Benefits of citizen deliberation for future-regarding governance

In response to the threat of political short-termism or presentist bias (Thompson 2010; Boston 2017), there has been a growing interest in the potential of democratic innovations such as deliberative mini- publics to foster more long-term decision-making. Initial evidence indeed suggests that deliberative citizen participation increases participants’ willingness to consider future generations’ interests (Kulha et al. 2021; MacKenzie & Caluwaerts 2021). However, the actual mechanism by which citizen deliberation might enhance long-term governance have not been explored in-depth. This paper formulates a typology of the different future-regarding benefits of citizen deliberation, covering intrinsic (cognitive and affective), instrumental, and institutional effects of deliberation. Further, these mechanisms are compared in the context of climate and technology governance to evaluate how these benefits might hold in different long-term governance contexts. The analysis suggests that the future- regarding benefits of climate deliberation are more likely to manifest through perspective-taking of future generations and positive future emotions. In contrast, technology governance might benefit more from the instrumental effects of deliberation, such as slowing down deployment of unsafe technology and excluding short-term interests of large companies from decision-making. The results have implications for how citizen deliberation is best institutionalized as a long-term governance mechanism in different policy domains.