What Do “Turned-Off” Citizens Think About Deliberation? Evidence from a Picture Task in Focus Groups Among Belgian Citizens

Most democratic theorists consider deliberation a key ingredient to making democracy work (Kuyper, 2018), and public authorities over past decades have followed suit, experimenting extensively with new ways to involve citizens in discussions on public policy (OECD, 2020). Yet, how do citizens themselves feel about deliberation? In a seminal article, Neblo et al. (2010) maintain that many citizens share the excitement about deliberation. Their survey results suggest that a large proportion of the American public is willing to participate in organized discussion sessions. In particular, their results suggest that enthusiasm for deliberation is strongest among those citizens that are often “turned off” by regular politics, most notably younger people, racial minorities and lower-income people. In this paper, we critically examine these conclusions by means of an analysis of 12 focus groups (67 participants) conducted in 2019 in Brussels, Belgium, as a part of a larger inter-university project on political representation. The focus groups bring together two groups of “turned-off” citizens: (1) activists that regularly engage in public protests and (2) citizens that tend to experience political exclusion because of their social backgrounds. The former groups consist of activists belonging to the Youth for Climate and Yellow Vests movements. The latter consist of residents from a deprived neighborhood in Brussels, social workers engaging with citizens in extreme poverty, and working-class citizens with a precarious employment status at the European Parliament. The focus group format seeks to give these citizens the opportunity to express in their own words what they think about deliberation and to offer contextualized insight into their appraisals of deliberation. We used an innovative picture task to prompt participants to talk about deliberation (cf. Saunders & Klandermans, 2019). In concrete terms, we asked them to express what they associate with six pictures of common political practices, including citizen deliberation, voting, involvement of experts, (legal) protests, violent protests, and direct community action. Contrasting participants’ views on deliberation with the other (non-deliberative) practices allow us to provide a detailed analysis of what it is that these citizens do and do not like about deliberation in specific. We base our analyses on the coding of the focus group transcripts and assess to what degree and under which conditions participants indeed prefer deliberation to other political practices. Digging deeper, we assess in what ways the participants connect their appraisals of deliberation to personal experiences to understand within-group differences. In the end, the focus group data allow us to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of what “turned-off” citizens themselves think about deliberation, making clear that (a) not all are deliberative enthusiasts and (b) those supportive of deliberation are not necessarily so all of the time. Our findings invite researchers and practitioners to think critically about how they understand and depict the public’s views on deliberation as well as to reflect on how they design democratic innovations seeking to involve citizens in deliberation, especially those citizens that usually do not get involved in mainstream politics.