When Citizens’ Assemblies Matter: Political Opportunity and the Irish Case
This is the first article published on this blog, and I could not think of a better place to begin than with a case that has influenced the whole domain of those who research on citizens’ assemblies: My first article examines the Irish Citizens’ Assemblies, often regarded as one of the most influential examples of deliberative democracy.
Instead of focusing only on their celebrated successes, I ask why some assemblies had a remarkable policy impact while others did not. Looking at the Irish experience through the lens of Political Process Theory, I argue that deliberative institutions are most effective when they become embedded within broader political and social processes.
I hope this marks the beginning of many conversations to come. Thank you for reading, please do not hesitate to share your views of any kind through the comment section!
Irish Citizens’ Assemblies (ICAs) are shown as role models for what other democratic innovations are meant to be on paper: a highly institutionalized structure with support from political authorities and autonomous enough to influence policymaking by including the broader public. This structure was indeed successful as the public voted in favor of ending the abortion ban in the 2018 referendum, in consistent with the Assembly’s recommendation.
Building a consensus on a divisive topic like abortion has caught the attention of scholars since this was seen as the direct influence of a citizens’ assembly on policy. Strong campaigning of civil society organizations in Ireland that created the demand from the public to change the law, at a time when abortion laws were globally contested around the world, has opened a window of political opportunity to call for an assembly. As a consequence, the unique institutional design of ICAs, which links deliberative mini-publics to the maxi-public through a referendum, has led to a successful process of policy reform.
Since 2018, however, other ICAs that have convened at the same time and the following ones (e.g. tackling climate change, responding to ageing population, fixed-term parliaments etc.) did not lead to a referendum. In this blog article I will discuss why others did not follow by example, using Political Process Theory (PPT) which I borrowed from the social movement scholarship.
In a nutshell, the theory says this: political change happens when the timing is right, the actors are willing to do what it takes, and the ideas are framed in a way persuasive enough to mobilize wider public.
In Ireland, the success of the 2018 referendum reflected an unusually open political opportunity structure. Public opinion had shifted; political elites were ready to act, and previous experience — most notably the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum — had demonstrated that change was both possible and electorally viable. Under these conditions, the Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendations did not create momentum on their own, but they helped channel and legitimize it.
The openness of this political environment was also shaped by years of sustained campaigning and by critical events that transformed abortion into a highly salient public issue. Among the most significant was the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012 after being denied an abortion during a miscarrying pregnancy, a case widely discussed in both public debate and academic literature as a turning point in Irish abortion politics. Her death intensified public scrutiny of Ireland’s abortion laws, strengthened mobilization by pro-choice movements (such as the Abortion Rights Campaign, Together for Yes and more) and helped create the moral urgency that later made political action increasingly difficult to avoid.
While political opportunity structures and issue salience explain when political systems become receptive to change, framing and legitimacy explain whether citizens’ assembly outputs can actually be politically actionable. The effectiveness of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly in 2018 did not depend solely on favorable political conditions, but also on its ability to produce a clear and publicly credible narrative that could be taken up by political actors. The framing of abortion as a matter of rights, care, and democratic voice helped transform deliberative recommendations into politically actionable claims. Where such a coherent and resonant framing is weaker — as in more technical policy domains — the translation from deliberation to policy becomes more difficult, even if institutional support exists.
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In this context, then, the Citizens’ Assembly did not operate in isolation. Rather, it entered a political landscape that had already been reshaped by years of campaigning, mobilization, and emotionally resonant events.
The success of the 2018 referendum, however, also revealed the limits of citizens’ assemblies. Assemblies that followed did not operate under the same favorable conditions. Issues such as climate policy, biodiversity loss, ageing, or drug use lacked the same combination of public salience, political urgency, and electoral pressure. It seems that unlike abortion or same-sex marriage, these were not issues that could be resolved through a clear constitutional referendum or a binary public choice. As a result, even when assemblies produced ambitious recommendations, governments faced fewer incentives to translate them into direct policy action.
Seen in this context, the Citizens’ Assembly functioned less as the origin of political change than as an institutional mechanism that translated an already intensifying social and political transformation into a legitimate democratic process.
Returning back to the starting point, Irish citizen assemblies do matter. I think they showed a novel way of doing politics by including the citizens with a strong institutional design, all which lead to the success story I have told above. However, their success cannot be explained by deliberation alone, nor can their later uneven impact simply be treated as failure.
In order to understand the factors behind the success of the 2018 referendum, political process theory offers a more convincing account because it shifts attention away from the assumption that better deliberation automatically leads to better outcomes. The 2018 referendum emerged from a rare convergence of political opportunity, sustained mobilization, public salience, and institutional design. Citizens’ assemblies did not create these conditions by themselves, but they helped transform them into legitimate democratic action. This may be the most important lesson of the Irish experience: deliberative institutions are most powerful not when they stand above politics, but when they become embedded within broader political and social processes.
FURTHER READING:
Irish Citizens’ Assemblies, abortion referendum and deliberative democracy
Courant, D. (2021). Citizens’ Assemblies for Referendums and Constitutional Reforms: Is There an “Irish Model” for Deliberative Democracy? Frontiers in Political Science, 2, 591983.
Farrell, D. M., Harris, C., & Suiter, J. (2019). Systematizing Constitutional Deliberation: The 2016–18 Citizens’ Assembly in Ireland. Irish Political Studies, 34(1), 113–123.
Suiter, J., & Saintraint, F. (2026). The Irish Citizens’ Assemblies: A Framework for Evaluating Governance Legitimacy. Journal of Sortition, 2(1), 89–109.
Political Process Theory and social movements
McAdam, D. (1999). Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Tarrow, S. (2011). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
