Citizen’s Trust in Mini-Publics in France

Mini-publics have been proposed as a participatory mechanism to bridge the widening gap between citizens and elected representatives by letting citizens participate in the political decision-making process. In practice, the number of participants is restricted, especially compared to the whole population. For mini-publics to become effective in rekindling the relationship between the electorate and representatives, they should positively influence both participants and non-participants. In this paper, we investigate how the general population perceives mini-publics. With the multiplication of designs, we seek to understand whether characteristics of the design (access to experts, decisions taken by vote or consensus, and the final decision taken by referendum or by the government) impact citizens' perception of the participatory process. Through a factorial vignette survey experiment (2x2x2) conducted in France (n=1600), we analyse the effect of design on trust and legitimacy of a mini-public. Furthermore, we look into how the perception of different dimensions of the mini-public affects trust in it, such as representativeness and competence. We check how socio-economic factors and political attitudes impact citizens’ perception of the mini-publics. The preliminary results show that knowing that mini-public participants can interact with experts increases citizens’ trust in the mini-public. Taking the decision by vote or consensus does not impact trust. The final decision-maker (recommendation sent to politicians or referendum) has no effect on trust. We do find that perception of competence of participants increases trust but there is no significant effect of like me perception (representativeness) on trust. Some socio-economic and political attitudes variables influence trust, such as social trust, age and gender.