Deliberated on, therefore better? A typology of deliberative minipublics’ policy recommendations

Within the last two decades, deliberative minipublics (DMPs), such as citizens’ assemblies, have been gaining popularity as a way to supplement traditional political decision-making, especially across the Western world (OECD 2020). The DMPs are claimed to address the obstacles that are faced by liberal democracy. In particular, they are expected to democratize the policy-making process, empower the perspectives of regular citizens, and heighten the epistemic value of public decisions (Carson & Martin 1999; Cohen 2009). So far, the research on DMPs has focused on analyzing either their internal processes or their place in the broader political system. There is, however, still a limited number of studies assessing the substantive outcomes of such deliberative fora. Moreover, since DMPs allow policy inputs and formalized participation of both traditional policy-making actors (i.e., public authorities, interest groups, and experts) and lay citizens, it remains unclear how and by whom the quality of DMPs’ policy recommendations should be evaluated. Thus, the aim of our paper is to create a typology of DMPs’ policy recommendations. It is developed in an integrative approach, built upon theory, secondary sources from DMP cases, in-depth interviews, and focus group interviews. We argue that assessing the quality of the recommendations should consider the perspectives of all types of actors participating in DMPs. For this reason, the interviews were conducted with policy experts, civil servants implementing the recommendations, and citizens. The study employs a novel theoretic approach, and its findings provide a new tool enabling comparative studies of DMPs’ outcomes that are thus far scarce. Moreover, the provided typology of DMPs recommendations will aid future research to explore links between different DMPs’ designs and the quality of their recommendations and contribute to the study of DMPs’ policy impact.