The quality of deliberative conversations are dependent on citizens compliance with deliberative norms yet there is a lack of methods to assess norm compliance in discussions. Here, the psychological construct of complexity of thinking is claimed to conceptually correspond to the deliberative conversational ideal and adopted as a measurement of deliberative norm compliance. The hypothesis that citizens' complexity of thinking increases as a result of participation in deliberative conversations was tested in a minipublic case study in Sweden. Participants' complexity of thinking was assessed before and after deliberation by responding to an open-ended question about the topic of debate. Manual coding was used to rate participants integrative complexity. The result confirms the hypothesis, which serves as an indicator of deliberative quality. The study also demonstrates that women get higher increases in complexity, as do highly agreeable individuals and those who hold more liberal views. The findings demonstrate the potential usefulness of integrative complexity as a measurement of deliberative quality.

The debate surrounding mini-publics has focused on top-down assessments about their use in the wider democratic system. This chapter inverts that analysis to explore how observation of mini-public deliberation informs possibilities for scaling up their deliberative effects—as opposed to their decisions. The effect involves in good part reversing the influences of strategic and manipulatory political discourse via discourse regulation and the activation of norms consistent with consistent with the “deliberative stance”. Scaling up the deliberativeness involves a form of mini-public trust, with a focus on the regulation of discourses by trusted peers, and deliberating citizens acting as exemplars of deliberative behaviour. To the extent that both practice and institutionalization exceed certain conditions there is scope for mini-publics to become engines for deliberative democratization.

liberative democracy publicly available in advance of publication in journals and books. The series aims to present new research that makes original, high-quality contributions to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy informed by recent literature in the field.For further information see: ABSTRACTInclusiveness is essential to deliberative democracy, but willingness to participate in deliberation is not well understood. In the case of deliberative minipublics, which seek to achieve deliberation among a representative selection of citizens, representation is viewed in terms of demographic or positional features. Thus far, research has focused on political, social and attitudinal variation among willing deliberative participants. The role of personality in willingness to participate is likely to be important for deliberation, as it has been demonstrated in other areas of political participation to explain a good deal of variation, as well as being a pre-cursor to many of the attitudinal variables the deliberative scholars have used in other studies. The role of personality has been explored by a number of deliberative scholars, but only partially, and based on an incomplete model. I contribute to this research by examining how personality traits in interaction with situational features influence patterns of deliberative participation. Situations mediate the impact of personality traits, which is visible in the stated motivations that citizens provide for accepting/declining an invitation to deliberate. Drawing on data from a field experiment -involving a three-day deliberative minipublic in Sweden on the topic of begging by internal EU migrants -I examine the simultaneous impact of vital features of the situation and personality traits in interaction.The main finding confirms the relevance of personality as a predictor of who is willing to participate in deliberation and also how the impact of personality is both situation dependent and related to explicit motivations to participate.

Citizens’ adherence to deliberative civic values fulfils a vital function in deliberative democratic systems. We propose a way to measure the prevalence and variations of such values as a first step to better understanding how this works. Based on survey data, we demonstrate that, in Sweden, adherence to the values of reasoning and listening is stronger than adherence to the strategic rhetorical, non-deliberative values. This may have important implications for our understanding of how deliberation and democracy work in this particular context. There are also, however, important individual-level variations of adherence to deliberative civic values related to age, education, gender and Swedish background. Taken together, this opens up for a new research agenda where comparative analyses of deliberative civic values and how it relates to political behaviour are particularly encouraged.

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