Measuring Epistemic Deliberation on Polarized Issues: The Case of Abortion Provision in Ireland
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211020909 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211020909
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) 630 –647
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211020909
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Measuring Epistemic
Deliberation on Polarized
Issues: The Case of Abortion
Provision in Ireland
Jane Suiter1, David M Farrell2,
Clodagh Harris3 and Philip Murphy3
Abstract
This paper compares the debate quality in the plenary sessions of an Irish Citizens’ Assembly and an
Irish parliamentary committee to assess the epistemic effects of public deliberation on a contentious
subject: abortion. The unusual occurrence of a similar process of detailed discussion on the same
topic in different institutions at around the same time (in 2016–2017) allows us to compare the
deliberative capacities of these institutions and thus contribute to discussions on the appropriateness
of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. We suggest that the
epistemic effect of deliberation on abortion should facilitate nuanced multi-layered discussion that is
both ‘deeper’ in being based on multi-faceted arguments and ‘wider’ in terms of a more accommodative
view. We anticipate that these effects should be more pronounced in the more deliberative, less
polarized, environment of a citizens’ assembly rather than in a parliamentary committee. The analysis
deploys the psychological concept of ‘cognitive complexity’. We find that members of the Citizens’
Assembly demonstrate a deeper cognitively complex grasp of the subject matter. In contrast, experts
and parliamentarians tend to adjust their mode of delivery at a parliamentary committee reflecting the
conflictual and strategic aspects of political debates in such a forum.
Keywords
deliberation, cognitive complexity, mini publics
Accepted: 9 May 2021
Introduction
Deliberative democracy initially conceived at a highly abstract and theoretical level (e.g.
Cohen, 1986; Elster, 1998; Habermas, 1997; Luhmann and Habermas, 1971; Rawls, 1993)
has been increasingly used for a variety of real-world policy issues (e.g. Parkinson, 2006;
1School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
2 School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
3 Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Corresponding author:
Jane Suiter, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland.
Email: jane.suiter@dcu.ie
1020909PSW0010.1177/14789299211020909Political Studies ReviewSuiter et al.
research-article2021
Article
Suiter et al. 631
Smith, 2005, 2012; Elstub, 2010, Elstub and McLaverty 2014; Farrell and Suiter, 2019;
Harris, 2019). In all of these approaches, there is an assumption that within the deliberative
system both politicians and citizens can under certain circumstances deliberate well.
Bächtiger and Beste (2017: 106) argue that both politicians and citizens have the capacity
to approach the ideals of deliberation as envisaged in Habermasian rational discourse if the
‘institutions are appropriate’. Yet this is contested. Shapiro’s (1999) ground breaking piece
argued that deliberative studies fail to sufficiently take into account interest and power
among political elites. Deliberative scholars such as Fishkin and Luskin (2005) worry that
political elites will focus on negotiation over deliberation, thereby undermining the power
of the better argument. For others the potential of politicians to do so is limited to the rela-
tively rarefied confines of consensus systems on uncontentious topics (Bächtiger and
Hangartner, 2010; Steiner, 2004; Wyss et al., 2015); the possibility of deliberation is seen
as especially unlikely in Westminster systems. Some scholars are concerned about the abil-
ity of citizens to deliberate; for example, Achen et al. (2017) view citizens as simply inher-
ently incapable of deliberating, while Rosenberg (2014: 115) argues that participants who
attend a deliberation do not, in fact, engage in the give and take of the discussion’.
In terms of the potential of citizens to engage in epistemic deliberation empirical evi-
dence points to a deliberative potential, especially when appropriate institutions are uti-
lized, such as deliberative mini-publics. Various research teams have found deliberative
and epistemic benefits such as more evidence-based reasoning, or improved citizen pref-
erences through, for example, change of mind or less polarized positions (for a review see
Carpini et al., 2004; Mendelberg, 2002; Setälä and Smith, 2018). Furthermore, normative
benefits are often grounded in the various psychological mechanisms at play when people
deliberate, many of which can also have an important role in determining the outcome of
deliberation. Such normative criteria used to measure the quality of the deliberation vary
including reaching of meta-consensus (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2006; Niemeyer and
Dryzek, 2007), increased respect between the participants (Gutmann and Thompson,
1996; Steenbergen et al., 2003; Schneiderhan and Khan, 2008), changing of opinion
(Suiter et al., 2016), increased coherence between beliefs (Gastil and Dillard, 1999; Suiter
and Reidy, 2020), the substantive quality of the outcome, and, importantly, reasoning
(Mercier and Landemore, 2012; Suiter et al., 2020). Thus, it seems that empirical research
shows that both politicians and citizens have at least the capacity to deliberate when insti-
tutions are appropriate.
However, much of the evidence is particular and relies on specific minipublics or spe-
cific parliamentary debates on specific topics at specific points of time. We simply do not
know how the quality of deliberation varies across citizen and legislative institutions.
This is largely because, to our knowledge, the comparative study of the deliberative qual-
ity of debate among citizens and among politicians in the same period on the same subject
has not been possible to date. It is important to do so because otherwise while we can
demonstrate that citizens can deliberate, we cannot tell whether their deliberation is dif-
ferent (either inferior or superior) to the deliberation of elected representatives. This
becomes ever more important as deliberation expands across institutions and as it scales
up, in particular given the role of both minipublics and parliaments, as different types of
deliberative fora, within the wider deliberative system. It can aid our understanding as to
how each can contribute to the whole.
Responding to Landemore’s (2017: 286) question, ‘Under what conditions do demo-
cratic procedures tend to produce better decisions?’, this paper adopts a comparative per-
spective to compare the debate quality in the plenary sessions of an Irish citizens’ assembly
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