From Raw to Considered Opinions on Municipal Mergers – The Role of Deliberation on Contested Local Issues

Municipal mergers are arguably one of the most wide encompassing and important issues which local democracies face. They also resemble wicked-problems, albeit on a local scale, since they have broad-reaching consequences, affect all citizens of the municipality, and tend to stir up strong emotions and ultimately leave large groups of citizens dissatisfied. In this paper we study the role of public deliberation in shaping opinions on a current actual proposed municipal merger in Western Finland. The potential merger has given rise to widespread debate, and the population is clearly divided between those in favor and against the merger. Given how the deliberative process promotes rationality, argumentation, reciprocity, mutual respect and understanding of differing viewpoints, we hypothesize that opinions on the prosed merger converge more after deliberation than before deliberation. To study this, we use two types of data. Firstly, in order to measure raw opinions unconsidered opinions on the proposed merger, a survey will be disseminated to all citizens of the municipality in question (N is expected to be around 6,000. Total population in municipality is 20,000). In this survey, we ask respondents about their opinions on the merger, the arguments in favor or against it, and which aspects of the merger that they care most about. The second data material is collected through three mini-publics about the municipal merger (N is expected to be about 200 in total). In these deliberations, we use experimental pre-test post-test design to gauge opinion changes due to deliberation. Moreover, since the surveys disseminated prior and after deliberation contain the same items as the survey sent to all citizens, we are able to compare the post-deliberation opinions to the raw opinions measured in the survey. Data collection is taking place currently and will be finished in April 2018.