Examining the links between deliberative minipublics, democratic legitimacy perceptions, and the wider public

Abstract

Deliberative minipublics are widely applauded for their positive effects on the small group of randomly selected citizens who participate in the deliberative exercise. Extant research highlights changes in participants’ political attitudes and behaviour, amongst which stand higher levels of political knowledge, trust in government, political efficacy and civic engagement (e.g. Boulianne, 2019; 2020; Grönlund et al., 2010). Several scholars have suggested that these beneficial effects can also occur in the wider public – that is, among people who were not personally involved in the minipublic’s proceedings but who were in varying degree and form aware of a minipublic, its features or output (Boulianne 2018; Jäske, 2020; Knobloch et al., 2020; Setälä et al. 2020). Although the few extant studies on non-participants indeed indicate a broader pay-off of minipublics, much remains to be explored: Identifying patterns of support for these forums within subgroups of the wider public, gauging the importance the latter attaches to certain commonly shared design features of minipublics, accounting for contextual influences on these popular perceptions, or differentiating between effects of being exclusively aware of a forum compared to additionally considering its output or recommendations. The focus of this panel is twofold. Firstly, this panel invites papers that focus on the wider public’s attitudes towards deliberative minipublics. We welcome papers that examine support for (different types of) minipublics alongside those that look into citizens’ perceptions of deliberative minipublics as legitimate processes in themselves. Secondly, we invite research on effects of minipublics on political attitudes and behaviour more generally as well as on their underlying mechanisms. Examples of such effects include – but are not limited to – political trust, decision acceptance and public opinion.

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