| Popis: |
In the wake of a crisis of representation and a growing detachment of citizens from institutions, the debate on alternative models of democracy proposes inclusive procedures to complement representative mechanisms (Barber 1984; Held 1987; Patenam 1970; Elster 1998). Deliberative tools, including deliberative polling, public assemblies, online communities and mini-publics, allows citizens with different viewpoints to discuss political issues in a context of mutual respect and equality. Empirical research has shown that these practices would produce positive outcomes, such as knowledge of issues (Grönlund et al. 2010), an understanding of the complexity of the political process, recognition of others’ views and changes in opinions (Luskin et al. 2002) as well as an attenuation of opinion polarization (Grönlund et al. 2015), and, above all, democratic legitimacy and trust (Boulianne 2019). Advocates of deliberation argues that this has the potential to transform people’s political attitudes and arrive at shared decisions providing alternative policy solutions (Bächtiger et al. 2018). One central tenet of deliberative democratic theory is that democracy should be inclusive and non-discriminatory. In order to foster inclusion deliberative theory has focused on the selection of participants to deliberative democracy, arguing that random selection is the least discriminatory strategy to bring people to discuss and deliberate. However, much less attention has been devoted to other components of the process and the way they might affect the rate of participation and the motivation to participate (e.g., Gherghina et al. 2021). In the light of this, we propose a conjoint experiment (Hainmueller et al. 2013; Hainmueller et al. 2015) to dig deeper into the conditions that foster participation, exploring which conditions, beside the mode of selection, can affect the decision to join a deliberative mini-public. The single conjoint experiment we discuss below focuses on eight main conditions that characterize deliberative mini-publics: mode of selection (self-selection, random selection and based on level of expertise); topic (one controversial topic – immigration – and one more consensual topic – environment); scope (distance from the respondent); duration; financial incentives; impact on policy-making (consultative versus decision-oriented deliberation); mode of deliberation (on line or in person) and sponsorship (academics, vs. partisan vs. public authorities). The study has the potential to contribute to the policy debate on how to increase citizens’ engagement in deliberative democracy. |
