After examining internal effects of deliberative mini-publics on their participants, scholars have started devoting more attention to the mini-public’s influence on public policy. Although these studies provide valuable insights, they suffer from two shortcomings. First, they approach the policy process as if nothing existed before the mini-public. They consider that a mini-public has an impact when a mini-public’s recommendation is congruent with subsequent public policy. However, decision-makers also hold preferences beforehand and therefore a mini-public can influence policy-makers by changing or confirming their preferences. Second, studies rely on a monolithic conception of public policy which overlooks the different components and levels of abstraction that compose it. As a consequence, analyses are constrained in their explanatory power and they cannot differentiate whether a mini-public affects significant or symbolic aspect of public policy.
This paper addresses these deficiencies in a new analytical framework, the Sequential Impact Matrix. This framework relies on a distinction between the mini-public’s influences on policy makers and the result of these influences on public policy. It develops an operationalization of both concepts, which allows a systematic and transparent analysis of a mini-public’s impact on public policy. Based on these two indicators, it builds a 10 point-scale of the mini-public’s impact on public policy.
The paper then applies the framework on two Belgian mini-publics: The Ouderspanel (2016) and the Panel Citoyen pour le Pacte d’Excellence (2016). These cases are interesting because both had a similar design (i.e. a citizens’ panel on education) but they occurred in different political contexts. Whereas the former took place in the Flemish community with a centre-right government, the latter was convened by the French Speaking Community with a centre-left government. The analysis shows the difficulty for mini-publics not only to inject new ideas into the policy-making but also to transform policy-makers’ preferences. Most of the mini-public’s policy impact aligns with the policy-makers’ pre-existing preferences, thereby questioning our theoretical and normative expectations for mini-publics to actually improve the deliberative and democratic systems.
