Roads to minipublic success: Exploring “technocratic” and “democratic” pathways to uptake based on a new dataset of deliberative minipublics

Not only is the public use of deliberative minipublics on the rise around the globe, some have claimed that this is accompanied by increasing consequentiality (OECD Report, 2020). But the issue of minipublic consequentiality is contested (Achen 2022) and under-researched. A few pioneering studies have addressed this issue, especially Font et al. (2016) who found that minipublic recommendations are “cherry-picked”, but this finding is limited to the Spanish context. Similarly, Smith et al. (2015) found out of the Participedia database that the more deliberative minipublics are, the less policy effects they create; again this result is based on a limited number of crowd-sourced cases. The OECD (2020) has compiled an extensive database on deliberative minipublics, but despite an update in 2022 information on the uptake of minipublic recommendations is limited - especially with regard to antecedents of mini-public success or failure - and fairly scattered across different contexts. In this paper we introduce a new dataset based on the Participedia platform, enhanced by an “observer survey” complementing missing cases and updating missing information. The databank comprises over 150 minipublic cases conducted at the national and regional level in Great Britain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark and Finland as well as the European level in the period from 2000-2021. By focusing on a wide-range of potential antecedents of minipublic uptake, ranging from process design (e.g. initiative, purpose, size, composition), issue type (complexity and salience), political support (especially alignment of recommendations with preferences of political elites), and characteristics of the country context (e.g. open vs closed political systems), the dataset provides a new springboard for exploring the antecedents of minipublic uptake. We will provide first results exploring whether there is a “technocratic” or “democratic” road to minipublic success, i.e. whether minipublic uptake – defined as full, partial or no implementation of minpublic recommendations - only happens when minipublics are organized top-down, are designed for policy appraisal and do not contest the preferences of political elites (“technocratic” road) or whether uptake also happens when some procedural features are more democratic (bottom-up organization, allowance for policy development and non-alignment with elite preferences).