Such moments present governments with two closely connected challenges. The first is a policy challenge: how can far-reaching reforms be designed so that they are workable, sustainable, and capable of being implemented in complex institutional environments? The second is a democratic challenge: how can societies be meaningfully involved in decisions that may reshape their institutions and collective future, generating democratic legitimacy and a sense of ownership over the direction of change?
Periods of major political transformation confront governments with an unusual combination of opportunity and responsibility. Democratic reconstruction after a period of backsliding, accession to the European Union, post-war reconstruction, or other moments of systemic change may require governments to undertake multiple large-scale reforms within a relatively short period of time. Constitutions may need to be rewritten, electoral systems reconsidered, public administrations reorganized, and healthcare, education, or social protection systems substantially reformed. These are not ordinary policymaking moments. They are periods in which countries make choices not only about individual policies and institutions, but about the kind of state—and, ultimately, the kind of society—they want to build.
Such moments present governments with two closely connected challenges. The first is a policy challenge: how can far-reaching reforms be designed so that they are workable, sustainable, and capable of being implemented in complex institutional environments? The second is a democratic challenge: how can societies be meaningfully involved in decisions that may reshape their institutions and collective future, generating democratic legitimacy and a sense of ownership over the direction of change? Large-scale reform, in other words, requires governments to think simultaneously about the substance of reform and about the democratic process through which reform is developed.
This democratic challenge is particularly important in societies where policymaking has historically been dominated by political, administrative, and professional elites and where citizens have had relatively few opportunities to participate meaningfully in public decision-making. Democratic renewal cannot be achieved solely through institutional repair or the restoration of electoral competition. Rather, renewal also requires rebuilding the relationship between citizens and public decision-making itself[1]. Moments of systemic transformation can therefore be understood not only as opportunities for institutional reform but also as opportunities for democratic development. Inviting citizens to participate in shaping major reforms can strengthen their capacity to engage with complex public questions, create a greater sense of democratic agency, and potentially contribute to rebuilding both trust in institutions and trust among citizens themselves. The question is therefore not simply what institutions and policies should be built, but how societies can be involved in building them.
Hungary today provides a particularly compelling setting in which to consider this question. For more than a decade, the country occupied a central place in political and scholarly debates about democratic backsliding. Under Viktor Orbán and his governing coalition, Hungary became one of the most frequently cited examples of contemporary democratic erosion, variously described as an illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarian regime, electoral autocracy, or hybrid regime. As the country enters a potentially transformative political period, however, a different question comes to the foreground: how should democracy be rebuilt after a prolonged period of democratic backsliding?
The scale of this task makes the question especially consequential. Democratic renewal in Hungary may require reforms across multiple domains, including constitutional arrangements, electoral institutions, public administration, the judiciary, healthcare, education, media governance, and democratic accountability. Each would constitute a significant reform on its own; taken together, they represent a project of systemic transformation. A government possessing an electoral mandate and the legal authority to enact such changes may nevertheless lack something equally important: a process through which society can develop informed judgments about the reforms, while those expected to implement them can contribute their knowledge and experience to their design.
Hungary is not unique in confronting this problem. Moldova’s path towards European Union membership requires extensive institutional and policy reforms; Ukraine’s eventual post-war reconstruction will involve fundamental decisions about institutions, public services, communities, and the relationship between citizens and the state. Different historical circumstances generate different reform agendas, but they raise a common question: how can periods of systemic transformation produce reforms that are both democratically legitimate and capable of being successfully implemented?
Deliberative Democracy and the Promise of Citizens’ Assemblies
Deliberative democracy provides one important starting point for addressing this challenge. At its core, deliberative democracy holds that democratic legitimacy should arise not only from voting and political competition but also from citizens having opportunities to consider public questions through informed discussion, reflection, and the exchange of reasons. Over the past two decades, deliberative democratic innovations—particularly deliberative mini-publics—have gained increasing prominence as mechanisms that can address democratic dissatisfaction while improving the quality and legitimacy of public decisions[2]. Their growing use across different levels of government and policy areas has been described by the OECD (2020) as a “deliberative wave.”[3]
Among the most prominent of these innovations are citizens’ assemblies: processes that typically bring together a broadly representative group of ordinary citizens selected through civic lottery. Participants receive balanced information, hear from experts and stakeholders, deliberate with one another with the support of trained facilitators, and develop recommendations on a public question. Their underlying premise is both simple and ambitious: ordinary citizens, when provided with sufficient time, information, and appropriate deliberative conditions, are capable of making informed judgments about complex public issues.[4]
The Irish Citizens’ Assembly on abortion has become the most widely cited example of this potential, demonstrating that ordinary citizens can engage constructively with highly contentious moral and political questions and generate recommendations capable of influencing major policy change.[5] For countries undergoing democratic renewal, the attraction of such processes extends further. Citizens’ assemblies can open policymaking to people who would otherwise rarely participate, introduce perspectives that are poorly represented through conventional consultation, and create spaces in which citizens encounter and reason with people whose experiences and views differ from their own. Used repeatedly during periods of democratic reconstruction at all levels of governance, deliberative processes may therefore contribute not only to particular policy decisions but also to the development of a more participatory democratic culture.
Yet the accumulated experience of deliberative democracy also points to an important qualification. A well-designed deliberative process does not by itself ensure political uptake, institutional integration, or successful implementation. Accordingly, increasing attention is being devoted not only to the internal quality of deliberative processes but also to their relationship with political institutions, administrative systems, organized interests, and the wider deliberative system in which they operate. This becomes especially important when deliberation is expected to contribute not to a relatively bounded policy question but to large-scale institutional reform.
Healthcare reform, education reform, electoral reform, public-administration reform, and constitution-building present particularly demanding cases. Such reforms affect citizens broadly, making democratic participation indispensable. But they are also embedded in complex institutional systems and depend heavily on the knowledge, behaviour, and cooperation of people working within those systems. Teachers, doctors, nurses, civil servants, local officials, judges, administrators, and other professionals possess forms of practical and experiential knowledge that may be difficult to capture fully through conventional expert input or stakeholder consultation alone. This paper therefore asks whether deliberative democracy needs an additional institutional form for precisely these kinds of reforms. How can citizen deliberation be combined with meaningful deliberation among the professional communities whose knowledge and cooperation are essential to implementation, without allowing expertise or organized interests to displace democratic judgment?
I propose a co-deliberative model as one possible answer. The model retains a citizens’ assembly composed through civic lottery but complements it with a separate deliberative track drawn from the professional communities most directly involved in implementing the reform. Rather than relying only on professional representatives or organizational leaders, this second track seeks to capture the diversity of experience and knowledge within professional communities themselves. The two groups initially deliberate separately before entering a structured process of exchange and joint deliberation.
The purpose is not to replace citizens’ assemblies, nor to give professionals a privileged role in democratic decision-making. It is to explore whether, for particularly complex and implementation-intensive reforms, democratic and implementation considerations can be incorporated into the reform process from the outset. In doing so, the model seeks to connect the paper’s two central challenges: building democratic legitimacy by involving citizens in shaping their collective future, while improving the conditions for successful implementation by giving those who must translate reform into practice a meaningful role in its development.
Hungary provides the immediate context for this argument, but the question extends far beyond it. As countries confront democratic reconstruction, European integration, post-war rebuilding, climate transition, and other forms of systemic transformation, the challenge is increasingly not simply whether citizens should participate in major reforms. It is how participation should be designed when democratic legitimacy and successful implementation must be pursued together.
The Hungarian Challenge: Democratic Renewal and Large-Scale Reform
Such a task would be formidable even in democracies with strong traditions of citizen participation, high levels of institutional trust, and well-developed mechanisms for social dialogue. Hungary enters this moment from a different starting point. Although democratic institutions were established following the regime change of 1989-1990, the transition itself was largely negotiated among political and intellectual elites.[6] Subsequent decades brought important democratic developments, yet opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate meaningfully in public decision-making remained limited. With few exceptions, policymaking continued to operate primarily through representative institutions, party competition, and occasional consultations with organized stakeholders. As a result, many citizens came to perceive politics as something that happens to them rather than something they actively shape.[7]
The parliamentary elections of 2026 have fundamentally altered this context. Following more than a decade of democratic backsliding, a new government under the Tisza party, bringing together a broad coalition of interests under a single parrty banner, has secured a constitutional supermajority and possesses both the political authority and legislative capacity to undertake far-reaching institutional reforms. The election campaign was characterized not only by promises to restore democratic standards and the rule of law, but also by commitments to rebuild public services, strengthen state capacity, and create a more participatory relationship between citizens and government.
This creates a rare historical moment. The new Hungarian government, led by Peter Magyar, possesses both the political mandate and the institutional capacity to pursue large-scale democratic and policy renewal simultaneously. Yet the existence of such a mandate does not resolve the fundamental question of how renewal should occur. A constitutional majority may provide the legal authority to enact sweeping reforms, but it does not automatically generate the broader societal legitimacy, collective ownership, and long-term consensus necessary for those reforms to endure. Nor does it guarantee support from the professionals, public servants, sectoral actors, and institutional stakeholders who will ultimately be responsible for implementing change.
The Implementation Challenge of Large-Scale Reform
Successful policy reforms depend not only on public support but also on the cooperation of those actors responsible for translating policy decisions into practice.[8] Professionals, public servants, sectoral experts, organized interests, and political elites often possess critical knowledge, institutional resources, and implementation capacity. Without their engagement, even well-designed reforms may struggle to achieve meaningful impact.
Yet these objectives are often difficult to reconcile. Virtually all significant reforms create winners and losers. Healthcare reforms affect medical professionals, patients, insurers, and public budgets. Educational reforms affect teachers, administrators, parents, and students. Electoral reforms inevitably alter political incentives and redistribute power. Local government reforms raise questions about representation, efficiency, and territorial identity. Constitutional reforms touch upon fundamental issues of authority, rights, sovereignty, and collective identity. As a result, reforms frequently encounter resistance from actors who benefit from existing arrangements or who fear the uncertainty associated with change.
Moreover, reform processes in most democratic systems continue to rely on relatively narrow forms of consultation.[9] Governments may engage with experts, stakeholder organizations, professional associations, trade unions, and employer groups through various consultative mechanisms. These processes serve important functions, yet they are typically conducted in parallel rather than in dialogue with one another[10]. Expert consultations, stakeholder negotiations, and public consultations often proceed as separate exercises, producing fragmented rather than integrated forms of participation.
Under these conditions, reforms may struggle to generate the broad societal and professional ownership necessary for successful implementation. The Hungarian experience illustrates this challenge particularly well.
The 2006–08 healthcare reform was arguably the most ambitious attempt to restructure Hungary’s post-socialist health system. The back then socialist–liberal government sought to address chronic underfunding, inefficiency, and poor service quality through a package of reforms that included modest co-payments for doctor visits and hospital stays, hospital restructuring, and—most controversially—the introduction of a multi-payer health insurance system with private insurers competing to manage publicly financed insurance funds. The government argued that competition would improve quality and efficiency while preserving universal coverage.
The reform, however, never secured broad societal or professional legitimacy.[11] Opposition came not only from patients but also from much of the medical profession, healthcare trade unions, and professional organizations, many of which opposed both the introduction of private insurers and the perceived marketisation of healthcare. Consultation remained largely confined to conventional negotiations among government actors and organised interests. These consultations were widely criticised as rushed, opaque and highly conflictual, while the broader public had little meaningful opportunity to engage with the rationale or trade-offs underlying the reform. As a result, rather than building a shared reform coalition, the process reinforced distrust among key actors.
The Limits of Existing Deliberative Models in Large-Scale Reforms
The Hungarian experience illustrates why these two dimensions cannot easily be separated. The failure of the 2006–08 healthcare reform was not simply the result of insufficient public consultation, nor can it be reduced to professional resistance alone. Rather, it illustrates some of the difficulties that arise when a far-reaching reform is developed without either broad societal engagement or meaningful ownership among those working within the system being transformed. The case therefore provides a useful starting point for asking what kind of institutional process might bring these different sources of knowledge and legitimacy into a common reform process.
Over the past two decades, deliberative democracy has increasingly been proposed as a response to precisely this problem. Citizens’ assemblies, in particular, seek to broaden participation beyond organized stakeholders by enabling ordinary citizens to deliberate on complex public questions.[12] They therefore appear, at first sight, to offer a promising solution to one of the central weaknesses of conventional policymaking.
The Irish case has inspired policymakers, practitioners, and scholars around the world. It has become a powerful illustration of the democratic, epistemic, and legitimacy-enhancing benefits of deliberative mini-publics. Yet it remains noteworthy precisely because examples of comparable political impact remain relatively rare. While deliberative democracy has expanded considerably over the past two decades, relatively few citizens’ assemblies have led to major systemic reforms or enduring institutional transformations.
In fact, the record of deliberative and participatory processes shows that high-quality citizen participation is only one element in a successful reform process. Different cases reveal different points at which the connection between participation and the wider political system can break down.
Iceland’s constitutional process remains one of the most ambitious attempts to combine citizen participation with constitutional renewal.[13] Widely celebrated for its innovative and participatory character, the process nevertheless struggled to secure sufficient political support among key institutional actors. Despite strong public backing and a successful referendum, the proposed constitution was never fully implemented.[14]
Chile’s first constitutional process also represented an unprecedented effort to draft a new constitution through highly participatory means. Yet the resulting draft was rejected in a national referendum, while the subsequent constitutional process also failed to produce a constitution that could secure popular approval.[15] Even in Ireland, often regarded as the field’s most successful case, not all deliberative recommendations translated into political change.
These cases should not be interpreted as evidence against citizen participation or deliberative democracy. On the contrary, they represent some of the most ambitious democratic innovations attempted in recent decades and have generated significant democratic benefits regardless of their ultimate policy outcomes. They demonstrate that citizens are capable of deliberating on highly complex issues, that public participation can enrich policymaking, and that deliberative institutions can contribute to political learning and democratic legitimacy.[16]
Rather than invalidating the deliberative project, these experiences highlight the conditions under which deliberative processes succeed or struggle to achieve broader political impact. They draw attention to questions that extend beyond the internal quality of deliberation itself. How are deliberative outputs received by political institutions? How do elected representatives, public administrations, professional groups, and organized interests respond to recommendations generated by citizens? And how can deliberative processes secure not only public support but also the cooperation of those actors responsible for translating decisions into practice?
From Citizen Deliberation to Reform Architecture
The lessons emerging from these cases suggest that one of the central challenges facing deliberative democracy today is not only how deliberative institutions interact with the political system but also how citizen-generated legitimacy can be connected to the institutional and professional realities and capacities necessary for implementation.
While citizens’ assemblies are exceptionally well suited to generating informed citizen judgment and strengthening broad democratic legitimacy, they may be less well equipped to address the implementation dilemmas that accompany far-reaching structural reforms. As reforms become more complex, more technical, and more dependent on the cooperation of diverse institutional actors, questions of implementation, professional acceptance, and institutional ownership become increasingly salient. Consequently, many reforms face a dual problem. Citizens often feel excluded from decisions that affect their lives, while affected professionals and stakeholders frequently feel insufficient ownership over reforms they are expected to implement.[17] Governments must therefore simultaneously generate informed public judgment, secure implementation capacity, and maintain political momentum for change.
What institutional models are capable of bridging these needs? How can societies design reform processes that generate informed citizen judgment while simultaneously securing the engagement of those actors responsible for implementing change? How can democratic renewal avoid becoming either a purely technocratic project dominated by experts or a purely participatory exercise disconnected from institutional realities?
These questions become particularly important during periods of major public sector reform, such as healthcare, education, social protection, public administration, or electoral reform. Such reforms require balancing citizens’ perspectives with the knowledge and experience of the professional communities responsible for putting reforms into practice. They therefore call for institutions capable of bringing these different forms of knowledge into dialogue while maintaining broad public legitimacy.
Towards a Co-deliberative Model
The co-deliberative model introduced at the outset may offer one possible response to this institutional gap. It begins from the premise that deliberative mechanisms designed to support large-scale reforms may benefit from institutional arrangements capable of bringing different forms of knowledge and experience into constructive dialogue. Its central question is whether citizens and the professional communities involved in implementing reform can both be given meaningful opportunities to contribute to its formulation, thereby strengthening democratic legitimacy while improving the conditions for successful implementation.
In this sense, the co-deliberative model is not simply a proposal for improving the learning phase of the citizens’ assembly model. Nor is it intended to replace citizens’ assemblies or give professionals a privileged role in democratic decision-making. Rather, it asks whether reforms characterised by high institutional complexity and significant implementation challenges might benefit from a deliberative architecture that gives both citizens and implementing professionals meaningful opportunities to reason about reform. A reform that enjoys widespread public support but lacks the cooperation of those responsible for implementation may struggle to achieve its intended effects. Conversely, a technically sophisticated reform supported by professional communities but lacking democratic legitimacy may struggle to secure public acceptance and political durability.
The model builds on a simple observation: professional knowledge relevant to implementation is dispersed, situated, and heterogeneous. How the learning phase of a citizens’ assembly is designed—what information is provided, by whom, and in what form—is already a central methodological and legitimacy question in deliberative practice. It is not only desirable but a core principle of good deliberative design that citizens are exposed to a plurality of perspectives, including those of relevant experts and stakeholder groups.[18] Yet, particularly in large-scale institutional reforms, it may be a mistake to assume that a professional community can be adequately represented through a limited number of invited experts or organisational representatives.
Professional communities are rarely internally homogeneous. Hospital directors, senior physicians, nurses, general practitioners, paramedics, hospital administrators, researchers, medical educators, and other professionals, for example, experience the same healthcare system from markedly different positions, possess different forms of practical knowledge, and may identify different priorities or implementation challenges. The same applies to education, public administration, social protection, and other complex institutional systems. Implementation knowledge cannot therefore be assumed to reside exclusively with recognised experts, organisational leaders, or formal representatives.
Conventional expert and stakeholder involvement tends, understandably, to select participants precisely because they are recognised experts, organisational representatives, professional leaders, or actors already possessing access to policymakers. This can, however, reproduce within the professional sphere some of the same representational problems that citizens’ assemblies were designed to address in the wider public sphere. Professional associations, trade unions, and stakeholder organisations perform indispensable representative functions, but they cannot necessarily capture the diversity of perspectives and experiences that exists within professional communities themselves.
Moreover, hearing selected professionals provide evidence to a citizens’ assembly is not equivalent to enabling professionals themselves to deliberate. The former provides essential input into citizen deliberation; the latter creates an opportunity for members of professional communities to encounter perspectives different from their own, examine trade-offs, reconsider assumptions, and develop more considered judgments about the practical implications of reform. Professional communities themselves may have few opportunities to engage in this kind of structured discussion across occupational, organisational, and hierarchical boundaries.
There is also a transparency dimension to this argument. Professional and organised interests frequently seek to influence major reforms, and governments have legitimate reasons to consult those possessing relevant knowledge and experience. The question is therefore not whether professional influence should exist, but how it should be organised. Institutionalising professional deliberation could make at least part of this engagement more visible, structured, and open to scrutiny, rather than leaving professional influence predominantly to established organisational channels, informal access, or closed negotiations.
The ambition, therefore, is not simply to introduce more expertise into a citizens’ assembly, but to democratise professional involvement itself. Just as civic lottery seeks to broaden participation beyond citizens who are already politically organised, vocal, or connected to decision-makers, a co-deliberative approach could broaden professional participation beyond those who conventionally speak on behalf of their sector. This would complement rather than replace professional associations, trade unions, and other stakeholder organisations whose representative functions remain important.
This does not imply that every citizens’ assembly requires a parallel professional track. Expert and stakeholder input remains an essential part of the learning phase of any well-designed deliberative process and may be entirely sufficient for many policy questions, including highly complex or morally contentious ones. The case for a separate professional deliberative track arises more specifically where the object of deliberation is the reform of an institutional system whose implementation depends on dispersed knowledge, adaptation, and cooperation across the professional communities operating within it. The distinction is therefore not primarily one of complexity or political salience, but of implementation dependence: whether professionals are principally contributing knowledge to inform a public decision, or whether they will themselves collectively play a substantial role in translating that decision into institutional practice.
This distinction also helps clarify why citizen deliberation remains indispensable in such reforms. Professional communities possess knowledge about how institutions operate, where implementation constraints lie, and how proposed changes may work in practice. But this knowledge does not give them a privileged claim to determine the purposes those institutions should serve or the societal values and priorities that should guide reform. Healthcare systems do not belong to healthcare professionals, just as education systems do not belong to teachers or public administrations to civil servants. Large-scale institutional reforms typically involve choices about public priorities, distribution, rights, values, and acceptable trade-offs that require democratic judgment. Citizen and professional deliberation therefore perform different but potentially complementary functions.
The co-deliberative model therefore builds on both participatory and deliberative democratic traditions. It preserves core deliberative principles of informed discussion, random selection, and reason-giving, while extending structured deliberation to professional communities whose knowledge and cooperation may be particularly important for successful implementation. At its most basic, the co-deliberative model consequently envisages two complementary deliberative tracks. One consists of a randomly selected group of citizens reflecting the diversity of society. The second brings together a diverse group drawn from the professional communities most directly involved in implementing the reform. Each deliberates independently before entering a structured phase of exchange and joint deliberation. The purpose of the professional track is not to privilege expertise over citizenship, but to incorporate forms of experiential and implementation knowledge that may be difficult to capture through conventional consultation alone.
The proposal outlined here should therefore be understood as an invitation to explore this institutional possibility rather than as a fully specified blueprint. Its practical application would necessarily raise important questions that require further consideration. Its central proposition is deliberately modest: where major reforms depend simultaneously on broad democratic legitimacy and on the dispersed knowledge and cooperation of complex professional communities, creating deliberative spaces for both—and subsequently bringing them into structured dialogue—may offer something that neither conventional stakeholder consultation nor citizen deliberation alone can provide.
Hungary—and Beyond
Hungary’s democratic deterioration has made it one of the most widely discussed examples of democratic backsliding in recent decades.[19] Ironically, the very scale of the reconstruction that now lies ahead may also create an opportunity for democratic innovation. Countries with long-established democratic traditions have often struggled to reform fundamental public institutions because existing structures, routines, and political equilibria are difficult to change. Hungary begins from a different position. Much of its institutional architecture requires reconsideration anyway. Rather than viewing this as merely a burden, it may also be understood as a rare opportunity to rethink not only what institutions are rebuilt but how they are rebuilt and the democratic purposes they are intended to serve.
If democratic renewal is understood as a process rather than a single political event, then the design of reform processes becomes almost as important as the reforms themselves. This is particularly true where governments seek not only to restore democratic institutions but also to rebuild trust, strengthen public ownership, and create reforms capable of enduring beyond a single electoral cycle.
Democratic institutions are never neutral procedural arrangements. They embody particular understandings of how citizens relate to one another, how public authority should be exercised, and what kind of political community a society aspires to become. Rebuilding democratic institutions is therefore not only a question of institutional design but also of democratic purpose. It is to cultivate a political culture in which citizens recover a genuine sense of democratic agency, experiencing themselves as active participants in collective self-government rather than passive recipients of political decisions. At the same time, professionals see themselves as partners in democratic problem-solving rather than merely implementers of political decisions, and disagreement becomes an opportunity for shared learning rather than polarization.
Hungary may be particularly well positioned to seize this opportunity. The scale of the reconstruction ahead creates both considerable risks and an unusual opportunity for democratic experimentation. Many established democracies have struggled to reconcile ambitious reform with broad societal legitimacy. If Hungary succeeds in developing new institutional models capable of bridging this divide, it may contribute not only to its own democratic renewal but also to the next generation of democratic innovation internationally.
Hungary became internationally known as one of the paradigmatic cases of democratic backsliding. It would therefore carry considerable symbolic significance if Hungary were also to become one of the first countries to demonstrate how democratic renewal can be pursued through genuinely participatory institutional innovation. If successful, the country’s experience would suggest that democratic reconstruction is not simply about restoring previous institutions but about designing better democratic ones.
[1] Dryzek, John S., André Bächtiger, Simone Chambers, Joshua Cohen, James N. Druckman, Andrea Felicetti, James Fishkin, et al. 2019. “The Crisis of Democracy and the Science of Deliberation.” Science 363 (6432): 1144-46.
[2] Fishkin, James S. 2018. Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics through Public Deliberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[3] OECD. 2020. Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. Paris: OECD Publishing.
[4] Curato, Nicole, John S. Dryzek, Selen A. Ercan, Carolyn M. Hendriks, and Simon Niemeyer. 2017. “Twelve Key Findings in Deliberative Democracy Research.” Daedalus 146 (3): 28–38.
[5] Farrell, David M., Jane Suiter, and Clodagh Harris. 2019. “Systematizing Constitutional Deliberation: The 2016–18 Citizens’ Assembly in Ireland.” Irish Political Studies 34 (1): 113–23.
[6] Bozóki, András. 2002. The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy. Budapest: Central European University Press.
[7] Simon, János. 2014. “Non-Participative Political Culture in Hungary: Why Are the Participatory Pillars of Democratic Political Culture Weak in Hungary?” Central European Papers 2 (2): 167–88.
[8] World Bank. 2017. World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. Washington, DC: World Bank.
[9] Fung, Archon. 2006. “Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance.” Public Administration Review 66 (Special Issue): 66–75.
[10] Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis Thompson, and Mark Warren. 2012. “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy.” In Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, edited by John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[11] Raisio, Harri. 2009. “Deliberating Together: Public Deliberation in the Context of the Hungarian Health Insurance Reform.” Society and Economy 31 (2): 253–69.
[12] Smith, Graham. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[13] Landemore, Hélène. 2020. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
[14] Bergmann, Eiríkur. 2016. “Constitutional Deliberation and the 2011 Constitutional Reform in Iceland.” In Constitutional Deliberative Democracy in Europe, edited by Min Reuchamps, Jane Suiter, and Stephen Elstub, 15–32. Colchester: ECPR Press.
[15] Couso, Javier. 2024. “Chile’s Failed Attempt to Get a New Constitution: Or the Challenges of Democratic Constitution Making in a Polarized Era.” Southwestern Journal of International Law 30 (1): 1–28.
[16] Curato, Nicole, John S. Dryzek, Selen A. Ercan, Carolyn M. Hendriks, and Simon Niemeyer. 2017. “Twelve Key Findings in Deliberative Democracy Research.” Daedalus 146 (3): 28–38.
[17] World Bank. 2017. World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. Washington, DC: World Bank
[18] OECD. 2020. Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. Paris: OECD Publishing.
[19] Nord, Marina, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Tiago Fernandes, Ana Good God, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2025. Democracy Report 2025: 25 Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped? University of Gothenburg: V-Dem Institute
