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Mini-publics and Party Ideology:  Who Commissioned the Deliberative Wave in Europe?

Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

The increasing implementation of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) such as Citizens’ Assemblies and Citizens’ Juries led the OECD to identify a “deliberative wave”. The burgeoning scholarship on DMPs has increased understanding of how they operate and their impact, but less attention has been paid to the drivers behind this diffusion. Existing research on democratic innovations has underlined the role of the governing party’s ideology as a relevant variable in the study of other procedures such as participatory budgeting, placing left-wing parties as a prominent actor in this process. Unlike this previous literature, we have little understanding of whether mini-publics appeal equally across the ideological spectrum. This paper draws on the OECD database to analyse the impact of political party affiliation on the commissioning of DMPs in Europe across the last four decades. Our analysis finds the ideological pattern of adoption is less clear cut compared to other democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting. But stronger ideological differentiation emerges when we pay attention to different design features of DMPs.

Keywords

Deliberative mini-publics, Political parties, Ideology, Europe, Citizens' assemblies

Funding

Name
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
FundRef ID
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004837
Funding ID
PID2019-106731GB-I00
Name
Ministerio de Universidades
FundRef ID
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100023561
Funding ID
FPU2019

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Authors

Rodrigo Ramis-Moyano orcid logo (Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC))
Graham Smith orcid logo (University of Westminster, UK)
Ernesto Ganuza (IESA (Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados))
Thamy  Pogrebinschi

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  • This article is not a part of any issues.

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

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This article has been peer reviewed.