We consider representative deliberative processes as particularly powerful instruments in the democratic toolkit. High-quality deliberative processes have a combination of properties that make them well-suited to complex decisions where it is critical that decisions are made in the public interest:

• They are representative, through sortition — every member of a population has an equal likelihood of being selected; the decision-making body truly looks and feels like the population they are making decisions for.
• Sortition removes the perverse incentives of electoral politics: participants have no donors, no re-election concerns, no partisan base to perform for.
• They are informed: participants are given time to engage deeply with the issue, often compensated and supported by briefing materials, expert testimony, and stakeholder input.
• They are deliberative: structure and facilitation help participants move beyond initial reactions to surface deeper values, find common ground even on polarized issues, and can provide substantive decisions.
• These properties together help make them more robust to manipulation than most democratic alternatives — and more legitimate than most expert-driven ones.
• They function as a kind of modular decision-making infrastructure — composable, deployable at many different scales, and across any jurisdiction.
• This jurisdictional flexibility also means they can even be used by corporations and other organizations to delegate governance decisions to a democratic microcosm, as a complement to CEO, board, or shareholder decision-making (we’ve supported organizations like Meta and Open AI in piloting this).

Deliberative processes are uniquely valuable for issues where existing power holders, including politicians and CEO’s, should not be the decision-makers because there are dangerous conflicts of interest. This is especially critical for decisions which could be used to overcome checks on their power, or where they are disincentivized from taking necessary collective action.

This makes them particularly valuable in contexts like AI governance and alignment where decisions involve inevitable normative trade-offs, where affected publics are large and diverse, and where the stakes of getting it wrong are high.

The promise of deliberative processes also outpaces current practice. Our Democratic Capabilities Gap Map is an effort to take stock of exactly that gap, mapping the tools, research, and infrastructure that would need to exist for deliberative processes to live up to their potential. We see this as particularly urgent given the scale of transformational change that we expect will result from AI advances.

See Reimaging Democracy for AI for more context.

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