What citizens want from deliberative forms of participation: mapping legitimacy perceptions with an online survey and a preference experiment
Final Report Abstract
The research project "Perleg” shows that non-participating (representative) citizen in Germany, United States, Ireland and Finland think that deliberative citizen forums (DCFs) are quite attractive institutional innovations but in general are very reluctant to grant them empowerment and autonomy as well as ask for additional provisions. Citizens in general want DCFs to be constricted: non-empowered (limited to an advisory role), coupled (collaborating with legacy actors), and complying with extra provisions, namely descriptively representative composition via random selection, large size, and clear majorities for recommendations. However, disenchanted citizens and citizens who have made positive experiences with DCFs are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens and citizens who are unfamiliar with DCFs, but this not imply that they are generally in favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent vis-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). The project also shows that sensitization for DCFs matter: the more citizens know about DCFs, the more supportive there are. Overall, the project findings suggest that "recreating feelings of "ownership” of the democratic process via citizen forums might turn out to be a rockier road than many advocates have imagined” (Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022). Empowering DCFs – as some advocates have proposed - might eventually decrease (rather than increase) citizens’ satisfaction with democracy.
Publications
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Towards a More Robust, But Limited and Contingent, Defence of the Political Uses of Deliberative Minipublics. Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 16(2).
Bächtiger, André & Goldberg, Saskia
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Just Advisory and Maximally Representative: A Conjoint Experiment on Non-Participants' Legitimacy Perceptions of Deliberative Forums. Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 17(1).
Goldberg, Saskia
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Catching the ‘Deliberative Wave’? How (Disaffected) Citizens Assess Deliberative Citizen Forums. British Journal of Political Science, 53(1), 239-247.
Goldberg, Saskia & Bächtiger, André
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Replication data for article "Catching the Deliberative Wave” at Harvard Dataverse.
Saskia Goldberg & André Bächtiger
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Where the grass is always greener: Non-participants´ contingent legitimacy perceptions of deliberative citzens´ forums. PhD Thesis, University of Stuttgart
Saskia Goldberg
