Technology and Citizens: Case of Citizens' Jury on National Pandemic Response System in South Korea

Due to their technical complexity, most public policies in today's technological society are dominated by expert-centrism and technocracy (an institutional form of expert-centrism), based on the belief that they should be the exclusive realm of technical experts. But globally, expert-led and technocratic policy-making culture is faced with challenges in many countries. The same is happening in Korea in many different forms.

Based on such awareness, this paper aims to analyze the democratic implications of the Korean experience of the citizens' jury, a form of citizens' participatory technology assessment activity organized by an NGO called the Center for Democracy in Science and Technology in 2008. In particular, the topic of this paper, the citizens' jury on the National Pandemic Response System in 2008, is a noteworthy case for it represents the first time in Korea that citizens were randomly selected to make up a jury, a method considerably different from existing forms of citizens' participation.

In identifying its democratic implications, the citizens' jury will be compared with another form of deliberative participation, the consensus conference. Compared to consensus conference, citizens' jury is different in the following ways: first, the participants are randomly selected; second, the modalities of opinion collection and presentation well illustrate the differences and  non-alignment between the participating citizens. The paper concludes that such characteristics of citizens' jury present highly positive implications in realizing genuine democracy in our society.