Measuring Epistemic Deliberation of Difficult Subjects: The Case of Abortion Provision in Ireland

This paper compares the debate quality in the plenary sessions of the Irish citizen assembly and the Irish parliament on a particularly contentious subject: abortion. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly, completed its deliberations on the topic of abortion in June 2017 and its recommendation for a total liberalisation of our currently highly-restrictive laws was subsequently considered by a parliamentary committee; with a referendum provisionally slotted for May 2018. This paper compares the epistemic effects of public deliberation in both environments. We suggest that the epistemic effect of deliberation on abortion should facilitate nuanced multi-layered discussion that is both ‘deeper’ (based on multi-faceted arguments) and ‘wider’ (in terms of a more accommodative view). Both the citizens' assembly and the parliamentary committee operated in a broadly similar fashion, both listening to expert legal and health professionals as well as advocates and later questioning these witnesses. However, on the one hand, the citizen assembly had greater opportunity for facilitated discussion, and less political incentives to play to an electoral base. On the other hand the elected politicians are in a more familiar polity-denominated domain than the randomly selected citizens. We hypothesise that the presence of facilitated small group deliberation at the citizen assembly will lead to higher level sof both depth and breadth of discussion. We deploy the psychological concept of cognitive complexity. Examining these epistemic standards allow us to judge whether a given deliberative process produces better or worse outcomes from a substantive rather than purely procedural point of view.