Jury Service and Electoral Participation: A Test of the Participation Hypothesis

Deliberative Democracy and the American Civil Jury

“…As we noted above, however, it is likely that deliberation interacts with the structural variables of jury size and decision rule. These potential interactions were hidden in the previous Gastil et al (2002Gastil et al ( , 2008Gastil et al ( , 2010 analyses of criminal juries because of the largely invariant 12-person unanimous nature of criminal jury decision making.…”

“…The fact that civil juries differ structurally across and within different states was not considered in the prior research by Gastil et al (2008Gastil et al ( , 2010, so adding it to the analysis may reveal previously unseen civil jury effects.…”

“…Gastil et al (2008Gastil et al ( , 2010 used deliberation as a contrast, comparing jurors who experienced deliberation to those who did not. In this analysis of civil jurors, we predict that, after controlling for the other factors introduced in our study, deliberation will enhance jurors' civic engagement.…”

“…This study employs data originally collected by Gastil et al (2008Gastil et al ( , 2010. The original data set included both criminal and civil jurors, and we analyze only civil jurors.…”

“…For the periods studied, it constitutes a complete census of juries in the selected counties, but the counties themselves and the sampling period are not random. Gastil et al (2008) found it impossible for both technical and logistical reasons to collect jury service and voting data for a fully representative national random sample of jurors. Only some counties made available complete jury records that could be coupled with adequate voting histories.…”