Fostering Citizen Participation Top-Down

Political theorists speak of the need to institutionalize deliberative democratic processes but there is little evidence of institutionalization, although there have been many successful experiments with robust public participation methods. What has been missing to date is the political will to convert those experiments to routine practice supported by legislation. This paper documents a novel Law enacted in Tuscany in December 2007. It is a piece of legislation with the potential to provide a model for societies that are considered to be democratic. Tuscan Law no. 69 demonstrates how representative government and mini-publics might do more than co-exist.