The maxi-public and the deliberative referendum: a survey experiment

The idea of the deliberative referendum, linking citizens’ assemblies and direct voting, is receiving increasing attention (Hendriks and Wagenaar, 2023). The idea is that direct and deliberative democracy might be able to reduce each other’s weaknesses with their own respective strengths. While deliberation only reaches a small part of the population, direct democracy offers large-scale opportunities to participate. Referendums on the other hand ask citizens to make complicated decisions without always having all the resources to make these. This is where deliberation by a mini-public could offer a more in-depth perspective on the topic of decision-making. By combining the two, the deliberative referendum could be a way of institutionalizing deliberative democracy by reaching a larger audience through the direct democratic element. There are different ways in which this could take shape (Gastil and Richards, 2013). The deliberative mini-public could come up with input before a referendum vote or give meaning to the results after a referendum has taken place. At this moment, we still know little about these different designs in practice and whether the promises of the deliberative referendum hold in the eyes of citizens. In our study, we therefore set out to answer the question of whether and under what conditions adding deliberation to a referendum could improve outcome acceptance and procedural fairness perceptions among citizens. In a survey experiment among a representative sample of 2000 Dutch citizens, we test different decision-making processes that combine deliberation and direct democracy and we compare these to a strictly direct democratic process. We find similar levels of outcome acceptance for a referendum and a referendum that follows deliberation by a mini-public. Lower levels of outcome acceptance can even be found in the instance of a mini-public overruling a maxi-public's decision. This implies that more participation does not necessarily result in higher outcome acceptance and a better perception of a decision-making process. The promises the deliberative referendum holds thus do not appear to be fulfilled in the eyes of citizens in our experiment. This study also provides further insight into the trade-off citizens make between the choices of a voting maxi-public and a deliberative mini-public.