A Nation Talking to Itself?: Print and online media coverage of mini-publics and public knowledge acquisition

As the study of democratic innovations has increasingly taken a macro perspective (Grönlund et al. 2014), the normative role of mini-publics in deliberative systems has been seen as trusted information proxies to guide public opinion (Mackenzie and Warren 2012) and, to stimulate public debate (Niemeyer 2014), on policy issues. However, these aims can only be achieved if mini-publics receive appropriate media exposure (Maia 2018). Despite this, there has been very little research conducted on media coverage of mini-publics and the effects this has on public opinion and debate. Moreover, much of the existing research utilises experimental methodology (Boulianne 2018), rather than actual existing cases operating in the political system, which fails to consider the role of journalists as actors in the public sphere (Pomatto 2019). We start to fill this gap through a case study approach (Elstub and Pomatto 2021), focusing on the Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland. We employ a mixed method approach that combines content analysis of the press coverage, interviews with journalists, and a survey of the Scottish public to analyse the role of print and online media as an arena and actor in linking the citizens’ assembly to the public sphere.