Inclusiveness of Considered Interests in Public Deliberation

• In Event: From Deliberation to Participation

Abstract

Policy makers are increasingly confronted with citizens' demand for popular involvement in the formulation, decision-making and implementation of climate and social justice policies. Responding to this demand, popular participatory processes involving citizens without political expertise have set foot in these policy areas.
The Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) – a randomly selected deliberative mini-public implemented for the first time in Oregon in 2008, combines the diversity of views from a near-randomly selected sample with its considered judgment after deliberation on an issue of public concern ahead of a direct-democratic popular vote. Past theoretical work has stressed that besides considered judgement, individuals taking part in participatory processes like the CIR also reconsider their self-interest and those of others. The paper extends this work by deriving an approach to detect the degree to which individuals involved directly in the deliberation consider other interests or their self-interest and the extent to which these considerations are exclusive.
We use this framework to identify what triggers changes in participants' interests and to understand why some citizens are more inclusive of certain interests than others. We test the framework by applying it to pooled data of 91 participants in four deliberative mini-publics conducted in Switzerland between 2019 and 2021 on the topics of climate change and housing policy. We develop a survey question eliciting participants’ considered interests of a range of political jurisdictions and complement the responses with textual analysis (word embeddings) from the transcript of the first pilot CIR. Using panel and mixed effects regressions, we find substantially larger degrees of inclusive interests among older participants and those taking part in the two CIR mini-publics. These findings help policymakers and social movements to identify the importance of both individual and process characteristics in shaping to what extent popular involvement of citizens stimulates taking others' interests into account.

Author

• Alexander Matthias Geisler, Université de Genève