right to govern. They are creating, as Peter MacCleod put it, a “politics of dignity.”
Civic assemblies do this while acknowledging the reality that there must be some division of labor in the political sphere. Yet rather than accept that elections and indirect representation are the best democracy we can have, civic assemblies strive for more robust political equality through democratic lottery. Civic assemblies empower people that would otherwise never have a chance to play a meaningful role in guiding policy.
They ensure fair representation. They ensure that groups are represented in rough proportion to their actual population as opposed to how those groups turn out to vote or donate to campaigns. Through the democratic lottery, they recreate the city in one room and give everyone equal power. And, depending on the issue, different groups can be included: for example, the 2024 Deschutes County, Oregon, assembly on youth homelessness included homeless participants.
Like a union, civic assemblies are little democracies — in this case, a fairer Athenian-style democracy in miniature. And like an effective union, they can marshall collective interests towards policies that improve the common good.
Contrary to a well-known political axiom, that politics is the art of the possible, civic assemblies make what seems impossible, possible.
Democratic deliberation can break the constraints of conventional wisdom. By tapping into ordinary people’s creativity and empowering them to collectively work to solve a problem, civic assemblies are premised on the democratic principles John Dewey described: a “working faith in the possibilities of human nature” and a “Belief in the Common Man.”
Past assemblies have broken political taboos and laid the path to transformative change. In 2012-2014 and 2016, Ireland implemented civic assemblies to recommend constitutional reforms. Many were surprised when citizens of this very Catholic country recommended legalizing same sex marriage and abortion. But those recommendations led to legislators calling national referendums on these topics and voters approving each by over 60% in 2015 and 2018, respectively.
Before the assemblies, Irish politicians were afraid of proposing these “radical” changes because conventional wisdom said that they would be unpopular and thereby risky for a politician seeking to remain in their seat. These fears, coupled with a constitution that is designed to limit dynamism, can make it hard to establish policies that are in step with people’s needs. The assemblies helped the Irish overcome those obstacles.
This example shows how civic assemblies can unlock democratic imagination that elections and bureaucracy can excessively limit. Democracy, as one famous definition puts it, is institutionalized uncertainty. Change is possible in democracy, but the constraints of that change are determined by the regime’s institutions, including social and economic ones.
Osita Nwanevu describes, in his recent book The Right of the People, how the American constitutional framers were fearful of democratic constitutions that allowed too much possibility for change — especially the capitalist anathema of erasing debts. Bureaucracy and elections can be virtuous parts of democracy but, in the United States especially, these institutional forms overly constrain the dynamism of the people.
Democratic dynamism is given new life through the civic assembly process. Through democratic faith in the “Common Man,” civic assemblies can create policies that are more representative of people’s real lives and material conditions. And because of the representativeness of the deliberative process, the policy recommendations cannot be easily dismissed or delegitimized as “fringe” or “unreasonable.” The assembly’s legitimacy imbues these policies with power and a greater chance of approval by a city’s council or a state legislature.
The mix of dynamism, giving “radical” ideas new life, and power through legitimacy is a valuable cocktail for democratic socialists, whose ideas will still face uphill climbs among the media, political establishment, and local economic elites. Civic assemblies can help socialists in office, from New York City to Washington, DC, advance their ambitious agendas.
If elected DC mayor, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George will likely aim to advance the social housing policy she has championed on the Council. But passing this policy will be a challenge. Several councilors oppose or are skeptical of the policy. And others will be loath to spend political capital to support social housing, almost certainly angering real estate developers for little political gain. Finally, social housing is a slow policy — few public officials would support a policy that will not pay dividends until after their next election. Faced with such odds, a Lewis George mayoral administration might opt to expend capital on more plausible wins.
That’s where a civic assembly comes into play. Democratic socialists in office should use this empowering institutional innovation to understand what people want and build support to enact policies opposed by political and economic elites. A civic assembly that shows popular support for a social housing program could empower councilmembers in favor to vote their conscience and create the conditions needed to pressure others into supporting the policy. The developers cut large checks, but ultimately, the voters choose whether or not members stay on the Council.
At times, the assembly may not reach consensus on the policies that socialists favor. But that just means we have to continue to do more work building power and persuading people towards our policies. And when empowering working-class and racially marginalized voices, facilitating deliberation based on expertise (and with passions tempered by reasoned discussion), and reducing the outsized influence of the very wealthy in electoral democracy, we should have faith that the best policies will rise to the top.
Writing in Jacobin, Gabriel Hetland and Bhaskar Sunkara recently argued that Mamdani should implement popular assemblies for many of the same reasons noted here. They argue that well-structured popular assemblies will be important for facilitating the agenda of the Mamdani administration. They further note that the legitimacy of the assembly will determine Mamdani’s success in building power to pass democratic socialist reforms. They even cite civic assemblies as an example of popular assemblies.
However, there are two key differences between popular assemblies and civic assemblies — democratic lottery and participant pay. Without these two elements, popular assemblies are little different from New England town halls. When anyone can participate but no one is paid for their time, there will be an overrepresentation of people who can afford to spend time at a democratic exercise. While popular assemblies may make sense in some Latin American contexts, like those Hetland has studied, the American and New York context is better served by civic assemblies, which ensure the wide diversity of the city is represented.
This is crucial because, as we all agree, the legitimacy of the process will determine the persuasive power of the assembly. And while assemblies with democratic lottery and participant pay are more legitimate by design, there is also an unfortunate strategic problem with popular assemblies. Popular assemblies, as an institutional form championed in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, will be susceptible to bad faith — but potentially effective — attacks on their legitimacy. Civic assemblies, on the other hand, have begun to take hold in the United States, including the conservative city of Montrose, Colorado, giving them homegrown heft. Popular assemblies may be able to be implemented in the long term, but civic assemblies have a greater chance in the next four years.
Civic assemblies are a democratic innovation that make governance more representative, more inclusive, and more effective at finding sustainable solutions to issues bedeviled by representative democracy. A single civic assembly can move a community forward on a wicked problem. And the promise of this type of governance, made permanent as in Paris, is a transformation of democracy to its next stage, beyond representative democracy alone. If and when democratic socialists take power, the revolution must be institutionalized. Civic assemblies can be that institutionalized revolution; they can be the kind of structures that make people power permanent.
Democratic socialists in office should champion this democratic technology as they elevate the participation of the politically marginalized: the multiracial working-class majority. Candidate Zohran Mamdani proved that we socialists are listening. Mayor Mamdani has the chance to do even more. With participatory deliberative democracy as our guide and civic assemblies as our starting point, socialists can show that a more democratic society is possible. One in which the people’s equal right to co-govern is respected, where there is a collective belief in the “Common Man’s” capacity and essential role in governance, and where there is a celebration of democracy’s dynamism.
