Communitarian Deliberation: Two Citizen Experiments on the Political Rights of Foreigners in the Swiss Canton of Geneva

In this article, we relate deliberative theory to the political rights literature, both theoretically and empirically. Our starting point is a strong intuition, namely that deliberation might constitute a mechanism to sensitize discourse participants for the frequent problématique of absent rights of denizens. Focusing on two deliberative experiments with randomly selected citizens in the Swiss canton of Geneva we find, however, that citizens do not shift their opinions in progressive directions; in one experiment, citizens even became massively less favorable to political rights after deliberation. This provides evidence for what we call “communitarian deliberation”. In this conception, “good reasons” cannot be equated with liberal and progressive ideas and concepts, but arise on the basis of communal values and self-understandings that mirror local and temporal circumstances.