Location: UCL Bloomsbury campus: Cruciform Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Event Information: Citizens’ assemblies are increasingly proposed as ways of improving the functioning of democracy and policy-making. Yet their real-world record is mixed: while they almost always generate high-quality discussions internally, their connection to wider political processes is often challenging, meaning their impact can be limited. Careful consideration is therefore needed to what citizens’ assemblies are supposed to be for and how they can be embedded within political systems in order to achieve that. This seminar will explore these issues with two leading experts in deliberative democracy and Martin Wolf, one of the UK’s most respected economic commentators, whose recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, argued that greater use of citizens’ assemblies is needed.