Mini-public statements and media as transmitters of deliberative verdicts: A survey experiment on a Citizens' Jury on forest policy

Our study examines how information and arguments produced by mini-publics can be transmitted to policymaking and to the wider public. Deliberative mini-publics have been regarded as a potential cure for the lack of information and reflective reasoning on complex political issues such as climate change among the public at large (Warren and Gastil 2015). A growing body of experimental research suggests that deliberative mini-publics have the potential to influence opinions, civic attitudes, perspective taking, efficacy and political trust among the wider public (Sloman et al. 2012; Boulianne 2018, Knobloch et al. 2020; Setälä et al. 2021) under certain conditions (Germann et al. 2022). For experimental purposes, the wider public is often asked to evaluate hypothetical mini-publics that are simplified in terms of their recommendations and policy impact. This paper draws attention to the vast majority of real mini-publics that are advisory by nature and produce deliberative verdicts containing several policy proposals. In the study of mini-publics’ effects on the wider public, key question becomes the transmission mechanism from mini-public deliberations to reflection and opinion-formation among the general public. The CIR procedure is unique in this sense, because the statement of a Citizens’ Jury is sent to all voters before a popular vote, and the whole procedure is designed to help voters reflect on facts and arguments for and against a measure. Most deliberative mini-publics, however, occur as part of representative or administrative decision-making processes. In these cases, citizens receive information on the mini-public process and outcomes most likely through media. The logic of media outlets and mediatized public sphere is, however, somewhat contradictory to the principles of citizen deliberation (Bächtiger & Goldberg 2020). Part of the journalistic work is to pick one or few (ideally) controversial themes to create an attractive piece. So even if mini-publics are featured in media, citizens’ recommendations are often presented very selectively, and not much attention is paid to the factual and normative justifications developed by the mini-public. Therefore, media coverage is likely to lack the qualities such as sophisticated justifications and balance of arguments that have found to induce learning and reflection among readers of mini-publics’ statements. This suggests that the knowledge and attitudinal effects may not take place when respondents are merely exposed to media coverage on a mini-public. Reading news stories about a mini-public may even cause backlash among those who are initially negatively disposed to those mini-public’s arguments which are covered by the media. We conducted a survey experiment to examine both the direct effects of reading a mini-public statement and the effects reading such mediated information on a mini-public. Our vignettes are based on a recent regional-level mini-public in Northern Finland: the Citizens’ Jury on the role of forests in climate change mitigation. Our data were collected from a representative panel of adults living in this region. We analyse the effect of reading the statement and the newspaper article on knowledge, efficacy, procedural fairness and attitudes towards forest policy and climate change.