A Citizens’ Jury on Referendum Options: The Case of Korsholm

The involvement of citizens in political decision-making has become a popular way to complement traditional representative decision-making recent decades. Nevertheless, many still maintain that citizens do not possess the required skills to take part when it comes to complex substance matters with potential consequences for years to come. Although deliberative mini-publics are designed to overcome some of the cognitive problems related to decision-making on complex issues, questions may be raised whether deliberative mini-publics can deliver the purported benefits when they are arguably needed the most. Another question is how mini-publics should be connected to actual decision-making, for example, direct and representative democratic procedures. We here examine the effects of a citizens’ jury in connection to a consultative referendum on a municipal merger in Finland between the municipalities of Vaasa and Korsholm. This merger has been on the political agenda for decades and involves several deeply entrenched issue cleavages, which have resulted in a polarized public opinion between supporters and opponents especially in the smaller municipality of Korsholm. Although the referendum in Korsholm was not based on a popular initiative, we followed the procedures developed in the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). This is the first time the CIR procedure is applied in Europe. The jury consisted of around 20 citizens from Korsholm who deliberated on the merger during two weekends in February 2019, and the resulting statement was sent to all voters in the municipality of Korsholm before the referendum on 17 March 2019. We here use various sources of data to examine how this statement affected knowledge, opinions and attitudes among voters. Through this, we aim to discern the prospects for using such processes even for controversial policy issues.