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newDemocracy Foundation

newDemocracy is one of Australia's most active organisations in the deliberative democracy space. It conducts real-world trials using random selection and deliberation — the jury model — to show that citizens, given good information and time to deliberate, can reach considered decisions on complex public issues.

The foundation is non-partisan and works across government, community, and institutional settings. It publishes research on what works, what doesn't, and why — with the explicit goal of making deliberative methods a normal part of democratic governance rather than an experimental curiosity.

Approach

newDemocracy's core argument is that the adversarial, partisan nature of representative democracy produces poor decisions on long-term or complex issues, and that randomly selected citizens' assemblies and juries consistently outperform what elected bodies produce when given the same brief. Their work is empirical — they run trials, document outcomes, and publish findings.