Hear Me Out: A Behavioral Experiment on Fairness and Deliberation in Collaborative Governance

• In Event: Coming Full Circle: Design, Deliberation, Decision, and Delivery of Collaborative Policymaking

Abstract

Fairness hinges not only on impartial outcomes but also on deliberative processes. Collaborative governance theories highlight the fairness-enhancing role of deliberation, especially amid challenges like value conflicts and unequal representation. This article provides experimental evidence to support and refine those theoretical claims. It examines how two interactional justice dimensions in deliberation—receptiveness to opposing viewpoints and explanation of reasoning—shape perceptions of distributive justice when views are not equally represented in the group. In a pre-registered online behavioral experiment with 1,034 U.S. participants, we randomly vary receptiveness, explanation, and minority-view conditions of AI-generated meeting videos and measure the perceived fairness of the final policy decision through questions on the equality-, equity-, and need-based dimensions of distributive justice. We find that receptiveness and explanation improve perceived decision fairness by about 0.33 points (0.26 standard deviation) and 0.17 points (0.13 standard deviation), respectively, on a six-point Likert scale. However, the effects of receptiveness and explanation do not stack up or differ by minority view status. Exploratory analyses on possible causal mechanisms triangulate manual, computational, and Large Language Model (LLM) assisted analysis methods on responses to open-ended questions. We find that receptiveness to opposing viewpoints fosters process inclusivity and decision acceptability through empathy and civility, whereas explanation of reasoning does so through clarity and legitimacy. Additional moderation analysis demonstrates that the effect of explanation becomes more positive when participant preferences diverge from the final decision. This article offers one of the first empirical tests linking distributive, interactional, and procedural justice in collaborative governance, suggesting that interactional justice cues in deliberation (receptiveness and explanation) can ameliorate representational disparities in procedural justice and sustain perceived distributive justice (decision fairness) despite low procedural justice (unequal viewpoint representation) and value conflicts. Such deliberative repair can thus promote reconciliation between the government and traditionally marginalized groups whose voices have been underrepresented in policymaking processes.

Author

• Jiho Kim, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author