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Participation bias and framing effects in citizens’ juries
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Participation bias and framing effects in citizens’ juries
Damien French
Trinity College Dublin
## email not listed ##
Michael Laver
New York University
## email not listed ##
ABSTRACT
Estimating the impact of deliberation on attitude change in real political settings is complicated by a problem of external validity. It seems plausible a priori that those who choose to participate in deliberation are more predisposed to particular attitudes, and/or to shifts in attitudes, than those who do not. We built the possibility to investigate this problem into the design of an Irish field experiment on deliberation – the first large-scale citizens’ jury to take place Ireland. The jury was a random sample of voters from the 2002 Irish Election Study (IES), itself a random sample of Irish voters, for which a large amount of demographic and attitudinal information had been collected. Before jury selection the issue for deliberation – the incineration of domestic waste – was included in a summer 2003 IES panel study, along with a suite of questions on environmental attitudes. Jurors were also surveyed on key attitudes, immediately before and after a deliberation in which they were encouraged to come to a consensus “verdict” on the issue under consideration. The deliberation itself was monitored by non-participant observers, who coded each intervention in the discussion using juror ID numbers that could be linked to the election study. Finally, attitudes on the core questions for deliberation were also part of the 2004 IES panel study, conducted nine months after the jury deliberations and including all jurors. Large opinion shifts against waste incineration were observed during deliberation, and some of these shifts remained observable nine months later. However, a troubling feature of the experiment was the extent to which key “stakeholders” who expected to be on the “losing” side of the deliberation were able to influence and probably de-legitimize the eventual outcome by withholding their cooperation in the entire process.
Prepared for delivery at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
September 1-4, 2005. Copyright by the American Political Science Association.
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| | Authors: French, Damien. and Laver, Michael. |
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|
Participation bias and framing effects in citizens’ juries
Damien French
Trinity College Dublin
## email not listed ##
Michael Laver
New York University
## email not listed ##
ABSTRACT
Estimating the impact of deliberation on attitude change in real political settings is complicated
by a problem of external validity. It seems plausible a priori that those who choose to participate
in deliberation are more predisposed to particular attitudes, and/or to shifts in attitudes, than those
who do not. We built the possibility to investigate this problem into the design of an Irish field
experiment on deliberation – the first large-scale citizens’ jury to take place Ireland. The jury was
a random sample of voters from the 2002 Irish Election Study (IES), itself a random sample of
Irish voters, for which a large amount of demographic and attitudinal information had been
collected. Before jury selection the issue for deliberation – the incineration of domestic waste –
was included in a summer 2003 IES panel study, along with a suite of questions on environmental
attitudes. Jurors were also surveyed on key attitudes, immediately before and after a deliberation
in which they were encouraged to come to a consensus “verdict” on the issue under consideration.
The deliberation itself was monitored by non-participant observers, who coded each intervention
in the discussion using juror ID numbers that could be linked to the election study. Finally,
attitudes on the core questions for deliberation were also part of the 2004 IES panel study,
conducted nine months after the jury deliberations and including all jurors. Large opinion shifts
against waste incineration were observed during deliberation, and some of these shifts remained
observable nine months later. However, a troubling feature of the experiment was the extent to
which key “stakeholders” who expected to be on the “losing” side of the deliberation were able to
influence and probably de-legitimize the eventual outcome by withholding their cooperation in
the entire process.
Prepared for delivery at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
September 1-4, 2005. Copyright by the American Political Science Association.
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