Exploring Deliberative Multiplier Effects on Minipublic Participants’ Social Network

Deliberative minipublics have emerged as a key practice for embedding deliberation into democratic decision-making processes. Initially, they were critiqued for their limited capacity to engage the wider public and enhance democratic legitimacy (Chambers 2009; Pateman 2012). With a shift towards a more systemic approach of democracy, however, scholars now examine minipublics within the broader context of democratic systems. Although there is a growing literature focusing on external (spillover) effects of minipublics on the wider public, the empirical evidence is still scarce and remains tentative (van der Does und Jacquet 2023). Despite growing attention to the external effects of minipublics, the minipublic participants’ immediate social network (family, friends and acquaintances) remains an underexplored area of impact. This subgroup of the wider public matters because it is at closest proximity of minipublic participants. If the latter share their deliberative experiences with their social network, they act potentially as "deliberative multipliers". In this regard, the proven internal effects of minipublics might spill-over to everyday political conversations outside the forum and therefore broaden the impact of these small-scale deliberative forums within the wider public (Mansbridge 1999; Lazer u. a. 2015). To shed light on this question, this study investigates how participating in a minipublic influences both the deliberative quantity and quality of everyday political talk within participants’ social networks outside the deliberative forum. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining longitudinal quantitative surveys with qualitative focus groups. Surveys conducted before, during, and after participation in a Swiss national Citizens’ Assembly (n = 100) capture the extent and nature of information-sharing within participants' social networks, while focus groups including minipublic participants and members of their social networks delve into the impact of the minipublic experiences on informal political talk. By addressing the gap in understanding the spillover effects of minipublics on everyday political talk outside the forum, this research contributes to broader discussions on how these small-scale deliberative forums are connected to the wider public. Specifically, it sheds light on the question to what extent minipublics can enhance the deliberative capacity of democratic systems by injecting deliberation into everyday political conversations of minipublic participants with their family, friends or acquaintances outside the forum.