(Page 2 of 27) - Participation bias and framing effects in citizens� juries authored by French, Damien. and Laver, Michael.

Participation bias and framing effects in citizens’ juries / 1

OVERVIEW

Efforts are being made in many countries to promote richer citizen participation. Motivations for
these efforts include concerns about citizen apathy and disaffection; the perceived remoteness of
representatives and traditional institutions; and systematically unequal participation in decision-
making by different social groups. Public responses to these perceived problems range from
statutory requirements for public bodies to consult with the public, to ambitious experiments with
different methods to realize participative ideals.

Merging with this, the model of “deliberative democracy” is an increasingly popular and

widely discussed normative account of requirements for genuinely democratic decision-making.
In its simplest articulation, a deliberative democracy is “an association whose affairs are governed
by the public deliberation of its members” (Cohen 1997, 67). The idea of deliberative democracy
involves the claim that “legitimate lawmaking issues from the public deliberation of citizens”
(Bohman and Rehg 1997, 1). Proponents unite in arguing that the democratic process should not
be one of simply responding to raw citizen preferences, and that the legitimacy of the democratic
process is tied to unconstrained communication, discussion and debate among citizens. The
purpose of deliberation is transformative. It is argued to: allow every citizen’s views to evolve in
a way that takes account of the views of every other citizen; shape reasoned judgments that do not
reflect citizen’s adaptation to unjust background conditions; generate decisions that are not
subject to strategic manipulation. It is to “deliberated” rather than “raw” preferences that the
democratic process should respond (Benhabib 1996, Cohen 1997, Dryzek 1990, 2000, Elster
1997, Gutmann & Thomson 1996, Habermas 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, Sunstein 1991). The
deliberative ideal thus envisages the creation of significant informal spaces and formal forums in
the real world, within which public deliberation on matters of general concern can occur.

Citizens’ juries

are one of several types of formally organized deliberative forum. Other

types include: citizens’ panels; citizens’ summits; consensus conferences; deliberative mapping;
deliberative polling

; and scenario workshops. To these can be added one-off processes such as:

participatory forums on public health policy in Oregon; community policing in Chicago; and
municipal budgeting in Brazil.

These forums are inspired by visions of direct democracy derived

from idealized notions of ancient Athenian and US town meetings. They use various methods,
including survey techniques, to recruit citizens to panels of a size deemed suitable for
interpersonal deliberation. Participants are typically given balanced briefing materials in advance
and are then brought together at a single site over a day or several days, sometimes with experts
and political leaders to inform their discussions. They engage in intensive discussion and debate
on the issue under consideration, with the objective of reaching a group conclusion, or agreed set
of recommendations, to which the commissioning body may be required to respond (in the case
of UK citizens’ juries for instance: see Smith & Wales 2000), or even implement (municipal
budgeting: see Wampler 2004).

On one hand, such a forum is seen as a way to produce a “better” and more reasoned

collective judgment on the matter under consideration, since everyone hears and can take account
of the views of everyone else – putting themselves in a position where they can be persuaded by
the arguments of others. On the other hand, the forum may be seen as an exercise in civic

Ned Crosby has copyright of the term ‘citizens’ jury’.

James Fishkin has registered ‘Deliberative Poll’ and ‘Deliberative Polling’ as trademarks.

Ackerman & Fishkin 2002, Andersen and Jaeger 1999, , Coote & Lenaghan 1997, Crosby, Kelly &

Schaefer 1986, Delap 1998, Eames, Stirling, Burgess, Davies, Williamson, Mayer & Staley 2003, Fishkin
1991, 1995, 1996, Fishkin, Luskin & Jowell 2000, Fung 2003, Kuper 1997, Hansen & Andersen 2004, ,
Hall 1996, Horning 1999, McIver 1997, Merkle 1996, Pickard 1998, Renn, Webler & Wiedmann (eds.)
1995, Smith & Wales 2000, Stewart 1995, 1996, 1997, Stewart, Kendall & Coote 1994, Wampler 2004.