From Remit to Output: A Comparative Empirical Analysis of Local Citizens’ Assemblies’ Recommendations

Deliberative minipublics (DMPs), including citizens’ assemblies (CAs) are expected to democratize the policy-making process, empower the perspectives of regular citizens, and heighten the epistemic value of public decisions. Recently, research on DMPs has been focusing not only on their internal procedures, but also on their integration into the political system and their broader impacts. However, certain ‘micro-level’ aspects of a minipublic’s design have implications for its interactions with the macro-context as well. A central yet insufficiently researched aspect of any minipublic is the remit, i.e. the deliberative process’s guiding question. The remit frames the issue to be addressed and sets boundaries for the recommendations that the process should produce and in which policy fields. In practice, DMPs’ remits vary greatly in their specificity and breadth. Several practice-oriented reports and single case studies showcase how the remit impacts all major aspects of the process, including the quality of deliberation, its outputs, actors’ perceptions of the process, and the subsequent political impacts. However, systematic comparative analyses examining the consequences of various remits have been thus far lacking. DMPs’ substantive outputs are another aspect that hasn’t received enough attention, even though providing recommendations on public policies can be considered the DMPs’ main aim (OECD, 2020). Certain attributes of recommendations may represent a key factor in their successive implementation and, thus, minipublics’ effectiveness in influencing policymaking. The few studies that examined the outputs of CAs to date have found them to be substantively and consistently different than policies developed by traditional policy-makers, e.g. in their sectoral distribution and types of policy instruments. However, the results varied between cases, and further research is needed to explain the sources of this variation. Given this central role played by minipublics’ remits and their hypothetical relevance for the shape of their recommendations, it is crucial to investigate more closely what results follow from certain design choices. In my doctoral research, I focus on bridging the gap between the CAs remits, the outputs they produce, and their subsequent policy impacts. The presented empirical chapter will address the research question of what differentiates recommendations developed in CAs processes with more broadly and more narrowly formulated remits. The analysis will be based on a database comprising all recommendations (n=384) put forward by 9 local CAs commissioned to discuss climate-related issues in Poland between 2016 and 2023. Polish CA cases are well suited for such a comparison due to their uniform designs, duration, and legal and institutional context. The recommendations will be coded using a categorization framework developed by Szymaniak-Arnesen and Gąsiorowska [work in progress] that allows for a systematic comparison of CA outputs across cases. The analysis will present a still-rare instance of a comparative analysis of CAs’ substantive outputs and, as a part of the broader research agenda, address the research gap on the relevance of the DMPs’ remits and their outputs for their subsequent policy impacts.