The Influence of Deliberative Mini-Public Participation on the Development of Civic Virtues – Does the Mode of Deliberation Matter?

Research on deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) has demonstrated that mini-public participants’ opinions transform during deliberations. In addition to opinion transformations, researchers have been interested in the development of mini-public participants’ civic virtues, that is, skills and willingness for political participation. Evidence on civic virtues is somewhat mixed and does not show similar robust changes pertaining to opinions. Moreover, there is no systematic evidence on the impact of the environment of deliberations, e.g., whether it takes place face-to-face or online, on the development of civic virtues. We ask how civic virtues change in a DMP, and whether there is a difference in this change in three different modes of deliberation – face-to-face with human moderators, online with human moderators, and online with an automated moderator. We look at several types of civic virtues: democracy attitudes, perspective-taking, political efficacy and political trust. The change in civic virtues is measured by comparing pre and post deliberation survey responses, and the difference in the three modes by comparing the amount of change in these conditions. Ou data is based on a DMP organized according to the Deliberative Polling® model. In the Citizens’ Parliament DMP, participants (n=671) were recruited through random sampling and randomly allocated into one of three treatment conditions. In Face-to-face, participants were physically present and discussions were facilitated by human moderators. In Online human, participants discussed online with human moderators. In Online automated, participants discussed online with automated moderation. Deliberations took place in small groups of ten people. The topics of the DMP were four citizens’ initiatives handed in to the Finnish parliament, two of which were on drug use policies and two on fuel prices. Participants filled in pre and post deliberation surveys, received information on the topics, discussed in moderated small groups over a weekend and had an opportunity to pose questions to three expert panels during the DMP. In an earlier paper, we found similar opinion changes, depolarization, and learning curves in all treatment conditions. The present paper analyses how civic virtues developed during the Citizens’ Parliament, and whether these developments were similar in all three environments.