No crisis, no deliberation? Explaining the non-adoption of mini-publics in Czech local governance

Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs), such as citizens' assemblies (Smith 2009; Elstub and Escobar 2019), are widely recognised as one of the most promising democratic innovations of the past two decades. Existing research links them to enhanced procedural legitimacy, trust in public institutions, and greater citizens’ acceptance of policy decisions (e.g., Theuwis, van Ham, Jacobs, 2024). As democratic dissatisfaction has intensified across Europe, DMPs have diffused beyond Western Europe and increasingly appeared in Central and Eastern Europe (Gherghina et al. 2019; Pospieszna and Hoffmann 2026). Yet, the diffusion has been highly uneven. While some contexts have embraced DMPs as tools to mitigate democratic crisis and polarisation, others have seen no such developments. Despite this variation, the literature has largely focused on successful and high-profile cases, neglecting failed and non-adopted attempts (Goldberg 2023; Spada and Ryan 2017), and implicitly assuming that democratic innovations emerge in response to political contestation or legitimacy deficits (Kübler 2020; Macq and Jacquet 2023). We know far less about the conditions under which mini-publics fail to emerge. One of the CEE countries where deliberative practices remain surprisingly limited, and DMPs are absent entirely, is Czechia (Šaradín et al. 2022, 2023), making it a particularly suitable exploratory case study for examining barriers to DMPs adoption. While Czechia largely resisted democratic backsliding (Hruška and Hanley 2026) – which may have reduced pressures to introduce DMPs compared to Poland or Hungary, where local-level DMPs partly emerged as a response to national-level democratic backsliding (Pospieszna and Pietrzyk-Reeves 2024) – it still faces legitimacy challenges and public distrust. It therefore remains unclear whether the non-adoption of DMPs, especially at the local level, where they usually take root before scaling to other governance levels, reflects insufficient crisis pressure or rather the existence of political, administrative or cultural barriers, such as a technocratic political culture (Durnová 2021) or politicians' reluctance to share power (Ragnoni et al. 2023). Either way, the Czech case constitutes both an empirical and a theoretical puzzle in explaining the (non-)adoption of DMPs. If mini-publics are not merely crisis-driven instruments, what explains their non-adoption in a context that exhibits neither acute democratic breakdown nor strong deliberative reform momentum? To answer the above question, we employ a mixed-methods research design comprising 35–45 semi-structured interviews with a heterogeneous sample of municipal authorities and NGO representatives to capture both top-down and bottom-up approaches to adopting DMPs, followed by a larger-N survey of cities´ representatives. This allows us to investigate whether the main barriers to adoption are primarily political (e.g., loss of control or accountability), administrative (limited expertise and costs), cultural (e.g., technocratic political culture), or institutional (e.g., the absence of legal anchoring)? The study contributes to research on democratic innovations by shifting attention from their effects to the conditions under which they are (not)adopted. The findings will not only contribute to a better understanding of barriers that may be subsequently addressed in Czechia but may also offer insights relevant to other contexts in which deliberative innovations continue to struggle to gain footholds.