The search for the good citizen is not unique to deliberative theory. The conceptualization of the ideal citizen has undergone several revisions over the centuries (Dalton 2008; Schudson 1998), generally based in the ways that public input is expressed and measured (Ginsberg 1986; Habermas 1996; Herbst 1995; Mansbridge 1999). As public officials, political professionals, and scholars develop new ways of soliciting public opinion, they shape what it means to be a good citizen. While the twentieth-century version of civic life—increasingly reliant on polling, bureaucratic procedures, and political professionals—further depersonalized, categorized, and aggregated public will (Habermas 1996; Herbst 1995), the emergence of deliberative democracy was intended, in part, to re-center the citizen in the public sphere by emphasizing discursive and collective engagement mechanisms (Habermas 1996). Rather than sitting on the sidelines, citizens under the deliberative model are expected to take an active role in civic life, attending events, learning new information, and finding common ground with political rivals.

Discovering whether deliberation can produce citizens capable of these tasks has been a driving force in deliberative research and is often used as a criterion for evaluating public processes. Deliberative engagement not only requires a specific type of citizen, it should also produce them (Burkhalter et al. 2002; Mansbridge 1999). While originally focused on knowledge gains and opinion change (Gastil & Dillard 1999; Luskin et al. 2002), over the past two decades scholars have expanded their search for deliberation’s ‘educative effects’ (Pincock 2012), arguing that deliberation can produce citizens who are more capable of self-governance.

Deliberative participation can increase factual knowledge about the issue under discussion and encourage participants to recognize pertinent values at play (Andersen & Hansen 2007; Barabas 2004; Gastil & Dillard 1999; Gastil et al. 2018; Luskin et al. 2002). It can make people feel more efficacious and foster community trust, connection, and respect across difference (Hartz-Karp et al. 2010; Knobloch & Gastil 2015; Luskin et al. 2014; Nabatchi 2010). Sustained deliberative experiences can spur increased political participation and heighten the likelihood that members of the public will engage in political conversations, join local organizations, and vote (Gastil et al. 2010; Jacobs et al. 2009; Knobloch & Gastil 2015). Even if one doesn’t directly participate, deliberative minipublics can impact individuals who simply hear about or engage with their work. Such secondary experiences can leave one more informed about public policy and more likely to believe they have the power to influence government decisions (Boulianne 2019; Gastil et al. 2018; Knobloch et al. 2020).

In contrast to these more top-down approaches to framing the good citizen, some scholars have turned to citizens to understand what they look for in deliberative engagement. Members of the public seem to want to deliberate (Neblo et al. 2010), and researchers have begun to focus on what motivates individuals to participate in deliberative processes. Those interested in deliberative participation hope to connect with members of their community, (Curato & Niemeyer 2013; Jacquet 2019) and to learn about public issues, both from experts and from other community members (Christensen 2020; Curato & Niemeyer 2013; Jacquet 2019). They often see deliberative participation as an avenue for empowerment—an opportunity to express their voices and to have their input influence public decisions (Christensen 2020; Curato & Neimeyer 2013; Goldberg et al. 2020; Jaquet 2019; Rao & Sanyal 2010), and random-sample deliberation may be most appealing to those who feel most disempowered (Jacquet et al. 2020). For individuals who routinely feel excluded from decision making, deliberative participation can offer a sense of ‘collective effervescence,’ a ‘moment [that] allows individuals with disadvantaged identities… to momentarily discard the stigma of their ascriptive identities and low economic status and to slip into their sacred identity as citizens with equal rights in the eyes of the state’ (Rao & Sanyal 2010: 159).

While this research has made substantial progress in identifying the characteristics needed for deliberation and the hopes that citizens take into their deliberative experiences, they have primarily focused on events that hew more closely to the ideal deliberative situation, such as deliberative minipublics. These events ask a demographically diverse sample of participants to come together across difference, learn from experts and one another, and provide input on public decisions (Curato et al 2021; Goodin & Dryzek 2006; Ryan & Smith 2014). Minipublics and similarly structured deliberative processes can play a vital role in enhancing empowerment, but deliberative systems theory reminds us that democracy both includes and requires moments when individuals engage outside of highly structured deliberative events, particularly through interest formation and advocacy (Dryzek 2010; Hendriks 2012; Mansbridge 1983; Mendonça 2008; Parkinson & Mansbridge 2012).

Though deliberative scholarship has largely focused on conversation across difference, some advocate for the inclusion of enclave discussion among historically excluded communities as a pre-cursor for any event that attempts to foster equitable conversations across power differences (Bruneau & Saxe 2012; Karpowitz et al. 2009). Enclave communication can allow communities to engage in interest formation (Hendriks 2012; Warren 2001). Affinity group conversations provide an opportunity for those who have been excluded from power to understand their interests and strategize about effective ways to advocate for their collective needs and goals (Karpowitz et al. 2009; Mansbridge 1994; Offe & Wiesenthal 1980).

Because of this, advocacy and interest groups play an important role in deliberative systems. They help to develop and support enclaves in the work of interest formation and expression and often serve a representative function for identity or interest-based communities (Mendonça 2008). In the larger deliberative system, the integration of advocacy can alleviate existent power imbalances and create more informed and inclusive public discourse by providing opportunities for historically excluded communities to articulate their experiences and interests and push for their inclusion in the public sphere (Mansbridge 1983; Mouffe 1999; Young 2000). Moreover, activism is both effective at creating change (Chenoweth & Stephan 2011; Levine 2018, Young 2001) and mobilizing (Huddy et al. 2015; Iyengar & Krupenkin 2018; Mutz 2002), suggesting that this model of engagement is useful for democratic empowerment and appealing to many who hope to find agency in democratic systems.

If interest formation and advocacy are essential parts of deliberative democracy, then, the notion of the deliberative citizen should be inclusive of the skills associated with those acts. Some studies have already highlighted the ways this might shift what it means to be a good deliberative citizen. For example, a study of Gram Sabhas in India highlights how engagement needs change when advocacy plays a central role in deliberative processes. In these village meetings, participants are given budgetary decision-making power, and an analysis of transcripts of Gram Sabhas indicates that strategic communication and the development of community capacity play central roles in empowering historically excluded communities (Rao & Sanyal 2010). These findings slightly alter our understanding of the good citizen. Though focused on community and open to learning, they should also be effective advocates for their own interests.

This discrepancy may have consequences for how the good citizen is both theorized and enacted. Conceptualizations of the good citizen are important precisely because deliberation is a normative and pragmatic theory. When scholars discuss the effects of deliberative participation, and when they use these constructions to measure deliberation’s success, they devise a standard for the good citizen that deliberative processes are evaluated against and built to produce. When those ideals fail to match the goals of the public or their needs for achieving empowerment, deliberative practice may unintentionally reproduce the top-down power structures it is intended to avoid.

The remainder of this paper will be used to explore the meaning of the good citizen from the perspective of ordinary community members working within a system of deliberative democracy that bridges the competing tensions of deliberation and advocacy. It asks how the public wants to engage in decision making and what this normative conceptualization means for how we define and measure the good citizen.

In 2017 city officials in a mid-sized university town implemented an engagement plan that aimed to foster more robust public input in policy development (Blonsley 2018). The program trained a cohort of Community Guides2 to host small-group conversations about matters of public policy. The city modeled the program after community boards found in other municipalities, with the goal of expanding and diversifying engagement. Since its inception, the project has been used for public engagement processes focused on city infrastructure, environmental sustainability, and health and housing.3

Though programmatic and contextual changes have been made throughout each iteration, the underlying structure remains the same: community members, acting as either individuals or on behalf of official organizations, receive training in deliberation and facilitation and then host small group conversations within their own communities about the issues in question. During the discussion, Guides collect data about the conversation and return this data to city planners and managers to use in the development of community programs and public policies.

The participants in the program represent a wide variety of community members. Organizers engaged in purposive sampling methods that blend a ‘stakeholder model’ with ‘targeted recruitment’ (Ryfe & Stalsburg 2012), attempting to engage both organizational leaders and everyday community members who have particular interests in the issue. The first iteration, focused on city infrastructure, recruited participants primarily through neighborhood associations. Community Guides served as self-selected ‘informal representatives’ (see Mansbridge 1983: 251) of their neighborhoods, tasked with soliciting the participation of their neighbors. The climate and housing processes took a slightly different approach, focusing on both organizational representatives and everyday citizens. Organizations were recruited to participate based on their connection to the issue or for their work with specific interest or demographic groups. Community Guides in these programs included leaders of non-profit, business, and activist organizations that focused on issues such as environmental sustainability or housing assistance. For these processes, Guides often served in either elected or appointed positions and held more formal roles as community representatives. Community members were also recruited to connect with specific cultural, demographic, or occupational communities, such as members of the BLIPOC (Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and People of Color) community or essential workers. These community members did not act as official representatives of those communities but were a conduit for bringing members of historically excluded populations into the discussion.

The Community Guide program blends purposive sampling with a critical mass approach, which seeks to over-represent historically underserved communities in an effort to prevent tokenization and better enable the articulation of diverse perspectives (Karpowitz & Raphael 2016; Mansbridge 1999). By encouraging affinity group discussion and focusing recruitment efforts on the inclusion of advocacy groups and historically underrepresented communities, it centers the voices of those most directly affected by the issue rather than attempting to mirror the perspectives of the wider population who may not see these issues as pressing concerns.

The research presented herein uses a case study approach to analyze data solicited from program participants across a range of encounters with Community Guides. It relies on Guides’ initial applications, their feedback on the programs, and responses provided by the wider community during these conversations.

For each of the three iterations, community members were asked to fill out an application explaining why they wanted to be a Community Guide, what was their experience with community engagement, and who they hoped to engage. Guides also provided feedback during trainings, in debrief sessions, or after their conversations. In addition to insight from the Guides, this research draws on data gathered during the community conversations. Both the sustainability and housing and health questionnaires ended by asking community members how the city could better engage residents. Though the infrastructure process did not explicitly ask for this feedback, participants often commented on these topics when asked for additional input at the close of their conversations.

All data was analyzed using an inductive approach to thematic coding (Strauss & Corbin 1997) to uncover how community members describe the role of the citizen in democratic governance. This method mirrors previous work that has asked practitioners to define deliberation or activism in their own terms (Levine & Nierras 2007; Mansbridge at al. 2006) and can bridge gaps between normative theory and real-life politics (Andersen & Hansen 2007).

Throughout the data, Guides and participants repeatedly noted that they wanted to have a larger voice in public decision making. For many, this format was a welcome opportunity to have their voice, and the voices of other community members, included in the conversation. As one participant stated, they ‘liked the opportunity to be heard.’ Generally, participants focused on three interrelated functions of interest expression: (1) interest formation, (2) public recognition, and (3) influence.

Another key theme that emerged in the data was a focus on equity. Participants repeatedly expressed a need for the city to widen the conversation and adapt to the barriers they faced to engagement. Together, these trends indicate that an equitable framework for engagement is one in which government officials take responsibility for robust recruitment practices and provide opportunities that meet the demands of both internal and external inclusion. As one participant said, it’s ‘great to have community involvement—not sure everyone is being included.’

Finally, participants saw a connection between interests, equity, and effectiveness and judged engagement not by its adherence to some normative ideal but by its ability to create real change for the community members it engaged. Participants and Guides often expressed skepticism of city-led engagement efforts and worried that their time was being wasted. They requested that city leaders ‘take their ideas and suggestions seriously’ and give them ‘more weight in decisions.’ They wanted ‘evidence that having these conversations are actually influencing decisions and making changes.’ Such a focus on efficacy was not only a call for empowerment but a requirement for equity. One participant said that the city should

For some, this simply meant more transparency in the ways that public input was being used. They wanted the city to ‘have follow-up on conversations and allow people to experience how the conversations and their participation has made a difference.’ Others got even more specific. Participants wanted to move beyond one-time conversations and requested opportunities for sustained engagement that built community capacity and gave the public more say in the structure of engagement efforts.

In their comments, participants in this program indicated that deliberative opportunities should include three components: (1) meaningful interest expression, (2) equitable engagement practices, and (3) democratic empowerment. Though these align with the three pillars of deliberation—learning across difference, inclusion, and decision making—they highlight the need for enclave and interest group discussion to be embedded in deliberative practice. They also push those concepts in the same way that critics of deliberative democracy do: by demanding the theory better address power.

Though deliberative theorists already contend with interest expression, equity, and empowerment, scholars of participant effects have paid less attention to these components. In part, this is because few studies have focused on engagement efforts that thoroughly integrate advocacy and deliberation. Participants in these processes wanted to acknowledge problems in current governing structures, not simply gain more faith in their power to influence them. They hoped to find community but also identified the discrepancies that kept individuals from feeling like they belonged. They appreciated the opportunity to express themselves but judged the process by whether it was effective and equitable rather than by whether they learned new information.

One thing noticeably missing was a desire to learn from traditional experts. Participants wanted to learn from one another’s experiences, but they rarely expressed an interest in learning the data-driven facts that are often used as measures of deliberative success. Recent work on empathy moves in this direction, finding that deliberation can make people more empathetic to others (Grönlund et al. 2017; Suiter et al. 2020), but it does not address whether or what they learned from other participants. Future studies should explore whether participants are gaining new knowledge from input provided by fellow participants rather than focus solely on retention of evidence presented by formal experts. Similarly, participants wanted to be empowered, not simply feel empowered. In addition to assessing changes to political efficacy, research should focus on whether participants learn how decisions are made in their communities and how they might influence those decisions.

This work also highlighted the skills that participants hoped to develop. Participants expressed the need for some deliberative skills already included in the participant effects literature—an openness to learning and a willingness to build community across difference—but they highlighted the need for additional skills that have traditionally been associated with advocacy, such as interest expression and network development. This mirrors findings from Gram Sabhas that highlighted the need for participants to possess advocacy skills and demonstrated the ability for sustained deliberative interventions to create more robust engagement networks (Rao & Sanyal 2010). Together, these studies suggest the need to both include training in interest expression in deliberative design and measure whether deliberative events increase participants’ capacity for understanding and articulating their own interests. Similarly, studies might assess the way that participants’ personal networks changed as a result of their deliberative experience.

These findings should push scholars to rethink the ways they define deliberative engagement and the effects it might produce. Research should offer ordinary citizens an opportunity to weigh in on what they think a better citizen might look like, and normative theory should incorporate these articulations into their visions of a better democracy. Qualitative studies can allow community members to define the good citizen, and quantitative studies can be redesigned to better reflect changes that are more nuanced than increases on scale measurements or which connect individuals across communities. Survey measures might better gauge things like political efficacy or community faith along a continuum. Community members likely should not be extremely polarized, but they shouldn’t place full faith in others who have little concern for their interests. Similarly, some skepticism of public leaders is likely healthy. A simple increase in political efficacy may not be a good gauge of whether an individual has a realistic and politically useful understanding of their governing power. Thinking about collective change, studies of communities’ civic capacity may provide insight. This research explores whether communities have the capability and will to enact civic change at both the grassroots and institutional levels (Briggs 2008; Stone 2001). Better linking of deliberative systems theory with studies of civic capacity may help to identify the ways that deliberative interventions may increase a community’s capacity to self-govern outside of deliberative events.

In addition to expanding the methodologies and theories utilized in the study of participant effects, future research should explore these issues in other contexts. Communities that have different ideological leanings may produce different results. This study focused on a specific design that takes place in the context of deliberative policy development. As deliberative systems theory notes, engagement takes place across a range of contexts, including electoral contests and mediated debate (Dryzek 2010; Elstub et al. 2018; Gastil 2008; Parkinson & Mansbridge 2012). Community members likely have different expectations for those forms of engagement. Scholars should explore the range of ways participants might act as good citizens and be open to integrating those conceptualizations into their normative ideals.