Women and Immigrant-Origin Citizens in Deliberative Minipublics

Since 2019, following the Demoscan pilot project, more than a dozen deliberative minipublics have been organised in Switzerland across all linguistic regions and at every level of government. Participants were ordinary citizens randomly selected from official population registers. An unexpected finding was the strong interest shown in this participatory mechanism by women and citizens of immigrant origin. This is noteworthy given that both groups are typically underrepresented in both electoral lists and parliaments. Despite its relevance, this phenomenon remains underexplored in the literature on deliberative democracy and minipublics. To better understand this phenomenon, we draw on several explanatory models derived from theories of political engagement. Our analysis combines three data sources: (1) an online survey of approximately 500 individuals who expressed interest in participating in a minipublic across eight cases; (2) 43 semi-structured interviews with a selected subsample of these respondents; and (3) a joint survey conducted among a representative sample of the Swiss population, yielding around 4,000 responses from 27,000 invitations. Initial results show that, among individual-level predictors, immigrant background is the main statistically significant factor: respondents of immigrant origin are more likely to prefer participation in minipublics over voting in elections. In-depth interviews indicate that these respondents primarily view minipublics as a concrete and meaningful opportunity for political engagement. Minipublics are understood as enabling forms of residence-based citizenship that partially compensate for the absence of formal political rights and enhance the inclusiveness of democratic participation. Immigrant-origin women, in particular, also perceive participation as an opportunity to acquire knowledge about political institutions and decision-making processes. Finally, women—both Swiss and of immigrant origin—are overrepresented among critically oriented participants who favour alternative forms of political engagement. This group also places particular importance on the provision of financial compensation, even if modest, as a condition for participation in a minipublic.