When Does Participation Matter? Developing a Policy Impact Index to Assess the Impact of Citizens' Participation in e-Rulemaking

Democratic and deliberation democracy scholars are very much focused on motivating the public to participate in public debates by engaging in deliberative procedures that allow flow of communication between participants and the formation of reasonable and well sustained arguments. While much effort is invested in widening public participation and in defining the best procedural rules to be followed in deliberation, less importance has been placed to the actual effect of deliberations on policy making and to the evaluation of deliberative procedures in relation to policy making. For the moment only a few examples such as the Citizens Assemblies in Ireland (Suiter et al 2016) (engaging in face to face deliberation) seem to really result in a recognisable policy outcome. The field of epistemic democracy is blossoming and constantly evolving and several Quality indicators and measurement criteria of deliberation have emerged such as the Discourse Quality Index of Steenberger et al (2003) the six level coding scheme of Stromer –Galley (2007) and the procedure- independent standard introduced from Fernros and Schaffer (2017) which draws on argumentation theory. We argue that the evaluation of deliberative procedures and their connection with policy outcome is still emerging. One would say that due to various format(s) and the discursive pattern of deliberation such a task is nearly impossible to achieve. Our approach will focus on e–rulemaking deliberative fora in which participants can act as co-editors at law making procedure. As law making is bound to have an effect we argue that a Policy Impact Index is a sine qua non prerequisite in evaluating e-rulemaking initiatives and make them sustainable. Laws are text based and thus provide a more ‘solid’ ground for understanding the result of the deliberation and how and if citizens input is transcribed into some form of output in the final law adopted . This paper will asses and utilise, wherever appropriate, current quality and measurement indicators that are already developed in literature and relevant empirical studies for the purpose of creating a Policy Impact Tool for e-rulemaking initiatives. This tool will seek to establish a number of indicators that can predict the policy impact of citizens’ deliberation specifically for e-rulemaking. In order to build this tool a) we will rely on the importance of comparative text analysis; b)we will develop the necessary criteria for the development of a threads index which will categorise citizens input in deliberation in the major arguments spelled out in the deliberation. At a third level c) we will employ argumentation and discourse analysis in order to evaluate arguments vis a vis their justification and d) we will provide the framework and the benchmark for the assessment of the policy potential of the preceding deliberation. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798502)