Effective Couplings of Mini-Publics and Popular Votes: Explaining Ballot Support and Policy Adoption

Popular vote processes are increasingly coupled with deliberative mini-publics such as citizens’ assemblies and other formats involving randomly selected citizens. These couplings take multiple forms, and policy-formulating mini-publics followed by a ballot vote have gained particular traction. This type of coupling has been used across a wide range of policy fields, from constitutional reform (e.g. electoral systems, abortion) to local governance challenges (e.g. amalgamation, industrial estates, urban infrastructure). Reflecting this growing practice, the coupling of deliberative policy-formulation and direct democratic decision-making has been highlighted as a promising arrangement, discussed under labels such as deliberative referendums, electorally embedded mini-publics or hybrid democratic innovations. Despite this wider diffusion and optimism, the empirical record is mixed. Some mini-public recommendations have been supported in popular votes, while others failed or were never adopted into policy. Even in the internationally acclaimed Irish case, two recent recommendations of a mini-public on gender equality were rejected at the ballot. Existing research, often based on within-case evidence, offers valuable but fragmented explanations for success. Some scholars emphasise the institutional architecture of direct democratic instruments, others highlight public engagement strategies, the interconnectedness between deliberation and voting, or the mediating role of representative institutions. Taken together, these findings point not to a single decisive factor but to causal complexity. Multiple combinations of conditions may enable ballot support and policy adoption. Yet a comparative account identifying these supportive configurations in cases where policy-formulating mini-publics are followed by a popular vote is still lacking. To address this gap, the paper asks: Under which conditions are mini-publics’ recommendations supported in popular votes and subsequently adopted in policy? It answers this question through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of twenty cases across Europe and North America. Reflecting the breadth of documented practice, the cases span local, regional, and national levels in Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland, and Germany. FsQCA, as a set-theoretic method, is particularly well suited to analysing the underlying causal complexity and identifying the configurations that enable effective couplings leading to ballot success and policy adoption. Building on this approach, the paper contributes a cross-case explanation illustrating how processual, institutional, actor-related, and contextual conditions intersect to yield effective couplings of policy-formulating mini-publics and popular votes.