Assemblies Across Borders: The Democratic Transposition of Citizens’ Assemblies in Latin America

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In the process of transposing deliberative institutions, we argue that Latin America should avoid democratic colonization and instead embrace deliberative innovation. This paper delves into four cases that highlight the deliberative wave in Latin America: The Itinerant Citizens’ Assembly of Bogotá (ICA) in Colombia, the Citizens’ Jury on Anticorruption Policy in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, the Decidadanía mini-publics in Brazil, and the Lxs 400 deliberative poll in Chile. Our analysis reveals that these cases exhibit evidence of three normative attributes associated with deliberative innovation: receptivity, generativity, and sensitivity. By virtue of these attributes, deliberative democracy and democratic innovation worldwide can learn from the democratic innovations currently occurring in the region.