Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics
| Author | Ramon van der Does,Vincent Jacquet |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211007278 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211007278
Political Studies
2023, Vol. 71(1) 218 –237
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00323217211007278
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Small-Scale Deliberation and
Mass Democracy: A Systematic
Review of the Spillover Effects
of Deliberative Minipublics
Ramon van der Does1
and Vincent Jacquet2
Abstract
Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However,
it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this
study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that
is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer
this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover
effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018
and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover
effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on
the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for
future research.
Keywords
minipublics, deliberative democracy, spillover, systematic review, PRISMA
Accepted: 15 March 2021
Introduction
Many scholars, political pundits, and citizens nowadays seem to find that there is some-
thing wrong with the functioning of mass democracy (Dryzek et al., 2019; Papadopoulos,
2013; Przeworski, 2019). Some of them claim that part of the solution to the crisis of
democracy is to implement “institutions that have been specifically designed to increase
and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process,” that is, to
1ISPOLE, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
2Institut Transitions, Université de Namur, Namur, Belgium
Corresponding author:
Ramon van der Does, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Montesquieu, 1 bte, L2.08.07, B-1348 Louvain-
la-Neuve, Belgium.
Email: ramon.vanderdoes@uclouvain.be
1007278PSX0010.1177/00323217211007278Political Studiesvan der Does and Jacquet
research-article2021
Article
van der Does and Jacquet 219
introduce democratic innovations (Smith, 2009: 1; Sørensen, 2017). According to their
advocates, democratic innovations could solve many of the problems associated with the
current crisis: they could reinstate trust in political institutions, inform voting at Election
Day, stimulate citizen involvement, and improve the quality of public debate (Fung, 2003;
Geissel and Newton, 2012; Smith, 2009). In this article, we assess to what extent one spe-
cific class of democratic innovations lives up to such promises: deliberative minipublics.
Minipublics are discussion forums of lay citizens that are (quasi-)representative of
the population at large (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006). Examples include the consensus
conferences pioneered by the Danish Board of Technology in the 1980s, Deliberative
Polling®, and citizens’ juries (Gastil and Levine, 2005). If we are to believe their advo-
cates, these short, small-scale instances of deliberation can and should have lasting
effects on participating citizens as well as effects on citizens that do not participate
(Dryzek, 2010; Niemeyer, 2014; Smith and Wales, 1999). These potential effects range
from increases in knowledge to opinion shifts, changes in political behavior, and, for
example, elevated trust in political institutions. Based on surveys administered before
and just after minipublics, the preceding research shows that minipublics tend to have
such transformative effects on participants in the short run (Dryzek et al., 2019; Gastil,
2018). Yet, it remains ambiguous to what degree these effects last and scale up to the
wider public.
This article offers a first systematic review of minipublics’ spillover effects. We bor-
row the notion of “spillover” from participatory democratic theory to refer to the effects
of participation in a minipublic on participants’ lives as citizens in the wider political
system (Pateman, 1970). This means that we are interested in the question to what degree
the effects of participation measured right after a minipublic last once participants return
to their lives outside of the minipublic. This question is especially pertinent for arguments
advancing that minipublics should take place on a regular basis, allowing all citizens to
go through the experience at some point in their lives (Niemeyer, 2014). Following the
recent work on democratic theory, minipublics’ effects may also spill over to other citi-
zens, that is, citizens that do not participate in a minipublic (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006).
The question to what degree and how minipublics affect the wider public is crucial for
assessing their role from a systemic perspective, that is, how they relate to other sites of
political discussion and opinion formation (Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012). These two
ways of thinking about minipublics’ spillover effects on lay citizens lead to the following
research questions:
1. To what extent do minipublics have long-term effects on participating citizens?
2. To what extent do minipublics affect non-participating citizens?
In the following, we first summarize ongoing normative debates about the roles politi-
cal theorists expect minipublics to fulfill in democracies. We then describe how we con-
ducted the systematic review and introduce a new framework to conceptualize minipublics’
spillover effects. Next, we describe the results for each of the two types of spillover
effects. We show that the empirical evidence for most spillover effects is still tentative
and/or mixed. Nonetheless, we do find several consistent findings that suggest that min-
ipublics can have long-lasting effects on participants as well as discernable effects on
non-participants. In the discussion, we summarize the key findings of the review, reflect
on the implications for normative theory, and suggest several ways forward to improve
our understanding of minipublics’ spillover effects.
To continue reading
Request your trial