How citizens evaluate participatory processes: a conjoint analysis

Abstract

This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a representative survey of the Finnish population (n = 1050). The conjoint analysis examines the impact of inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment, transparency, efficiency, and transferability on citizens’ evaluations of participatory processes. Furthermore, it is examined whether the evaluations differ by the policy issues and process preferences of the respondents. The results show that people want transparent participatory processes with face-to-face interaction among participants and expert advice to deal with complicated issues. The participatory processes should also be advisory and should not include too many meetings. These effects appear to be uniform across policy issues and do not depend on the process preferences of citizens.

Just Advisory and Maximally Representative: A Conjoint Experiment on Non-Participants' Legitimacy Perceptions of Deliberative Forums

“…These results confirm Lafont's critique (hypothesis 1) stipulating that deliberative forums should not have any direct decision-making powers, but only recommending force with further processing either by the democratic system or the citizens. They also corroborate Christensen's (2020) findings that participatory processes should only have advisory roles.…”

“…This allows for testing the importance of authorization mechanisms under randomly varied conditions. Recently, Christensen (2020) has conducted a similar experiment on legitimacy perceptions of participatory processes in general, but with fewer authorization mechanisms as well as fewer institutional design features that are critical from both a theoretical and practical vantage. Furthermore, this experiment is the first study to connect different authorization mechanisms and design elements of deliberative forums with other sources of legitimation such as issue salience and non-participants' substantive policy preferences (Esaiasson et al 2016;Marien and Kern 2018).…”

Engaged, Indifferent, Skeptical or Critical? Disentangling Attitudes towards Local Deliberative Mini-Publics in Four Western European Democracies

“…Citizens' attitudes towards deliberative innovations were measured by presenting respondents with two randomly generated "vignettes" or descriptions of a local DMP. The vignettes provide more information about the design of DMPs than standard survey items, which is crucial for capturing attitudes towards relatively complex and unusual political processes [32]. We chose to focus on local politics, where the issues and consequences are more immediate and concrete [25].…”

“…As a measure of willingness to participate, respondents indicated how likely they would be to participate in the DMP if invited on a scale ranging from "very unlikely" (0) to "very likely" (10). While prospective (as opposed to past) participation might be considered a limitation, real opportunities to participate in DMPs are few and far between, even at the local level [32]. Overall willingness to participate was slightly higher than support, with an average score of 5.89 out of 10.…”

“…In all countries the BIC is much lower for four-cluster models than for preceding models but only slightly lower for five and six-cluster models, which is an indication of having reached "saturation point". Hence, selecting a model with more than four classes might affect the estimation of probabilities (as this means fewer people per class) and the interpretability of the classes [32]. The UK is an exception as a four-cluster model offers very little improvement in goodness of fit relative to a three-cluster model.…”