A healthy democracy needs citizens to make reflective political judgements. Sceptics argue that reflective opinions are either nonexistent or rare. Proponents of deliberative democracy suggest that democratic deliberation is capable of prompting reflective political reasoning among people. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. This article offers a bridge between psychology and political theory and proposes a theory of perspective-taking in deliberation. It argues that under the right conditions, deliberation induces more reflective judgements by eliciting the process of perspective-taking – actively imagining others’ experiences, perspectives and feelings – in citizen deliberators. Two institutional features of deliberative forums are emphasized: the presence of a diversity of viewpoints and the interplay of fact-based rational argumentation and storytelling. I test the plausibility of this theory using a case study – the Irish Citizens’ Assembly – thereby, relying on qualitative in-depth interview data and quantitative survey data. I further substantiate my findings with a laboratory experiment.

This paper tests the possibility of embedding the benefits of minipublic deliberation within a wider voting public. We test whether a statement such as those derived from a Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) can influence voters who did not participate in the pre-referendum minipublic deliberation. This experiment was implemented in advance of the 2018 Irish referendum on blasphemy, one of a series of social-moral referendums following the recommendations of a deliberative assembly. This is the first application of a CIR-style voting aid in a real world minipublic and referendum outside of the US and also the first application to what is principally a moral question. We found that survey respondents exposed to information about the minipublic and its findings significantly increased their policy knowledge. Further, exposing respondents to minipublic statements in favour and against the policy measure increased their empathy for the other side of the policy debate.

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Does the level of public support for democracy promotion policies vary with the characteristics of potential autocratic targets? We conduct an experimental study with a conjoint design on a sample of 1,464 US citizens that manipulates several core characteristics of potential autocratic targets. We then compare citizens’ preferences with the cross-national evidence testing the determinants of democracy promotion success. We find that respondents support the use of coercive measures (military action and sanctions) precisely in contexts where, according to comparative research, these instruments are unlikely to foster democratization: oil-rich, exclusionary, personalistic regimes with no elections, and with no ties to the United States. Conversely, the characteristics driving public support for the use of democracy aid are more consistent with those favoring effectiveness: autocratic regimes with multi-party elections and with links to the United States. These findings have important policy implications by contributing to understand the micro-foundations of target selection.

How does the oil wealth of a potential target state affect the likelihood of the US public favoring the use of military force? Recent studies suggest that public opinion on foreign policy is responsive to the core characteristics of target states, such as regime type and majority religion. This article advances this research agenda by examining the effects of intra-regime heterogeneity in respect of an important characteristic of target states: their oil wealth. To examine the relationship between oil wealth and US public opinion on war, we fielded a conjoint experiment with US citizens. Respondents chose between hypothetical pairs of target states that varied across seven different intra-regime characteristics. We found that that the oil wealth of a target exerts a statistically significant (albeit small) effect on public support for the use of force, independent of the effects of other regime characteristics.