Integrating citizens' assemblies: How democratic deficit and trust shape public support

Citizens' assemblies (CAs) are increasingly proposed as a remedy for democratic discontent. Yet, whether they can serve that purpose may depend on how they are integrated into existing political systems, and thus on how far they transform the relationship between citizens and authorities. That relationship can be left largely intact, as in top-down consultative assemblies convened and controlled by authorities, or substantially transformed, as in assemblies that citizens themselves initiate and to which authorities must formally respond. We examine how perceived democratic deficit and trust in political authorities and fellow citizens shape support for three modes of integrating CAs, differing in how far they transform that relationship. Drawing on preliminary data from a preregistered survey in Belgium, Germany and Poland (N = 3,543), we find that perceived democratic deficit is consistently associated with which kind of integration citizens support. Citizens who perceive a greater deficit differentiate more sharply between integrative designs, expressing markedly less support for the least transformative mode and greater support for the most transformative one. Contrary to our preregistered expectations, we find no evidence that trust amplifies this association. Instead, perceived democratic deficit attenuates the relationship between trust in political authorities and support across all three modes, with trust in authorities more strongly predicting support for the authority-initiated modes among citizens who perceive a smaller deficit. Trust in fellow citizens, by contrast, predicts support for the two modes that grant citizens a substantive role, regardless of perceived democratic deficit. An integrative design often implemented in practice, in which authorities convene an assembly and remain free to use its recommendations as they see fit, receives least support from precisely those citizens who are most frustrated with democracy.