Mini-Public Replication: Emotions and Deliberation in the Citizens' Initiative Review Redux

Scholars have increasingly urged researchers to evaluate prior findings through replication studies that can help test, refine, and extend claims made in previous research. We agree that this is an important aspect of social science that deliberative scholarship has underutilized. To help fill this lacunae, we test our previous findings from an analysis of data from Citizen Initiative Reviews (CIRs) in 2016 by replicating our methodology on data from CIRs in 2018. We set out to determine if the patterns we discovered earlier and developed into the Deliberative Procedures Frame theory appeared again in 2018 CIRs. We find repeating across the two sets of data, including consistent levels of enthusiasm, slow rising happiness, and the relationships between certain emotions on the final day and participants’ evaluations of deliberative quality, and these indicate that our theory remains a viable explanation for emotions in mini-public deliberation. We remain confident that the sources of anger and frustration identified in our previous analysis remains correct. On the basis of this replication, we clarify that what we call the Procedures Frame enables the identification of the most likely time points during deliberation when the threat to democratic legitimacy and the risk to quality deliberation will most likely arise and result in expressions of emotion. Finally, our study reinforces how important deliberative design is to the role of emotions in the success of mini-publics.

Towards a Sustainable Landscape: Constructing Identities and Ambitions in a Citizen Initiative in the Making

The recent proliferation of citizen initiatives that aim to contribute to sustainable landscape transition prompted us to study how members of such an initiative in-the-making try to position themselves in their environment in order to make a meaningful contribution. We use a single case study in the east of the Netherlands to study how members discursively construct identities and ambitions through the inclusion of people and ideas over time. We applied an interactional framing analysis to 20 audio-recorded and transcribed meetings of the citizen initiative. The results show that various actors and ideas were included over time, resulting in the construction of different ambitions and identities over time. Ambitions changed in response to new event and changing circumstances. To justify these changing ambitions, the members constructed new identities during their conversations, using different interactional framing strategies. The study reveals that the process of finding an ambition and identity continuously changed direction, paradoxically, due to a lack of direction that hindered the members in making coherent and sustainable decisions. We conclude that a citizen initiative should actively interact with their relation groups to find a direction that supports the process of effectively positioning their initiative and contributes to the shared goal of improving the quality of the living environment.

Policy for science by ballot or by roll call?

This study compares stem cell research policymaking by legislators and citizens in the United States. First, using exit poll results from a 2006 stem cell research initiative in Missouri, the study finds that deeply held personal values such as religious beliefs and views of abortion predominate in an individual’s voting decision on this issue; second, an analysis of voting behavior by senators on the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 finds that senators make their voting decisions based on their personal policy preferences rather than their constituents’ preferences; and third, the complexity of the Missouri citizen initiative is compared with that of the legislation in the U.S. Senate, finding that the language of the citizen initiative is more sophisticated than the language of the legislative act. These findings provide the context for a broader discussion of the role of citizens and legislators in making policy for science.

Unfulfilled promise: How and why citizen initiative was created in British Columbia

Democracy serves as a governing philosophy where decisions are made by a vote of the population. Due to the large numbers of citizens who live in modern democracies, this is mainly done through elections to legislative assemblies as a form of representative democracy. But representative democracy does not always ensure policy alignment between citizens and elected representatives. Citizen initiatives serve as a means of promoting greater policy alignment by allowing citizens to propose their own legislation, to be voted on by the electorate. This thesis investigates why British Columbia chose to enact citizen initiative alone among Canadian provinces, and also why British Columbia’s policy was written with the provisions and constraints that elected representatives chose to include. The research shows that key individuals in power used their influence to advocate for citizen initiative in the province, and that British Columbia’s citizen initiative process was written to accommodate constitutional requirements and public opinion on what citizen initiative should look like.

Designing Democratic Innovations as Deliberative Systems: The Ambitious Case of NHS Citizen

What does it mean to design democratic innovation from a deliberative systems perspective? The demand of the deliberative systems approach that we turn from the single forum towards the broader system has largely been embraced by those interested in designing institutions for citizen participation. Nevertheless, there has been no analysis of the practical implications for democratic innovation. Is it possible to design differentiated but interconnected participatory and deliberative settings? Does this better connect democratic innovations to mass politics? Does it promote greater legitimacy? This article analyses one such attempt to design a systems-oriented democratic innovation: the ambitious NHS Citizen initiative. Our analysis demonstrates, while NHS Citizen pioneered some cutting-edge participatory design, it ultimately failed to resolve (and in some cases exacerbated) well-known obstacles to institutionalisation as well as generating new challenges. To effectively realise democratic renewal and reform, systems-oriented democratic innovation must evolve strategies to meet these challenges.