Catching the ‘Deliberative Wave’? How (Disaffected) Citizens Assess Deliberative Citizen Forums

Abstract

A ‘deliberative wave’, with increasing uses of deliberative citizen forums, is sweeping the globe. Whereas deliberative citizen forum enthusiasts claim that they represent appropriate tools to reconnect citizens with politics and demand a stronger empowerment of deliberative citizen forums, critics argue that they will reduce rather than increase democratic legitimacy. This letter sheds new light on the roles of deliberative citizen forums in democratic systems, with a particular eye on disaffected citizens. Drawing on a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of non-participating German citizens, it shows that citizens in general challenge notions of the strong empowerment of deliberative citizen forums. They prefer deliberative citizen forums that are limited to policy advice, collaborate with legacy institutions and include extra provisions (such as a large size or clear majorities). By contrast, disaffected citizens are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens, but this not imply that they are generally in clear favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent via-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). These findings have important ramifications for democratic designs.

When Digital Mass Participation Meets Citizen Deliberation: Combining Mini- and Maxi-Publics in Climate Policy-Making

“…Data on how citizens respond to citizen-centered policy-making and how that changes over time are scarce. As we know from other studies, it is mostly the disenfranchised or disaffected part of the public that is eager to participate in deliberative forums, whereas many others prefer exclusively supporting roles [62]. Nonetheless, processes that allow participants to come up with their own recommendations run less risk of being used as tokenistic exercises [61].…”

Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy

“…Normatively, this experience suggests adding 1⁸ Henceforth the word 'random' will mean 'near random and stratified, ' except where otherwise noted. 1⁹ See Arnstein 1969, however, argues normatively against giving randomly selected citizen forums full decision-making power, a position congruent with that of many citizens (Jaquet et al 2020;Devillers et al 2021;Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022). I suggest elsewhere (Mansbridge 1980 and subsequent work) that normative goals are often contingent on context.…”

“…Large size also improves greatly the likelihood of achieving believable results regarding opinion change (on statistical significance, see Werner and Muradova,Chapter 13 in this volume and Gastil Chapter 14 in this volume). Finally, large size increases the perceived legitimacy of a forum among citizens (Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022; see also Goldberg 2021). Yet, in addition to its considerably greater expense, which must be drawn from other projects that might help the needy directly, larger size impedes participant input into the process.…”

“…Hence, the individual effect of, say, the participant recruitment method for deliberative events could be tested across contextual factors, such as different levels of government or policy issues. First studies such as Christensen (2020) or Goldberg and Bächtiger (2022) made use of conjoint analysis to study citizens' preferences for different design components of a participatory process.…”

“…Landemore (2020), for example, claims that the citizens who are randomly chosen for a deliberative forum and decide to attend represent the other citizens in the polity as well as or better than the elected legislators. , by contrast, sees such forums as incapable of providing the 'authorship' that democratic citizenship requires; many citizens currently agree (Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022).…”