Meet Me in the Middle? How People and Political Parties See Deliberation

Two burgeoning strands of literature speak about people’s demand for deliberation and the ways in which the elites strive deliberation or try to avoid it. Although they both find an increasing demand for deliberation on both the demand and supply side, there is little dialogue between the findings. As such, beyond isolated case studies, we do not know how similar people and politicians are in their approach towards deliberation. To address this gap , out paper has a twofold goal: 1) to map the convergence of people’s attitudes and the rhetoric of political parties on deliberation in 15 European countries between 2021 and 2023 and 2) to explain the variation in convergence. It uses individual-level data from the EPIS survey combined with the manifestos of all the political parties that gained more than 1% in the elections that was the closest to the moment of population survey. The explanatory models include party level variables such as ideology, incumbency (vs. opposition), size and age and country level variables such as electoral system, experience with deliberation and size.