Combining online and offline participatory processes for local policymaking

Abstract

Western democracies have recently experienced a proliferation of various forms of democratic innovations such as the deliberative mini-public (hereafter: DMP). In a DMP, a small group of citizens provides policy recommendations after partaking in intensive and moderated deliberations. The advantage of DMPs is that they potentially offer epistemically better and socially more acceptable solutions, increase citizen involvement, and create more trust in and/or satisfaction with the democratic system. However, DMPs are criticized for bypassing the will of the broader society in public decision-making and for lacking outcome implementation. Adding a maxi-public to a DMP could potentially mitigate these issues. We studied three Dutch cases in which a DMP was preceded by an online maxi-public. We find that policymakers experienced that the recommendations of the hybrid participatory processes carried more weight in the decision-making process compared to only conducting a mini-public or a maxi-public. Policymakers particularly valued the high number of citizens participating in the maxi-public and the deliberated recommendations produced by the mini-public based on the insights derived from the maxi-public. However, we observe that the outcome implementation differs between the three case studies. In this chapter, we investigate how design choices can explain these differences.