Alastair Stark, Nivek Thompson (@NivekKThompson) and Greg Marston argue that public deliberation can lead to better policy design by offering something more dynamic than a ‘snapshot’ of public opinion: it can show policymakers how citizens think and justify their decisions.

How can deliberation support day-to-day policy design? With both online and face-to-face deliberation, our experiment demonstrates that policymakers can benefit from citizen deliberation without always having to use a citizens' jury or assembly process.

Citizens' juries and assemblies (often referred to by academics as deliberative mini-publics) ask a randomly selected group of citizens, stratified to descriptively match the community to learn and deliberate to reach a consensus position for governments to consider and hopefully act on. Citizens' juries and assemblies tend to involve significant amounts of time, and hence resources are only used where a challenging and often contentious decision needs to be made.

Traditional approaches to gaining citizen input to policy focus on participatory mechanisms, which seek to understand citizen opinion through public meetings, surveys, and market research. The difference between these processes and deliberative ones is that in the latter, citizens are given information about the policy area and work together respectfully and through sharing perspectives with a focus on the common good rather than their own opinion.

Our research

Our experiment randomly selected participants to consider four separate policy proposals, all with an environmental focus. Co-opted experts provided basic information on the advantages and disadvantages of each proposed policy, and the participants had the opportunity to question these arguments. The participants then shared their perspectives and listened to others either in online discussions or face-to-face.

Participants were asked their views on the four policy proposals before and after the deliberative process. As might be expected from other deliberative research, in particular Deliberative Polling, participants' perspectives on these policy proposals did change after hearing 'evidence' about them and deliberating with others on them.

Image from face to face deliberation (supplied by research team)

Of particular interest to policymakers is the policy proposal to link car registration costs to the kilometres travelled. In the initial survey, 75% of participants supported this idea. After hearing about the advantages and disadvantages and considering the proposal with others, this changed to 100% opposed (for the face-to-face group) and 46% opposed and 31% unsure (for the online group). Similar, although not as dramatic, changes occurred for two of the other three policy proposals.

Our analysis of the discussions, both for the face-to-face and online elements of the experiment, demonstrated what we believe to be an essential value add for policymakers from these 'light touch' deliberative processes. By considering how people talk about policy and what arguments change their initial view on a policy proposal, we can better understand how people think, to understand policy options and how they relate to other existing or potential policy mixes.

Why deliberation can be better

This experiment suggests that the evidence policymakers often use, which takes a snapshot of people's views on a topic, may give a distorted perspective. Including a deliberative component in policy consultation has a number of benefits for policymakers:

Provides a better understanding of the dynamics of public opinion and how it changes, and why
Identifies what matters to citizens in different policy areas and how they make sense of policy choices.

Decision-makers may reject deliberative processes, as they involve power-sharing - providing a commitment to implement the group's recommendations. Citizens’ juries and assemblies tend to be used only for difficult issues where policymakers are in no win situation.

This experiment demonstrates the value in supporting citizen deliberation on policy proposals as analysis of citizen sensemaking and citizen justifications can deliver insights for policy designers.

By showing the value of mini-publics to policy design generally, and by showing that value as something which can be distinct from power sharing, we hope to show policymakers that there is more to deliberative democracy: it can also produce better policy design.

Read the full open access article: Stark, A., Thompson, N. K., and Marston, G. (2021) Public deliberation and policy design. Policy Design and Practice, doi 10.1080/25741292.2021.1912906.