In The Jury and Democracy, John Gastil and his colleagues set out to apply sophisticated techniques of contemporary social science research to one of the most venerable claims in political theory, namely Alexis de Tocqueville's thesis that jury service is for Americans a primer in the arts of citizenship in democracy, increasing citizens’ inclination toward and competence in participation in government. The results produced by Gastil and his colleagues will go a long way to increasing readers’ appreciation of juries, and of social science itself.
While de Tocqueville set out his thesis (which celebrated not only juries but other forms of small group collective action) in 1835 in his book Democracy in America, and political theorists have noted it ever since, the authors express some surprise that no effort has been made to empirically test the claim. Perhaps, after considering the tremendous effort invested by the authors, readers will be less surprised. In research conducted over nearly 15 years the authors conducted four separate studies, three of them very large statistically complicated studies. They began, as the authors note, “as ethnographers” sending a University of Washington honours student to conduct qualitative interviews with twelve jurors randomly selected from four separate trials in King County court, including criminal and civil trials, guilty and not-guilty verdicts, to examine the relationship between jury participation and voting behavior. After their analysis of this qualitative data produced suggestive findings that participating in a jury that reached a verdict was potentially connected in the minds of jurors with an enhanced responsibility to vote, the research team set out to test this theory on harder data. The result was three further and increasingly sophisticated studies.
The next step was a study of jury and voting records from one county in Washington state. The authors examined the records of nearly 1,400 jurors who participated in 37 civil and 110 criminal trials between 1994 and 1996. They matched these records, which included detailed information regarding the charges and trial results, with voting records. Their headline finding supported the initial qualitative suggestion. Those jurors who participated in what the authors defined as a conclusive deliberative experience (that is a case where the juror participated in a complete trial to deliberation and verdict) were 9% more likely to vote in the 1996 presidential...
