Whom to trust? The determinants of support for citizen assemblies in Europe

Citizens remain a bottle neck in the quest to advance climate action. Studies have shown that political trust among citizens is an essential driver of support for stringent climate policies. Unfortunately, political trust and especially trust in political elites is an increasingly scarce resource which might further hinder the proposition and implementation of effective climate policies. One proposed solution to overcome this problem is the introduction of different, potentially more trusted actors such as ordinary citizens in the decision making process. Especially so-called climate assemblies have experienced an increase in popularity, with high profile cases such as the climate assemblies in France, the United Kingdom or Germany. However, it remains unclear to what extent preferences about citizen assemblies are driven by social and institutional trust. To what extent do citizens and policymakers support the use of deliberative minipublics to take decisions on climate policy? We focus on the role of trust in different societal actors, that can either act as push or pull factors in shaping support for deliberative mini-publics. The analysis is based on an original survey dataset of more than 9,000 respondents from 16 EU countries and will be contrasted with an expert-survey among more than 500 policy-makers from the same countries. We disentangle social and institutional trust into several dimensions and offer a detailed view on this construct. Contrary to previous findings, we find divergent effects for the assumption that diminishing trust in political elites drives support for citizen assemblies. Next to instrumental considerations, the main driver of support for citizen assemblies is trust in fellow citizens to make decisions on the energy transition - and this is true for both the average citizen as well as policy-makers.