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Experimenting with Deliberative Mini-Publics

Tue, September 28, 10:00 to 11:30am PDT (10:00 to 11:30am PDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

In both theory and practice, deliberating mini-publics have been the focus of much recent work on deliberative democracy. Yet there are many open questions about what they contribute. Do their effects last? Can their apparently salutary effects on their participants be scaled to much larger populations outside the random samples? How precisely should they be composed? These questions, and others related to them, are illuminated by the four field experiments discussed on this panel. Two of them, Siu and Wakao in Tokyo and Arneson in Norway, employ an “automated moderator” technology to conduct Deliberative Polls. This kind of technology sheds light on how deliberation can be scaled online to larger numbers of participants and to more events. The follow up to “America in One Room” a year later with both treatment and control groups sheds light on the long-term effects of deliberation in a national field experiment in the US. The results help address the question of whether spreading deliberation might have lasting as well as widespread effects. Grönlund and Herne’s paper from Turku, Finland experiments with a way to connect politicians to the mini-public, by including them within the sample in an online experiment. Progress with deliberative mini-publics depends on a dialogue that is both empirical and normative. This panel attempts to contribute to both.

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