Picturing deliberation: How dissatisfied and disadvantaged citizens make sense of deliberation

Growing public dissatisfaction with representative democracy has spurred extensive experimentation with new ways of doing politics in Western democracies. Increasingly popular are innovations that seek to involve citizens more deeply in policy-making via organized policy discussions (that is, deliberation). Yet, despite the popularity of deliberation in both theory and practice, it remains ambiguous how citizens themselves think about this political practice. Existing studies return contradictory findings: some suggest widespread enthusiasm for deliberation, others point towards public skepticism instead. We address this puzzle by means of a series of focus groups conducted among politically dissatisfied citizens in Belgium (n=54) : non-partisan activists (Yellow Vests, Youth for Climate) and politically disadvantaged citizens (non-national inhabitants of deprived neighborhood who experience racialization, people who experience homelessness and working-class people who experience casualization of work contracts in EU Parliament). We embedded a picture task in each of the focus groups, asking citizens in an open and accessible way what they think about deliberation and other political practices. We find that how citizens make sense of deliberation matters for their attitudes towards it. We find that when citizens thought of deliberation as low-key, informal discussion, they linked it to respectful communication and beneficial outcomes such as learning, bridging differences, and problem-solving; when they thought of it as formalized, structured discussion, their appraisals became much more negative. Our argument, then, is that differences in sense-making could account for the conflicting findings in the literature on citizen support for deliberation. The practical implication is that forms of deliberation that do not resonate with what people experience in everyday conversations might have a hard time to garner citizen support and convince citizens to participate. In order to “democratize democratic innovations”, to be more inclusive and to echo the lived experience of the most powerless citizens, we must gain a more nuanced understanding of how citizens relate to deliberation, grounding democratic theory and practice in citizens’ own experiences. Our study shows how, importantly, nearly all our focus groups exhibited highly developed levels of engagement and understanding, suggesting that such levels of sophistication are not reserved for the most politically active or educated citizens. More than a side-result of our study, it confirms important statements in political theory about the possibility of political equality and how to realize it in discursive settings with ordinary citizens, especially the one that might feel the most excluded by political innovations.