Can Deliberative Instruments Save (also) Representative Politics in Backsliding Context? First evidence from the case of Poland

The electoral rise of right-wing, populist parties that has witnessed Poland in recent years, as well as other Central European countries like Hungary or Romania, has often been portrayed as an indicator of the failure of representative politics in post-communist countries. Since deliberative approaches of policymaking attempt to fight against long-standing discontent with liberal democracy, it deserves to be question whether reorienting politics towards a deliberative democratic culture could help answer the bottom-up critique exploited by populist parties in these countries. Hence, we analyze the effect of the participation to the first bottom-up deliberative initiative ever led at the national level in Poland. The Citizen Panel on Energy Poverty occurs in 2022 for two days. It draws a representative sample of the Polish population to reflect on how Poland should go further dealing with poverty generated by the current energy crisis. Participants were surveyed twice: before and after the event. We benefited from these two repeated measures to explore the impact of the participation on their knowledge of the issue, baseline political attitudes, and attitudes towards deliberative mini-publics. Based on the existing literature in the field of democratic innovations, we formulate several expectations that are overall articulated around the idea of a democratic spillover effect. These are tested through pre/post comparisons of the same sample of participants (N=68). Then, we discuss the results as to see whether we find similar patterns than those observed in other context, i.e., in countries with higher democratic standards, where deliberative instruments are more common and therefore have been more studied. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on whether deliberative instruments might be an appropriate response to the populist/anti-liberal backsliding in Poland.