Citizens’ Perception of Deliberation in Participatory Democracy: the Role of Demonstrability

Citizen deliberation, as in mini-publics, is widely promoted as a method to improve political decision-making and increase its legitimacy among the general public. Past work suggests that such deliberations yield epistemic improvements, in particular when the problems being discussed are quite high in demonstrability (i.e. when some solutions are better than others, and can be argued for). However, to be effective beyond the few participating citizens, such deliberations have to be perceived positively by non-participating citizens. In the present work, we measured participants’ perceptions of the epistemic benefits and the fairness of citizen deliberation and investigated whether the participants’ assessments were influenced by the perceived demonstrability of the issue under discussion. Having validated a measure of perceived demonstrability (N = 80), we investigated participants’ perceptions of deliberation, using pre-tested stimuli to manipulate the perceived level of demonstrability of the issue presented (N = 370). Participants perceived deliberation as both fairer and more likely to lead to an optimal decision than individual reflection. However, their perceptions did not vary depending on demonstrability. This suggests that non-participating citizens have a positive outlook on deliberation but limited awareness of the reasons why deliberation is beneficial.