Who Deliberates? Evidence from Deliberative Democracy in Lebanon

• In Event: The Causes and Consequences of Conflict

Abstract

In highly divided societies, where religious or other group identities inhibit social integration, can deliberation among citizens about policy alternatives help repair social fragmentation and increase support for programmatic and inclusive politics? Although deliberative formats have proliferated around the world, scholarly attention has focused on testing the efficacy of these mini-publics. Yet, empirical work has overlooked two fundamental questions: who deliberates and whether deliberative formats enjoy popular legitimacy. Specifically, one of the main challenges faced by both practitioners and academics has been to encourage participation in deliberative meetings by diverse groups representative of society at large. Related to this, we posit that citizens may be willing to participate in these meetings as long as they perceive them as a more legitimate way to process decision-making. In this paper, we aim to answer both questions by combining survey data with a series of experiments designed to shed light on the factors that drive citizens' willingness to participate in deliberative meetings. We begin by characterizing the public's general idea of what citizen deliberative meetings are through an in-depth text analysis of responses to open-ended questions. Next, we examine how highlighting different characteristics of the input, throughput, and output of deliberative formats shapes individuals' willingness to participate in these types of meetings. Finally, we examine the extent to which the outcomes of these formats enjoy greater or lesser legitimacy vis-à-vis other possible formats, common in democracies, such as decisions made by legislators or expert advice, among others. However, we argue that legitimacy will be a function of the political arena considered; specifically, the salience and sectarianization of the policy domain will make citizen deliberation more or less perceived as an adequate forum for reaching decisions. The evidence gathered in this project contributes to our understanding of how deliberation works to de-escalate intergroup conflict and some potential limits to existing studies that fail to account for possible selection effects that may underlie their conclusions.

Authors

• Julian Vierlinger, European University Institute

• Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Harvard Business School

• Christoph Niessen, Leiden University