Climate Change Citizen Assemblies in 21st Century Media Environments: An Analytical Framework for Studying “Communicative Flows” in Democratic Systems and Climate Change Assemblies’ Potential to Counteract Vested Interests

Assessments of climate change citizen assemblies have devoted much attention to the quality of deliberation within assemblies and, more recently, also to their embeddedness in the existing system of representative-democratic institutions and the policy cycle (e.g., Boswell et al. 2022). This has shed light on the design of climate change assemblies and on strategies for making their results matter in collectively binding decision-making. Nevertheless, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the potential for deliberative communication between elites and citizens to underpin climate action also requires a more differentiated understanding of political communication involving and/or concerning climate change assemblies as well as mediated communication. Assessments of climate change assemblies need to systematically account for “communicative flows” between citizen assemblies and diverse actors and spaces in the broader democratic system including elites, and media. This also requires a more nuanced account of the digitalisation-associated “transformation of the public sphere”, and the increasingly complex interplay of diverse digital media and forums, “traditional” legacy media and various political actors and institutions (e.g., Chadwick 2017). Following suit, this paper presents an analytical framework for studying climate change assemblies that builds on systemic deliberative theory. Systemic deliberative theory provides an excellent point of departure for developing analytical frameworks to study the ways in which climate change citizen assemblies and diverse other democratic spaces or "deliberative sites" interact. Yet, contemporary deliberative theory usually does not account for the complexity of the 21st century media landscape as a site for deliberation and political communication (including heterogeneous spaces such as traditional mass media, blogs, different social media) -- and for its role(s) in the overall political process that (climate change) citizen assemblies are part of. To allow for a more differentiated analysis of political communication about climate change assemblies and between climate change assemblies and other democratic actors, we therefore complement systemic deliberative theory with conceptual approaches from the fields of science communication and political communication studies. We illustrate the merits of our framework for a deeper understanding of climate change policy and climate change assemblies’ potential to counteract the impact of vested interests and strategic actors by referring to exemplary empirical applications of our framework to climate change citizen assemblies and political communication about climate change in Ireland, Germany and the UK.