The United States is not alone among democracies in facing civic participation challenges. But other peer democracies have built formal institutional structures for maintaining civic infrastructure that the United States has not. Those structures vary in design, operate in different political cultures, and have different documented effects. What follows is a factual survey of what exists, what the evidence shows, and what is and is not plausibly transferable to the American context.
This is not an argument that other countries are better. Peer democracies face their own civic deficits, their own participation gaps, and their own institutional failures. The comparison is useful not as flattery but as evidence — a set of documented experiments with civic infrastructure from which conclusions, cautious ones, can be drawn.
Citizens’ Assemblies and Deliberative Mini-Publics
The most widely discussed civic infrastructure innovation of the past two decades is the citizens’ assembly — a body of randomly selected citizens, typically 100 to 200 people, who are asked to deliberate over a complex policy question and produce recommendations. The model draws on the ancient Athenian practice of selection by lot (sortition) and on contemporary deliberative democracy theory.
Ireland has run two nationally significant citizens’ assemblies. The first, which concluded in 2017, addressed five questions including abortion and climate change. On the abortion question, the assembly’s 99 members received expert testimony, deliberated over multiple weekends, and produced recommendations that were more liberal than existing law. A parliamentary committee then reviewed the recommendations and referred the question to a referendum. The referendum, held in May 2018, passed by a margin of approximately two to one — amending Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. On climate, the assembly voted by 80% or more in favor of recommendations to center climate change in policy-making, increase the carbon tax, and tax agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Those recommendations influenced Ireland’s landmark 2019 Climate Action Plan.
The KNOCA analysis of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly found that the process successfully moved politically contentious issues through the legislative system by creating public legitimacy for positions that politicians had been reluctant to advance on their own. The key mechanism was not the assembly itself — it was the combination of the assembly with a committed parliamentary committee that took its recommendations seriously and a government willing to act on the committee’s conclusions.
France’s Citizens’ Convention for Climate (2019–2020) was a larger effort: 150 randomly selected citizens deliberated over nine months on how France could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030. They produced 149 proposals, ranging from regulatory changes to constitutional amendments. The political outcome was more complicated. President Macron committed to submitting the proposals “without filter” to either parliament, referendum, or direct implementation — a commitment that proved difficult to honor fully. Many proposals were incorporated into legislation, but others were modified, delayed, or abandoned under lobbying pressure. Critics argued the process generated legitimate public demand for policy action that the political system then selectively filtered.
The UK ran a national Climate Assembly in 2020, reaching recommendations on how the UK could meet its net-zero target. The assembly’s recommendations were generally well-regarded by participants and observers, but the political follow-through was incomplete.
The comparative evidence on citizens’ assemblies is now substantial. A synthesis of nearly 70 studies found consistent positive effects at the individual level: participants reliably increase their political knowledge, civic efficacy, and willingness to engage in politics. There are also documented spillover effects — people who learn about assemblies but don’t participate show increased trust in government and greater openness to alternative political views. At the government level, assemblies have demonstrated the capacity to bypass institutional deadlocks on issues where traditional political processes had stalled.
The limitations are equally documented. Citizens’ assemblies are not democratic in the representational sense — they are small, unelected bodies whose recommendations carry no formal authority. Their political impact depends entirely on whether governments commit in advance to taking recommendations seriously and following through. Where that commitment is weak or conditional, assemblies can generate public expectations that the political system then fails to meet. Cross-national research across 15 countries found that support for citizens’ assemblies is highest among people who are politically dissatisfied and hold negative views of political elites — which suggests the institutions may be partly a response to legitimacy deficits in representative government rather than a freestanding solution.
Participatory Budgeting
Participatory budgeting originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the Workers’ Party introduced the process in 1989 as a mechanism for direct citizen participation in municipal budget allocation. In its early years, the process gave residents of Porto Alegre — including the working poor — direct input into how roughly half the municipal investment budget was allocated. Participation grew rapidly: from approximately 1,000 participants in 1990 to 16,000 in 1998 and 40,000 in 1999.
The Porto Alegre experience documented several genuine achievements: improved delivery of basic infrastructure to previously underserved neighborhoods, increased civic participation among people who had previously had little engagement with formal politics, and a measurable shift in budget priorities toward the needs of lower-income residents. The process also built civic capacity — participants learned how city government worked, developed relationships with other residents, and created ongoing organizations that extended beyond the formal budgeting process.
Research by the World Resources Institute found that the process spread to more than 2,700 governments globally. But the same research found that Porto Alegre itself suspended participatory budgeting in 2017 as political support eroded. The WRI analysis identified four conditions necessary for participatory budgeting to sustain transformative change: well-structured participation arrangements; adequate financial resources; sustained political commitment; and government follow-through on implementing what the process produces. When political commitment to the process weakened in Porto Alegre — as different political parties came to power with less investment in the mechanism — the process lost resources, participation declined, and the transformative potential it had demonstrated in its first decade contracted.
That finding is important for understanding what participatory budgeting is and is not. It is a powerful civic capacity-building tool when the conditions for it are in place. It is not self-sustaining. Like other forms of civic infrastructure, it requires ongoing political and institutional commitment to function. And like other deliberative mechanisms, its effects on large-scale policy are limited by scale — Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting worked well for neighborhood-level infrastructure decisions but was less effective for city-scale planning.
Participatory budgeting has since been adopted in hundreds of U.S. cities and institutions, typically applied to discretionary portions of municipal budgets. The civic capacity effects documented in those settings — increased participation, better-targeted spending, increased civic knowledge — are consistent with what the Porto Alegre experience showed. The scale effects are also consistent: participatory budgeting works best as one mechanism within a larger civic infrastructure, not as a substitute for it.
Civic Education as Infrastructure
The Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden — consistently rank at or near the top of international civic knowledge and political engagement measures. Research on Nordic civic education found that all four countries place at the high end of the European scale on the ICCS (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study) index of civic knowledge, with Denmark ranking first and Finland third. Civic knowledge among students increased in all four countries between 2009 and 2016, a period during which civic knowledge was declining in many other countries.
The Nordic approach to civic education differs from the U.S. model in several structural ways. First, civic education is treated as a cross-curricular responsibility — embedded across subjects and school life rather than isolated in a single civics class. Second, the model emphasizes participation capacity rather than content delivery: students are expected to actively practice democratic participation through student councils, school governance structures, and community engagement, not merely to receive information about how democratic systems work. Third, civic education in the Nordic context is connected to broader citizenship formation across the entire school experience, not bracketed as a separate subject.
Research on student councils in Nordic countries found that participatory school structures — where students have genuine input into school governance — contribute to civic engagement outcomes in ways that passive civic content delivery does not. The distinction matters for thinking about what civic education can accomplish: information about democracy is not the same as practiced participation in democratic processes.
Germany’s approach to civic education includes the Beutelsbacher Consensus (1976), a set of principles for political education that prohibit indoctrination, require teaching of controversy, and mandate that civic education strengthen students’ capacity for independent political analysis rather than reproducing particular political conclusions. This framework has structured German civic education across political parties and governments for nearly fifty years — providing a relatively stable civic education infrastructure that is deliberately designed to survive changes in government.
Public Funding of Civil Society
Nordic countries maintain a model of public funding for membership-based civic associations — political parties, trade unions, sports clubs, cultural organizations, and civic associations — that operates on a volume basis. Organizations receive public funding roughly proportional to their membership, on the theory that membership-based organizations represent actual civic participation and that public support for them strengthens the organized civil society that democratic participation requires.
This model is built on assumptions about the relationship between organized civil society and democratic health that align with Putnam’s and Skocpol’s research — specifically, that membership-based, participatory organizations contribute to civic capacity in ways that professional advocacy organizations do not. The Nordic model essentially treats civic association membership as a public good and subsidizes it accordingly.
The model is not directly transferable to the U.S. context. American political and constitutional culture is skeptical of government funding for civic organizations, partly on grounds of state neutrality and partly on grounds of First Amendment concerns. The relevant lesson is not that the U.S. should replicate Nordic funding structures but that the relationship between organized membership civil society and democratic health is real enough that Nordic governments treat it as worth public investment.
Public Media as Civic Infrastructure
The BBC, the CBC, and the Nordic public broadcasting systems function as civic knowledge infrastructure in ways that distinguish them from commercial media. Their funding structures — typically public funds allocated by parliament but managed at arm’s length from government — are designed to insulate editorial decisions from direct political control while maintaining a public interest mandate that commercial broadcasters do not have.
The civic infrastructure function of public media is specific: they provide a shared information commons across class lines, regional boundaries, and political affiliations. The BBC’s reach across the UK — including rural areas, low-income communities, and regions without competitive commercial media markets — provides civic knowledge infrastructure that market forces would not produce and that is necessary for political participation to be meaningful. The Nordic public broadcasters perform similar functions in smaller but more homogeneous markets.
This function is partly what local news performs in the U.S. context — and its decline has civic consequences that the research has documented. Harvard Kennedy School research has identified the collapse of local news as a civic infrastructure failure with measurable effects on corruption, voter turnout, political polarization, and community alienation. Academic studies have shown that weaker local news systems correlate with more corruption, lower voting turnout, more polarization, and more alienation. The U.S. does not have public media infrastructure comparable to the BBC or Nordic broadcasters, and the market failure in local news is occurring without a public infrastructure backstop.
What Is and Is Not Transferable
The comparative evidence is genuinely useful, but extrapolating from it requires care. Each of these civic infrastructure models emerged from specific political cultures, institutional histories, and economic structures. The Irish citizens’ assembly worked partly because of Ireland’s specific constitutional structure, which made a referendum a natural follow-on mechanism. The Nordic civic education model works within school systems with different funding, governance, and professional autonomy structures than the U.S. The Nordic public funding model for civil society presupposes political consensus about the public value of organized civic association that does not exist in the United States.
What transfers is not the specific mechanisms but the evidence they generate: that deliberately maintained civic infrastructure produces measurable effects on political participation, knowledge, and policy outcomes. Citizens’ assemblies, when properly structured and politically committed, can break institutional deadlocks and generate legitimate recommendations for policy change. Participatory budgeting, when adequately resourced and politically supported, builds civic capacity and improves spending targeting. Civic education that emphasizes participation rather than content produces participants rather than spectators. Public media and local news infrastructure provide civic knowledge commons that markets consistently fail to supply.
The U.S. context differs from these cases in important ways. American political culture is more skeptical of government-led civic infrastructure. American federalism distributes responsibility for civic institutions across thousands of jurisdictions. American constitutional constraints on campaign finance, public funding of organizations, and government speech limit some mechanisms that other democracies have used. None of that makes the evidence from peer democracies irrelevant. It makes the question of how comparable outcomes could be achieved within U.S. constraints a genuinely important design problem — one that comparative evidence can inform but cannot answer directly.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.