Elite perspectives on the merits of deliberative mini-publics: Local officials’ tales from three Swiss cities

Despite increasing scholarship on citizens’ views on mini-publics, the perspective of public officials remains understudied. A better understanding of this perspective is crucial, however. On the one hand, it remains unclear what function and role mini-publics can and should play within the broader public governance system. On the other hand, recent studies draw our attention to the fact that political uptake of recommendations from mini-publics rarely has stable and linear impacts on policymaking (Boswell et al. 2022). Political elites play a key role in determining the realization and anchoring of deliberative mini-publics in political practice, which makes their expectations and attitudes towards such processes an important object of scientific inquiry. The goal of this paper is to shed light on these questions. It presents the results of a qualitative study that explores the motivations, expectations and views of local elites involved in the organization of deliberative mini-publics that took place, in 2021 and 2022, in three mid-sized cities in Switzerland. In total, 15 elected politicians and high-ranked public managers were interviewed. Importantly, the views of the 7 public managers directly involved in the realization of the mini-publics were tracked over time: before, during and six to ten months after a mini-public took place in their city. Using inductive thematic analysis - allowing to identify “underlying ideas, assumptions, and conceptualisations” (Braun & Clarke 2006: 14) – the study presents and discusses the different narratives portended by local politicians’ and public managers’ in relation to the mini-public conducted in each of the three cities. It carves out specifically the perceived function of mini-publics in the existing local governance system. Findings are that local politicians and public managers harbour a rather instrumental view of mini-public and have clear (but differing) views on their potential functions. Yet they are also genuinely interested in improving citizen involvement, especially of those that are disconnected from traditional participatory institutions. Furthermore, the motivation for the use of mini-publics, at least among some, seems to be fed by a highly critical attitude towards the existing features of representative party government.