Institutionalizing Deliberative Mini-Publics and the Politics of Strategic Use

Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) have proliferated in recent years and are widely promoted as inclusive forums that can incorporate citizen input and support more informed collective will formation. Increasingly, DMPs are organized not as one-off, project-based experiments but as institutionalized procedures embedded in legislative and administrative processes. Such institutionalization is often expected to bring continuity, transparency, clearer rules, and potentially greater policy influence, and it is frequently presented as a mitigation strategy against undue influence by powerful actors. Yet embedding DMPs more deeply in decision-making arenas also places them more firmly within environments shaped by interest-based politics and administrative routines, potentially increasing incentives to instrumentalize them rather than treat them as autonomous sites of public reasoning. This raises the guiding question: How does the institutionalization of deliberative mini-publics structure the forms and mechanisms of strategic use by political and administrative actors, and with what implications for procedural autonomy and deliberative integrity? The paper conceptualizes strategic use as the instrumental deployment of DMPs to advance specific interests through (a) initiation and commissioning, (b) influence over design and facilitation, and/or (c) appropriation of outcomes. Strategic use is not treated as a binary but as a spectrum ranging from routine political–administrative steering (e.g., commissioning decisions, resourcing, agenda-setting) to forms of interference that may compromise procedural autonomy and deliberative integrity (e.g., agenda control, selective information provision, or cherry-picking of recommendations). Institutionalization on the other hand is conceptualized as the move from ad hoc projects to rule-bound procedures with defined linkages to legislative or administrative decision-making (often on a recurring basis). The central expectation is therefore a trade-off: institutionalization may constrain overt, ad hoc forms of interference by making procedures more rule-bound and transparent, yet it may also shift strategic influence toward less visible forms of procedural and administrative interference. Empirically, the paper combines a scoping review with a comparative case study informed by mechanism-focused, within-case process tracing. The scoping review maps how “strategic use” is defined and operationalized in research on democratic innovations and participatory governance and, on that basis, develops a provisional typology by identifying recurrent dimensions (actors, conditions, and strategies) and their likely implications for procedural autonomy and deliberative integrity. Drawing on published case-based evidence, the review then deduces a set of potential mechanisms through which strategic influence is enacted at key process stages. Building on this framework, the empirical analysis examines a small set of DMPs that differ in their mode and degree of institutionalization. Using documents and guided interviews with organizers, facilitators, administrative actors, and political decision-makers, the analysis traces how strategic use is enabled, channelled, or constrained in each case and compares the observed mechanism patterns across cases. The paper’s contribution is to render analytically tractable a ubiquitous but under-conceptualized diagnosis of “strategic use,” and to critically reassess the common prescription that more institutionalization straightforwardly mitigates it. In doing so, it aims to move the debate beyond abstract warnings, anecdotal verdicts, and purely hypothetical design prescriptions.