Integrating Mini-Public Deliberation for Impact: A Comparative Study of European Climate Assemblies

In recent decades, deliberative democratic innovations, such as citizens’ assemblies, have been touted as pioneering – and even necessary – means of engaging ordinary citizens to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of public responses to complex collective challenges. With their characteristic emphasis on random-selection of participants, facilitated deliberation and co-produced outputs, citizens’ assemblies have proliferated across Europe, with many dedicated to climate change, partly to help determine pathways for achieving Paris Agreement commitments. While there is increasing interest in the extent to which the recent wave of climate assemblies has generated impact, this attention has mainly focused on policy effects and there remains limited clarity - both conceptually and empirically - regarding the full range of impacts these processes might produce on political actors, systems and society. Furthermore, the debate has been shaped by an emphasis on internal design as an essential determinant of impact, overlooking how the integration of citizens' assemblies with political and social actors and the political system also influences their effects. This paper seeks to address this gap by applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to empirically explore the causal relationships between the integration patterns and impacts of over 50 national and sub-national climate assemblies across Europe. Beyond investigating implications for policy, the analysis also incorporates the political and polity impacts of these processes. Its findings advance our understanding of how different extents and types of integration interact to shape different kinds and degrees of impact and offer an evidence-based account of the conditions under which citizens’ assemblies can achieve meaningful change.