Populism wins not by delivering better policy but by providing what liberal democracies have stopped offering: identity, belonging, meaning, recognition. This isn't irrational—it reflects our evolved nature. Humans are wired for face-to-face cooperation; physical co-presence triggers oxytocin release and neural synchronization essential for trust and collective action. Digital spaces cannot replicate this, and now face an authentication crisis as AI floods online discourse with synthetic participation. The democratic response is a politics of presence: physical citizens' assemblies where real humans gather in real time to deliberate on real questions. These spaces generate both considered judgment and genuine community—the same neurobiological bonding that populist rallies exploit, but channeled toward cooperative rather than antagonistic ends. Assemblies are not nostalgic attempts to restore lost community but modern institutions for autonomous individuals who nonetheless need belonging. The body politic, reassembled.

Something puzzling is happening in democracies around the world. Populist leaders who fail to deliver on their promises—who preside over economic decline, institutional erosion, and broken commitments—nonetheless retain substantial political support. This pattern defies the conventional wisdom that voters evaluate incumbents based on performance. If citizens are rational actors who reward delivery and punish failure, populism should be self-limiting: once in power, populists would be held accountable for their results. Yet the evidence tells a different story.

Consider the empirical record. Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch's landmark 2023 study in the American Economic Review analyzed 51 populist leaders across 60 countries from 1900 to 2020. Their findings are striking: after fifteen years, GDP per capita is approximately ten percent lower under populist governments compared to non-populist counterfactuals. Populist rule is consistently associated with economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and institutional erosion. Yet this economic damage does not automatically translate into electoral defeat.

The case studies are equally instructive. Turkey's Erdoğan won re-election in 2023 amid inflation exceeding eighty percent. Mexico's López Obrador maintained extraordinary popularity despite a weak economic record, and his hand-picked successor won by a record margin. Hungary's Viktor Orbán has retained power for over a decade despite persistent corruption allegations. Silvio Berlusconi governed Italy on and off for two decades despite numerous scandals. In Venezuela, the Chávez-Maduro regime transformed a wealthy oil exporter into an economic disaster while maintaining significant support, at least initially.

Research on voter loyalty confirms this persistence. Rooduijn, van der Brug, and de Lange, writing in Government and Opposition in 2016, found that populist voters are as loyal as mainstream party voters. Contemporary populist parties have proven remarkably adept at establishing themselves as permanent outsiders despite being fully integrated into political systems.

This persistence demands explanation. If populism regularly fails to deliver material benefits—and often actively harms its supporters economically—why does support endure? The answer lies in recognizing that populism succeeds through a fundamentally different mechanism than conventional politics assumes.

The conventional model of electoral accountability treats voting as a mechanism for rewarding or punishing performance. Citizens evaluate what governments deliver—economic growth, public services, culture, security—and vote accordingly. This model is elegant but incomplete. It cannot explain why voters would continue supporting leaders whose policies demonstrably harm them.

A growing body of research suggests we need to distinguish between inputs and outputs in political support. Outputs are the tangible deliverables of governance: policy implementation, economic performance, public goods provision. Inputs are something different: the psychological and social goods that political participation itself provides, including identity, belonging, meaning, recognition, and community.

Daniel Brieba, writing in the Political Quarterly in 2025, argues that voters make choices based on social identities and support candidates with whom they identify, often irrespective of policy positions or outcomes. This is not irrationality but a different kind of rationality—one oriented toward expressive rather than instrumental goals.

The concept of "nostalgic deprivation" is particularly illuminating. Research by Gest, Reny, and Ferwerda, surveying 20,000 individuals across 19 European countries, found that voters support populists because they believe people like them had it better in the past. This is not primarily about economic decline but about status, recognition, and social position.

Rico, Guinjoan, and Anduiza, in their 2020 review in Current Opinion in Psychology, demonstrate how populist movements tap into deep psychological needs for belonging and status. Social identity theory suggests that identity threat caused by inter-group comparison is a crucial variable explaining attraction to populist ideas. Populism offers not just policies but a place in a meaningful collective—an "us" defined against a "them" that provides clarity, purpose, and belonging.

Salmela and von Scheve's work on the emotional roots of populism reinforces this picture. Shame, fear, and resentment—emotions tied to perceived loss of status and recognition—drive populist support more powerfully than calculations of material interest. Populist movements transform these negative emotions into positive collective identity.

If this analysis is correct, the implications for democratic response are profound. Competing with populism on outputs alone—better policy, stronger economic performance—may be necessary but is unlikely to be sufficient. Liberal democracy must also provide inputs: identity, belonging, meaning, and recognition.

It would be a mistake to conclude that liberal democracy is inherently incapable of generating belonging and meaning. This is historically inaccurate. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, democratic participation was embedded in rich organizational ecosystems that provided exactly what populism now offers—and more.

Consider the mass parties that dominated democratic politics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), British Labour, Christian Democratic parties across Europe—these were not merely electoral machines but total social ecosystems. They operated youth wings and women's organizations, sports clubs and cultural associations. They published newspapers and organized reading circles, educational associations and mutual aid societies. They provided funeral societies and cooperative housing, summer camps and festivals and parades. To be a Social Democrat or a Christian Democrat was not merely to vote a certain way but to inhabit a way of life.

Democratic movements have similarly demonstrated the capacity to generate profound meaning and belonging. The American civil rights movement, Polish Solidarity, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the Indian independence movement—these created communities of extraordinary depth and purpose. Participation was transformative.

What happened to these organizational ecosystems? The story is not simply one of decline. The same decades that saw the hollowing out of mass parties also witnessed genuine liberation: expanded rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people; rising education levels enabling independent judgment; greater individual autonomy and freedom from conformist social pressure; the pluralization of lifestyles and identities. The old forms of belonging came bundled with constraints that few would wish to restore. You were a Social Democrat because your neighborhood, workplace, and family were—not necessarily because you chose it freely. These communities could be patriarchal, conformist, and coercive.

Yet something was lost alongside these gains. Peter Mair's Ruling the Void documents how parties became professionalized and cartel-like, floating above civil society rather than embedded within it. The infrastructure for collective meaning-making atrophied without replacement. Modern individuals are freer but also more atomized, more educated but often lonelier, liberated from coercive community but hungry for authentic connection. Chantal Mouffe has argued that liberal democracy compounded this by trying to eliminate passion and antagonism from politics in favor of technocratic consensus—draining politics of emotional meaning and leaving a vacuum that populism eagerly filled.

The challenge, then, is not to recreate the old mass parties—with their conformism and inherited identities—but to build new forms of democratic belonging compatible with modern pluralism and individual autonomy. Citizens' assemblies may be particularly suited to this task: participation is chosen rather than inherited, random selection brings together strangers rather than tribal in-groups, engagement is time-limited rather than total, and deliberation respects individual judgment while creating genuine community. The task is not nostalgic restoration but forward-looking reinvention.

Before turning to institutional design, we must understand why physical assembly specifically—rather than any form of collective participation—is essential. The answer lies in our evolutionary heritage and the neurobiology of human sociality. We are not merely social by preference but social by biological design, and our brains require physical co-presence to function as social organs.

Robin Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis," developed through decades of comparative research, provides the evolutionary foundation. Primates evolved unusually large brains—specifically enlarged neocortices—to manage the complexity of social life. There is a quantitative relationship between neocortex size and social group size across primate species: the larger the brain, the larger and more complex the social groups the species can sustain. Extrapolating from this relationship to human brain size yields the now-famous "Dunbar's number" of approximately 150—the cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships a human can maintain.

Crucially, this research suggests that human intelligence is fundamentally social intelligence. We did not evolve large brains primarily to solve ecological problems like finding food or making tools. We evolved them to navigate the challenges of living in complex cooperative groups: forming alliances, tracking relationships, managing reputations, coordinating collective action. Our cognitive architecture is optimized for face-to-face social coordination.

Rutger Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History synthesizes evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and psychology to argue that this social nature is fundamentally cooperative rather than competitive. Drawing on the philosophical debate between Rousseau (humans are naturally good) and Hobbes (humans are naturally violent), Bregman marshals evidence that the Rousseauian view is closer to the truth. Humans are not self-interested individuals held in check by civilization but cooperative beings whose natural sociality is often suppressed rather than enabled by modern social arrangements.

This has profound implications. If cynical views of human nature become self-fulfilling prophecies—if institutions designed on the assumption that people are lazy or selfish bring out those behaviors—then institutions designed on assumptions of human cooperativeness might bring out our better natures. Deliberative processes , designed to trust participants with genuine responsibility and meaningful deliberation, may succeed precisely because they treat citizens as the cooperative beings we evolved to be.

The neurobiological mechanisms underlying human sociality have been extensively documented. Neurobiologist Nicole Strüber's recent work Unser soziales Gehirn (Our Social Brain) synthesizes research on the biochemistry of togetherness. Physical co-presence triggers the release of oxytocin and other neurotransmitters that promote relaxation, empathy, trust, and openness to change. Strüber emphasizes a key concept: synchronization. When humans interact face-to-face, their brains literally synchronize—neural oscillations align, autonomic responses coordinate, even heartbeats can entrain. This synchronization does not happen—or happens far less effectively—through digital mediation.

Research on oxytocin and interpersonal coordination confirms this picture. Studies using EEG hyperscanning—simultaneously recording brain activity from interacting individuals—show that synchronous social interactions evoke heightened oxytocin release in both partners, which in turn enhances neural synchrony in regions involved in social cognition and emotion processing. Oxytocin administration increases interpersonal coordination, and synchronization promotes cooperation, trust, and affiliation in a reinforcing cycle.

The implications are striking. The emotional bonds and collective identity that populism generates through rallies and spectacles are not arbitrary—they tap into evolved mechanisms for group bonding. But these same mechanisms can be engaged by democratic participation, if that participation involves physical co-presence. WhatsApp messages do not release oxytocin the way face-to-face conversation does. Video conferences do not produce neural synchronization the way sitting together in a room does.

Strüber's diagnosis is pointed: "We spend ever less time in genuine togetherness—WhatsApp messages instead of spontaneous visits, video conferences instead of in-person meetings, efficiency-driven family life, medical appointments run by stopwatch. Our brain needs this exchange, however. We synchronize, and neurotransmitters like oxytocin are released."

Dunbar's research confirms that digital communication has not expanded our social capacities. Despite the theoretical possibility of maintaining unlimited online connections, actual social network sizes remain constrained by the same cognitive limits that applied before the internet. The layered structure of human social networks—with an innermost circle of about 5 close relationships, then 15, then 50, then 150—appears in both traditional societies and online networks. The glass ceiling on genuine social connection remains where it always was, because it reflects the architecture of the social brain, not the limitations of communication technology.

An obvious response to the challenge of scale is digital technology. If the problem is connecting citizens to democratic participation, the internet would seem to offer unlimited potential. Online deliberation platforms, social media engagement, AI-facilitated discussion—surely these tools can rebuild democratic community?

The numbers are seductive. As of 2024, 5.41 billion people use social media worldwide—63.9 percent of the global population. Average daily usage exceeds two hours. If even a fraction of this engagement could be channeled toward democratic deliberation, the scale would dwarf anything achievable through physical assemblies.

Yet digital deliberation faces two insurmountable problems. The first, just discussed, is neurobiological: online interaction cannot generate the synchronization, oxytocin release, and neural coordination that physical presence and interaction produces. Digital democracy might transmit preferences but cannot build community in the neurobiologically meaningful sense.

The situation is actually worse than mere absence of bonding mechanisms. Social media platforms are engineered to activate an entirely different neurochemical profile—one optimized for engagement rather than connection. Research demonstrates that social media exploits the brain's dopamine reward system in ways analogous to slot machines and addictive substances: unpredictable rewards (likes, comments, notifications) trigger dopamine surges that create compulsive use patterns. As psychiatrist Anna Lembke explains, users enter a "dopamine deficit state" between sessions, experiencing reduced pleasure from ordinary activities and driving them back to the platform. Simultaneously, the constant stress of social comparison and fear of missing out elevates cortisol levels, which paradoxically amplifies dopamine sensitivity—creating addiction-stress cycles that platforms profit from but users suffer through. A 2024 neurobiological meta-analysis found that excessive social media use is associated with decreased serotonergic activity and increased cortisol release, "ultimately weakening emotional resilience and cognitive control."

More troubling still, these engagement-maximizing algorithms actively promote polarization. A November 2025 study published in Science found that exposure to antidemocratic and hostile partisan content shifted users' feelings toward the opposing party by two points on a 100-point scale—an effect normally observed over three years—demonstrating that algorithms causally alter affective polarization. Research on Twitter showed that moral-emotional language and outgroup derogation correlate with greater engagement.

Where physical co-presence releases oxytocin and promotes trust, social media triggers dopamine spikes and cortisol stress. Where face-to-face deliberation builds understanding across difference, algorithmic feeds amplify hostility toward outgroups. The neurobiological infrastructure of digital platforms is not merely inadequate for democratic community—it is actively corrosive of it.

The second problem is the authentication crisis which is not a technical limitation to be overcome but a structural feature that will only worsen as artificial intelligence advances.

The problem operates at multiple levels. First, there is simple attestation failure: in any online forum, how do we know that a contribution comes from a real human being rather than a bot or AI system? Second, even if we could verify human initiation, there is delegation ambiguity: did the human meaningfully engage with the question, or did they simply deploy an AI agent to participate on their behalf? Third, and perhaps most troubling, is what might be called synthetic drift. Large language models are increasingly trained on data that includes AI-generated content. The outputs of these models then enter the information ecosystem and become training data for future models. We are approaching a point where AI systems optimize for patterns that are themselves AI-generated, creating feedback loops with uncertain democratic legitimacy. Fourth, there is adversarial pollution. Bad actors—whether state adversaries, commercial interests, or ideological movements—can flood online deliberation systems with synthetic participation at minimal cost. The economics are asymmetric: authentic participation requires genuine human time and attention, while synthetic participation can be generated at scale.

Finally, all of this leads to legitimacy collapse. If citizens suspect that input to democratic processes is substantially synthetic, why should they trust the outputs?

This analysis suggests that the digital solution is not merely inadequate but actively counterproductive as a primary mode of democratic participation: It doesn't solve the belonging problematic and may lead to even less trusted outputs . What is needed is something that can create belonging at scale while producing sound policy results.

A body in a room, contributing in real time, in synchronicity with other bodies and minds—this is the one form of participation that resists synthetic replication and creates belonging. Physical presence provides what online engagement cannot: unforgeable authentication, witnessed identity, real-time accountability, embodied commitment, and readable social cues. And, crucially, it provides what our evolved social brains require: synchronization, oxytocin release, and genuine community formation.

Physical assemblies are of course not a novel proposal. They are the oldest form of collective decision-making, present in virtually every human society across history. The councils of countless traditional societies, the village assembly in India, the Athenian ekklesia, the Roman comitia, the Icelandic Althing, the New England town meeting, the Swiss Landsgemeinde—all share a common core: citizens gathering in physical space to deliberate and decide together. Before there was writing, before there were constitutions, before there were political parties, there were assemblies. The practice is as old as politics itself, because it is rooted in what we are as a species: social animals who evolved to coordinate face-to-face.

Even today, physical assemblies remain central to political life in ways we often overlook. Parliaments and councils meet in chambers. Juries deliberate in rooms. Shareholders convene in halls. Trade unions hold congresses. Social movements gather in squares. Religious communities assemble in churches, mosques, and temples. The moments that matter most in collective life—the decisions, the rituals, the transformations—still happen when people gather in shared physical space.

In recent decades a newcomer in the world of assemblies as gained traction under various names—planning cells, citizens' dialogues, citizens' forums, citizens' panels, citizens' juries, citizens' assemblies, mini-publics, deliberative polls—a family of practices has emerged that share common design principles. As a note, the term "citizens' assemblies" has become particularly prominent—perhaps overly so. It is important to recognize that this is not the only form deliberation can take, and the label matters less than the underlying mechanisms. What makes these practices distinctive is a specific combination of design choices that together create something genuinely new:

Sortition. Participants are selected by lottery from the general population, often stratified to ensure demographic representativeness. This is the crucial innovation that distinguishes these practices from traditional town halls, public hearings, or activist gatherings. Random selection means that participants are not self-selected enthusiasts, partisan mobilizers, or professional stakeholders. They are ordinary citizens who would never otherwise have met, brought together by chance. This has profound implications for belonging: unlike churches or parties, where membership follows pre-existing identity (you join people like yourself), sortition-based assemblies forge connection across difference. Strangers become collaborators. The belonging that emerges is not tribal but civic.

Structured deliberation. Participants do not simply show up and argue. They receive balanced information from diverse experts, work through issues in facilitated small groups, hear from affected stakeholders, and build toward considered judgment over multiple sessions. The process is designed to enable genuine learning and mutual understanding, not merely the aggregation of pre-formed preferences.

Physical co-presence. Participants meet in person, in real time, in shared space. As discussed earlier, this triggers the neurobiological mechanisms—synchronization, oxytocin release, emotional attunement—that digital interaction cannot replicate. The embodied experience of working through difficult questions together creates bonds that persist beyond the assembly itself. Of course in many cases, physical session of work alternate with online synchronous session to leverage the advantage of the online setting.

Synchronous engagement. Everyone participates in the same process at the same time. This shared temporality—the knowledge that others are grappling with the same questions in the same moments—creates collective rhythm and mutual accountability.

This combination of mechanisms produces something that traditional political institutions struggle to generate: belonging that is compatible with modern pluralism. Like churches or mass parties, these assemblies create genuine community through shared practice. But unlike those older forms, they do not require prior ideological commitment or inherited identity. They bring together people who disagree, who come from different backgrounds, who would never encounter each other in their ordinary lives—and ask them to work together on questions that matter. The belonging that emerges is chosen rather than given, forged rather than inherited, and oriented toward shared problem-solving rather than tribal solidarity against outsiders.

The track record demonstrates that such processes produce high-quality results on genuinely difficult issues. Ireland's Citizens' Assembly addressed abortion and marriage equality—questions that had paralyzed conventional politics for decades—and produced recommendations that led to successful constitutional referenda. France's Citizens' Convention on Climate generated 149 proposals, approximately 70 percent of which were adopted by the government. The European Citizens' Panels have continuously fed into European policymaking since 2022, with participants from across member states deliberating on topics from food waste to virtual worlds. Thousands of local participatory budgets, planning panels, and deliberative forums operate worldwide, giving citizens direct voice in decisions that affect their communities. In terms of belonging participants clearly express how the experience kicks off a very deep change: a large portion of participants in such process declare that their feeling of trust and belonging towards democracy and institutions increases through the participation. As many participants of European Citizens' Panels put it: "now I feel European".

So, there is strong evidence that such assemblies could function as the foundation of a renewed democratic infrastructure. To do so, they need to operate at a different scale. They must become something that every citizen experiences, not something that happens to a lucky few.

How can deliberative assemblies operate at the scale required to serve as genuine infrastructure for democratic belonging? The Scaledem project, a Horizon Europe initiative examining how to move democratic innovations beyond isolated experiments, identifies four critical dimensions of scaling that any comprehensive strategy must address: scaling high (embedding in governance structures), scaling out (reaching more people), scaling in (improving procedural quality), and scaling deep (meaningfully engaging and creating belonging).

For citizens' assemblies to address the populist challenge, they must succeed on all four dimensions simultaneously. Scaling high without scaling deep produces technocratic exercises that generate recommendations but not community. Scaling out without scaling in sacrifices deliberative quality for mere participation numbers. The distinctive contribution of this analysis is to argue that scaling deep—creating genuine belonging and meaning-making—is not a luxury to be added once the logistics are solved but rather the essential foundation without which the entire enterprise fails to address the challenge of populism.

Scaling deep means creating the conditions under which the neurobiological mechanisms described earlier can operate fully—where participants not only deliberate on policy but experience the synchronization, oxytocin release, and neural coordination that transform strangers into a community. This requires more than structured discussion; it requires time and space for genuine human encounter.

Concretely, scaling deep might involve dedicating one full day of a multi-day assembly process entirely to mutual exchange and sense-making activities. Participants could share something meaningful to them: personal stories, music that moves them, books that shaped their thinking. They might cook together, sing together, dance together, or engage in physical activities as a group. The point is not to be productive in any policy sense but simply to be with one another—to allow the slow work of human bonding that our social brains evolved to accomplish but that modern life so rarely permits.

This is not frivolous. The research on interaction ritual chains suggests that precisely such shared experiences—marked by physical co-presence, common focus, emotional attunement, and rhythmic coordination—generate the "emotional energy" that participants carry forward into substantive deliberation. The neurobiological research on synchronization confirms that these effects are not merely subjective: brains literally align, oxytocin flows, and the physiological preconditions for trust and openness emerge. Policy work conducted after such bonding draws on reserves of goodwill and mutual understanding that cold deliberation alone cannot generate.

Scaling out involves three complementary mechanisms that together can bring deliberative participation within reach of every citizen while addressing questions at every scale of governance.

Decentralization with integration

The crucial insight is that decentralization does not mean assigning local topics to local assemblies and global topics to global ones. Rather, it means enabling any question—including planetary ones—to be deliberated in thousands of local settings simultaneously, with results flowing upward or transversely through structured integration processes.

The World Wide Views and Global Citizens' Dialogue model pioneered this architecture: in 2015 ten thousand citizens across seventy-six countries deliberated on climate policy on the same day, using common information materials and guiding questions, producing recommendations that were then compiled into a global synthesis presented to the Paris climate negotiations. We the Internet convened 5,500 participants across more than seventy countries in October 2020 to deliberate on digital governance.

This architecture preserves the neurobiological benefits of many small, face-to-face local deliberation where synchronization, oxytocin release, and genuine human bonding can occur; meaningful connection between local participants and global outcomes; and the production of recommendations that carry the legitimacy of broad-based citizen input.

At least 3 architectural patterns can integrate local deliberations into higher-level synthesis:

The ambassador model: Local assemblies deliberate on a shared question and then delegates—"ambassadors"— are randomly selected to participate in a higher level assembly that works across the local productions. These ambassadors carry the mandate of their local assembly but also encounter the perspectives of ambassadors from other localities. The centralized assembly does not start from scratch but builds upon the foundation laid by parallel local deliberations. The ambassador is not a representative in the electoral sense—not someone empowered to substitute their judgment for the group's—but a carrier of the local assembly's collective reasoning into a higher-level synthesis. This model adds a second layer of deliberative experience: the ambassador who deliberated locally with neighbors then deliberates transnationally with fellow ambassadors, experiencing both scales of democratic community.

The synthesis model: Local assemblies produce recommendations that are aggregated, clustered, and synthesized by a higher level assembly without requiring physical delegates from each locality. The centralized assembly— itself composed of randomly selected citizens who did not participate in the local phase—works with the distilled outputs of the local deliberations as their evidentiary base, much as traditional assemblies work with expert testimony. This model allows the centralized assembly to benefit from the breadth of local input while maintaining its own deliberative integrity.

The transversal model: Assemblies working on similar topics in different contexts can exchange insights horizontally, learning from one another without requiring vertical integration through a higher-level synthesis. A citizens' assembly on forestry policy in Sweden—grappling with boreal forest management, timber industry interests, and Indigenous Sámi land rights—could learn enormously from an assembly on forestry in Ghana addressing tropical deforestation, cocoa farming pressures, and traditional land tenure systems. The ecological, economic, and cultural contexts differ profoundly, yet each assembly confronts the fundamental challenge of balancing human use with ecological sustainability, and each has developed solutions the other might adapt.

Transversal exchange can take several forms: assemblies might share their recommendations and background materials, allowing each to consider how a different context approached similar challenges; delegate exchanges might bring participants from one assembly to observe or briefly join another's deliberations; joint digital sessions might connect assemblies in real-time for structured dialogue; or a shared platform might compile approaches from assemblies across multiple contexts, creating a living repository of citizen-generated policy wisdom.

This horizontal architecture generates a distinctive form of belonging: solidarity across difference. The Swedish forest assembly participant who encounters the reasoning of Ghanaian citizens—and recognizes both the vast differences in context and the shared commitment to thoughtful collective judgment—experiences democratic community that transcends not only national borders but ecological zones, economic systems, and cultural traditions. The recognition that citizens everywhere are engaged in the same practice of deliberative self-governance, adapting it to radically different circumstances, builds a sense of global democratic citizenship that vertical integration alone cannot produce.

Transnational belonging through shared deliberation. This architecture addresses the parochialism concern in a way that purely local deliberation cannot. The participant in a neighborhood assembly in Lyon deliberating on global climate policy, aware that citizens in Lagos and Lima are engaged in the same question at the same moment using the same information base, experiences herself as part of a planetary democratic community even without leaving her arrondissement. When her assembly's ambassador travels to the global synthesis assembly—or when the Lyon recommendations appear alongside those from Lagos and Lima in the final synthesis document—the connection becomes concrete.

The European Citizens' Panels demonstrate that transnational deliberation generates transnational identity. As the Observatory Report on the 2022-2023 panels documented, participants spoke of developing "their greater understanding of their own 'European' identity." This effect can be multiplied when thousands of local assemblies across a continent or the globe deliberate on the same question simultaneously: the shared temporal experience of collective deliberation—knowing that at this very moment, fellow citizens across borders are wrestling with the same challenges—creates bonds that transcend the physical limits of any single assembly room.

Sequential phasing for depth and continuity

Single topics can unfold across multiple assembly cohorts, with each phase building on the previous. Germany's Bürgerrat Bildung und Lernen provides a template: over seven hundred citizens participated across multiple phases—scoping, diagnosis, vision, objectives, and recommendations—with partial rotation ensuring both continuity and fresh perspectives.

Participant rotation for universal reach

With rotation, every citizen could expect to serve in a deliberative assembly at least twice over their active citizen life—from childhood through old age, roughly ages six to eighty-five. For a country like Germany with approximately seventy million adults, achieving two participations per citizen over a fifty-year planning horizon would require roughly 2.8 million participant-slots annually. This is achievable through a distributed architecture operating at multiple scales simultaneously:

• Global level: Approximately 100 synthesis assemblies per year, each integrating input from thousands of local assemblies across countries. Topics would include climate, migration, technology governance, pandemic preparedness, nuclear security, and other challenges requiring planetary coordination. A Global Citizens' Assembly on climate, for instance, might draw on parallel local deliberations in every UN member state, with ambassadors or synthesized recommendations flowing to a centralized deliberation that complements intergovernmental processes.

• Regional level: Approximately 50 synthesis assemblies per year across major regional bodies—European Union, African Union, ASEAN, Mercosur, and others. The EU currently runs two to four European Citizens' Panels annually; scaling to approximately ten per year while other regional organizations establish similar processes would build regional democratic community. Each regional assembly would integrate local deliberations from across member states on questions of cross-border significance.

• National level: Approximately 50-100 synthesis assemblies per year per country, roughly aligned with major legislative initiatives. With the ambassador or synthesis model, each national assembly would integrate input from hundreds of local assemblies distributed across the territory—ensuring that citizens in rural areas, small towns, and underrepresented regions have equal voice with those in capital cities.

• Local entry points: The base layer consists of thousands of local assemblies—at neighborhood (15-30 participants), district (30-50), and city (50-100) levels—that serve as the primary sites of citizen deliberation. These are not limited to "local issues" but deliberate on questions at every scale, producing recommendations and selecting ambassadors that flow upward into synthesis processes. A neighborhood assembly in a German village deliberates on the same EU digital policy question as one in central Paris; both feed into national syntheses that feed into the European Citizens' Panel.

The optimal sizes at each level—15, 30, 50, 100, 150—correspond to the layered structure of human social groups identified by Dunbar's research on the social brain. These are not arbitrary administrative divisions but reflect the cognitive architecture that evolution has given us for managing social relationships. Assemblies sized to these natural groupings can leverage the full capacity of human social cognition.

The math

Top-down: If approximately 100 global, 50 regional, and 50-100 national synthesis assemblies operate annually, and each integrates input from 500-1,000 local assemblies (each with 30-50 participants), the system generates between 2.5 and 10 million participant-slots per year at the local level alone, plus additional slots for synthesis assembly participants and ambassadors.

Bottom-up: If the goal is two deliberative experiences per citizen over a seventy-eight-year active citizen life (ages 6-85), a country of seventy million people requires approximately 1.8 million participant-slots annually. Distributed across local assemblies feeding into higher-level syntheses, this translates to roughly 36,000-60,000 local assemblies per year (at 30-50 participants each), or about 100-165 per day—entirely feasible for a country with thousands of municipalities, schools, workplaces, and community organizations that could host deliberative processes.

The two calculations converge: a system designed to address the major policy questions facing humanity at global, regional, and national levels, using decentralized deliberation with upward synthesis, would generate approximately the right number of participation opportunities to ensure that every citizen deliberates at least twice over their lifetime.

The fourth dimension—scaling in—concerns procedural design quality. For our purposes, the crucial insight is that policy deliberation and meaning-making should not be separate activities but integrated dimensions of a single practice.

Traditional deliberative design often treats the "substantive" work of producing recommendations as primary and any community-building activities as optional add-ons. This gets the relationship backward. Without the trust, empathy, and mutual understanding that emerge from genuine human encounter, policy deliberation risk to degrade into positional bargaining among strangers. The recommendations produced may be technically sophisticated but will lack the legitimacy that comes from having been forged by a genuine community.

Design elements that integrate belonging into deliberation include:

• Opening rituals that mark the transition from ordinary life into deliberative space and acknowledge the significance of the collective task

• Storytelling rounds in which participants share personal experiences related to the policy topic before engaging in abstract discussion

• Creative expression opportunities—collective art-making, music, movement—that activate non-verbal channels of human connection

• Shared meals prepared and consumed together, tapping into the ancient human practice of commensality as community-building

• Closing ceremonies that acknowledge what has been accomplished together and create transitional objects (photographs, collective statements, small gifts) that participants carry back into ordinary life

• Continuity elements such as reunions, alumni networks, and follow-up communications that maintain relationships beyond the assembly period

Randall Collins's theory of interaction ritual chains suggests that successful rituals generate "emotional energy" that participants carry forward, motivating continued engagement and spreading positive affect through social networks. Durkheim's concept of collective effervescence captures the same phenomenon: the emotional electricity that emerges when humans gather with shared focus and common purpose. The neurobiological research confirms that these are not merely metaphors but descriptions of real physiological processes. The goal is not to manufacture artificial enthusiasm but to create conditions under which the natural human capacity for bonding can operate. When participants return from a well-designed assembly, they should carry not only policy recommendations but transformed relationships—with fellow participants, with the democratic process, and with the larger political community of which the assembly was a microcosm.

The earlier critique of digital deliberation emphasized AI's role in the authentication crisis—synthetic participation polluting online democratic spaces. But AI can also serve as technological infrastructure that makes scaled physical deliberation possible. Multilingual real-time translation enables assemblies to connect across language barriers, allowing the Swedish forestry assembly to engage directly with deliberators in Ghana. Synthesis tools can aggregate and cluster recommendations from thousands of local assemblies, identifying patterns of convergence and divergence that human analysts could not process at scale. Curated fact-checking and information provision can ensure that all assemblies work from reliable, balanced evidence bases. The distinction is crucial: AI as substitute for human deliberation undermines democratic legitimacy; AI as support for human deliberation enhances democratic capacity. The deliberation itself—the face-to-face encounter, the trust-building, the collective judgment—must remain irreducibly human. But the infrastructure connecting, translating, and synthesizing human deliberation across scales can and should draw on AI's capabilities.

The argument can be summarized as a logical chain. Populism succeeds primarily through inputs—identity, belonging, meaning, recognition—rather than outputs. Liberal democracy historically provided these inputs through mass parties and social movements, but modern societies have undergone a double transformation: genuine gains in autonomy, education, and individual freedom, alongside increased atomization and the erosion of collective meaning-making. This leaves an emotional vacuum that populism fills—and this vacuum also contradicts our evolved nature: humans are fundamentally social beings whose brains developed for face-to-face cooperation, and physical co-presence triggers neurochemical processes essential for trust, bonding, and collective action. Digital deliberation cannot fill this gap—both because online interaction cannot generate the neurobiological effects of physical presence and because an insurmountable authentication crisis makes online participation increasingly synthetic. Therefore, physical, synchronous citizen assemblies must become the primary infrastructure for democratic belonging.

The design implications follow: assemblies should be decentralized, sequential, aim for universal participation, and integrate meaning-making into deliberation. This is not utopian as we have seen that many pilots have been successfully deployed of such an approach.

The alternative—ceding the field of identity and belonging to populism while hoping that better policy outcomes will eventually win voters back—has not worked and will not work. Citizens are social beings seeking meaning, recognition, and community—and our brains are wired for precisely this seeking.

Hannah Arendt wrote that the public realm—the space of appearance where citizens act together—is the highest human achievement, the space where freedom becomes real. Physical citizen assembly offers a way to recover it: spaces where real humans gather in real time to deliberate on real questions, generating both considered judgment and genuine community.

John Dewey argued that democracy is not merely a form of government but a mode of associated living. The challenge of our time is to rebuild the infrastructure for that mode of living in ways that honor our social nature as a species. Deliberative assemblies, properly designed and deployed at scale, can be that infrastructure. They offer the body politic reassembled—not as spectacle or simulation but as the authentic gathering of citizens determining their common life together, their brains synchronizing, their trust building, their community forming through the oldest human technology: face-to-face cooperation.

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