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Ideal deliberative democracy seeks to employ unbiased moderators. Yet, a large literature in the field of mediation suggests the elusiveness of perfect neutrality. Our study thus addresses the following question: when moderators of deliberations express their own views-even in a limited manner-can they change the preferences of participants? Using a novel experimental design in a real deliberative decision-making process, we find that moderators can significantly influence the attitudes and behaviors of participants by expressing views in a constrained manner. The results of our study have implications for refining epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy and for designing more precise empirical investigations of the effects of deliberative processes on attitudes and behavior. The results also warn of a simple mechanism by which interest groups might hijack the deliberative decision-making processes used in community driven development projects all over the world.

e Cidadã." 4 There are many definitions of what constitutes a participatory budgeting process. At an abstract level participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that allows citizens to affect the formulation of a budget. Most participatory budgeting processes occur at the city level. They are based on repeated negotiations between the city government and the participants, combining elements of deliberative, participatory, and representative democracy. In order to give a more precise operational definition of this democratic innovation Sintomer et al. (Sintomer et al. 2013) include five additional criteria that distinguish participatory budgeting from other similar programs: (1) the financial and/or budgetary dimension must be discussed; (2) the city level must be involved, or a (decentralized) district with an elected body and some power over administration; (3) it has to be a repeated process (one meeting or one referendum on financial issues are not examples of participatory budgeting); (4) the program must include some form of public deliberation within the framework of specific meetings/forums (the opening of administrative meetings or classical representative instances to ''normal'' citizens are not participatory budgeting); (5) some accountability on the output is required. 5 See appendix 3 for full list of survey questions.

This is a repository copy of Citizen participation and changing governance: cases of devolution in England.

No abstract

e Cidadã." 4 There are many definitions of what constitutes a participatory budgeting process. At an abstract level participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that allows citizens to affect the formulation of a budget. Most participatory budgeting processes occur at the city level. They are based on repeated negotiations between the city government and the participants, combining elements of deliberative, participatory, and representative democracy. In order to give a more precise operational definition of this democratic innovation Sintomer et al. (Sintomer et al. 2013) include five additional criteria that distinguish participatory budgeting from other similar programs: (1) the financial and/or budgetary dimension must be discussed; (2) the city level must be involved, or a (decentralized) district with an elected body and some power over administration; (3) it has to be a repeated process (one meeting or one referendum on financial issues are not examples of participatory budgeting); (4) the program must include some form of public deliberation within the framework of specific meetings/forums (the opening of administrative meetings or classical representative instances to ''normal'' citizens are not participatory budgeting); (5) some accountability on the output is required. 5 See appendix 3 for full list of survey questions.

In this article, we report the results of an e-democracy experiment in which a group of supporters of a large political party were asked to debate online about ways to reform the electoral law. We compare a traditional forum with an online collaborative argumentation platform to capture the various proposals and their associated pros and cons. The aim of this study is to assess the capability of this tool to support online collective deliberation in a real-world case, as compared to an online discussion supported by a forum. By comparing users’ experience across several metrics related to usability, activity levels, and quality of collaboration, our findings show that the forum produced more activity and ideas and its users perceived a better quality of the collaboration process, while the argumentation tool helped to reduce the amount of self-referential arguments and encourage viewing and rating of others’ posts.

Can electoral incentives mitigate racial and class prejudices toward underrepresented groups? We use a pair of large-scale field experiments to investigate the responsiveness of Brazilian legislative candidates to information requests from fictitious voters before and after the 2010 elections. Our panel study design allows us to examine how politicians' electoral incentives and prejudices jointly affect their responsiveness to voters with randomly assigned socioeconomic and partisan characteristics. Distinguishing between prejudiced and strategic discrimination in responsiveness, we find that socioeconomically privileged and competitive candidates are equally responsive to underrepresented voters in advance of the election, yet less responsive once in office. At the same time, elections can create incentives for aspiring legislators to be responsive to underrepresented and marginalized groups, especially when electoral institutions facilitate the political participation of these marginalized classes. In sum, the electoral connection may motivate office-seeking politicians to be responsive to voters they would otherwise ignore. We provide insights into this question by reporting the results of a pair of field experiments in Brazil. Our two field experiments involved contacting more than 7,000 politicians competing at the state and federal levels immediately before the October 2010 elections, and again about