Does the Formulation of Citizens' Assemblies' Proposals Matter for Their Implementation? An Analysis of Official Implementation Reports from Local CAs in Poland

Deliberative minipublics (DMPs), such as citizens’ assemblies (CAs), have been increasingly used to supplement traditional political decision-making. They are expected to democratize the policy-making process by including the perspectives of regular citizens and to heighten the epistemic value of public decisions (Carson & Martin, 1999; Cohen, 2009; Estlund & Landemore, 2018; Setälä, 2017). Despite DMPs’ primary aim of developing policy recommendations (OECD, 2020), little is known about the contents of these proposals and what shapes them. Certain attributes of recommendations may represent a key factor in their successive implementation and, thus, minipublics’ effectiveness in influencing policymaking (Font et al., 2018; Pogrebinschi and Ryan, 2018). Some earlier works suggest that CAs’ thematic scopes may shape various qualities of recommendations by framing and delimiting the issues under deliberation and restricting the time available for CAs’ work (Elstub et al., 2021; Brancaforte & Pfeffer, 2022; Pfeffer, 2024). As a result, this scholarship expects some recommendations to be, e.g., better reasoned or more “useful and actionable” for policy-makers than others. These characteristics of proposals are thought to lead to a stronger influence on existing public policies, but this relationship has not yet been explored in more detail nor empirically verified. This research will address this gap by linking characteristics of the formulation of CA recommendations to how they are interpreted and implemented by public authorities, and how these authorities report on their efforts. The analysis will also shed light on the extent to which the formulation of CAs’ proposals can stimulate better policy-making, or, rather, enable public authorities to treat the recommendations instrumentally, omit them, or consider their intentions already fulfilled by existing practices. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of public authorities’ reports on the implementation of recommendations (n=210) put forward by 4 local climate CAs in Poland in 2021 and 2023, and qualitative interviews with local policy-makers (public officials, experts, stakeholders). The selected cases are well-suited for comparison due to their uniform legal and institutional context, and the common understanding of CAs’ recommendations as politically, though not legally, binding–a practice unique to Poland, a leader of democratic innovations in Central and Eastern Europe. The examination of official reports involved exploring the implementation-stage categories used by authorities across different cities, as well as applying a unified scheme to all cases to collate them with the characteristics of individual recommendations, which were coded using a systematic comparative framework (Szymaniak-Arnesen & Gąsiorowska, 2025). The contents of the reports were then examined using the Qualitative Content Analysis method (Schreier, 2012), providing insights into the strategies public authorities use when publicly reporting on their efforts to implement CAs’ recommendations. Interviews supplemented the findings by exploring different policy-makers' interpretations of the proposals and their perceptions of implementation progress. The study offers a unique approach to the comparative analysis of content and formulation of CAs’ substantive outputs, in conjunction with their subsequent implementation into policies and practices of public authorities, contributing to our understanding of CAs' role in public policy-making.