Focus and aims

This Project Core Activity will provide a comprehensive dataset of European events with representative and deliberative qualities that address key problems of democratic governance, including: (a) inclusion and representation in governance; (b) polarisation among and between groups, including identity and class-based cleavages; (c) reflective reasoning of citizens, including people’s capacity to assess news and manage complex information; (d) effects on European identity; and (e) consequentiality.

In addition, we will develop information on three outcomes that are external to deliberative processes and events, but which are of key importance to understanding the potential political impacts of these processes, including their impacts on (1) the legitimacy of political and policy decisions; (2) the trust of broader publics in these processes and their advice/decisions; and (3) trust in these processes by political and policy elites.

A specific innovation of this Core Activity will be to develop a parallel conjoint experiment for European decision-makers, investigating the conditions under which the latter perceive deliberative and representative processes as legitimated and productive (and when not). This will enable us (a) to identify intersections between citizen and elite views on deliberative and representative processes, and (b) to design new co-creative processes that help to rebuild mutual trust between citizens and European policymakers.

Focus and aims

To address these questions, the Consortium will adopt a four-steps strategy:

1. Make best use of existing databases to identify and catalogue recent and current processes, with a focus on the EU, its institutions, policies, and integration scenarios that have been promoted either by the EU or by other (local, regional, national) institutions since the early 2000s. The dataset scope will include EU-wide, national, regional, and local events and processes that are designed to be both representative (e.g., deliberative polls and citizen juries) and deliberative in their methodological approach. The dataset will be limited to European-wide issues, such as immigration and climate change, although also data from proximate countries (candidate countries, EFTA members, and neighbouring countries) will be considered. The database will be built using the public & open source Participedia platform, sourcing the data from its current Participedia Database and OECD’s ones, microlevel data from Europolis (a pan-European deliberative poll conducted in 2009), and other country, issue, and process-specific databases.
2. Conduct and analyse surveys of knowledgeable observers for a limited number of processes. From our universe of cases, researchers will select processes that maximise variation on the independent variables (variation in process design; issue variation; context variation), in order to determine which kinds of designs provide the highest impact on the process-focused dependent variables of interest. Using Consortium’s networks of researchers and practitioners, a ‘targeted recruitment’ strategy will be used to identify 10-15 expert ‘observers’ who have knowledge of a case. These observers will complete a survey designed by Participedia, while making sure that all survey interview responses are anonymised. An original measure of reflective reasoning will be designed for this survey, starting from a novel batch of questions to capture polarisation and moderation trends, as well as the development of European identity. This analysis will be bolstered by a re-analysis of micro-level data (including transcribed discussion sessions) from Europolis identifying potential gaps in voice, authority and responsiveness of a pan-European deliberative process on the part of disaffected and disadvantaged citizens.
3. Using survey experiments (on the basis of paired conjoint designs) in five of our focus countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland) this core Core Activity will assess the hypothetical potential of representative and deliberative processes to affect our three outcome-focused dependent variables, that is to say: (1) increase the political legitimacy of decisions; (2) increase trust between citizens and decision-makers; and (3) increase trust by decision-makers of these processes. The experiments will be embedded in the citizens’ survey carried out within the “INCLUSION” Core Activity.
4. Extract ideal design criteria from Participedia, Europolis, the observer survey, and the survey experiments to inform the project’s designed processes within the “DESIGNING THE M4D2 PARTICIPATORY SPACES” and “MAKE IT HAPPEN” phases.

Who’s in the first line

All the Universities involved in the project, led by the University of Stuttgart

Meet our Team Members!

Expected outcomes

D1.1: Report on “Using Europolis data for EuComMeet’s topics” – Analysis of the Europolis database using project-relevant variables. 

D1.2: Aggregated Deliberative Dataset  – Comprehensive database of events based on Participedia platform and other sources. 

D1.3 : Dataset of the “observers’ surveys” of selected cases –  Comprehensive dataset based on data from the observers’ survey. 

D1.4 : Report based on the analysis of observers’ surveys of selected cases – Analyses from the comprehensive dataset based on data from the “observers’ survey”. 

D1.5 : Report based on the analysis of survey experiments – Analyses from the comprehensive dataset based on data from the “citizens’ survey”. 

D1.6 : Report on Lessons Learned – Report on the main results from events data, observers’ survey, and the citizen survey experiments that informed the Fill the Gap and Make it Happen stages. 

Most of these outcomes will be made publicly available. Find them here once ready!