Supporting deliberative democracy, but not participating? Explanations of the citizen participation paradox

Many Western European democracies face increasing dissatisfaction with and lower citizen participation in democratic processes. Faced with these developments, the calls for more citizen participation, for instance through deliberative minipublics, have become louder. The support for such deliberative minipublics is especially high among those who feel politically alienated, such as politically dissatisfied and populist citizens (e.g. Bedock & Pilet, 2020; Gherghina & Geißel, 2019; Pilet et al., 2022; Van der Does & Kantorowicz, 2022; Zaslove et al., 2021). However, when we take a look at those who actually participate in such democratic innovations, higher-educated and elderly people are overrepresented (Den Ridder et al., 2021), who are on average more satisfied with the functioning of democracy. This seem to result in a paradoxical situation: democratic innovations are implemented to involve those who feel alienated, but it may be those who are already involved and feel represented that actually participate. A key prerequisite for democratic innovation, however, is that different people, opinions and interests should have equal chances of being heard of represented (Fishkin, 2011; Hendriks, 2021), so the question is whether these democratic innovations live up to the expectations. Or even better: under what conditions would these innovations live up to expectations? A possible solution is to oversample or actively motivate groups of people who may be underrepresented among the participants of deliberative minipublics. But who should be targeted? In this study, we examine possible explanations why people intend to participate or not. Whereas several recent studies focused on support for deliberative minipublics, relatively few quantitative studies examined citizens’ intentions to participate. We make use of an original survey among a representative sample of the Dutch population, fielded in 2021. We have asked respondents whether they would support a deliberative minipublic on climate change or immigration – one of the most pressing challenges in most Western European countries – and whether they would attend if they got invited. First, we test what socio-demographic groups are more likely to participate. Second, we test to what extent these effects are mediated by possible reasons why people would not participate (Jacquet, 2017): attitudes towards representative and deliberative democracy, external and internal political efficacy, political interest, and ideological positioning and satisfaction with policies regarding climate change and immigration. Our findings will shed light on what socio-demographic groups are potentially underrepresented and why, yielding specific recommendations to increase citizen participation and foster inclusive democracy.