Focus and aims

The driving question of this Core Activity is whether deliberation makes people think reflectively, by carefully weighing the pros and cons of the issue before making political decisions. Studying this question systematically is important, particularly in this time when unreflective and top-of- the-head political choices fuel political polarisation and enmity in society. 

Thanks to this Core Activity, the Deliberative spaces will be set up in a way that citizen participants will have the opportunity to seek more information on the topic they need during deliberations. Several proxies will give the wealth of information to capture different dimensions of reflective judgement processes. Post-deliberation opinions of the participants will be tracked at different points of time, in order to capture the latent and long-term reflection in judgements. 

EuComMeet will also bring novelty to the literature on the theme, by measuring reflections right after deliberation, after 2 weeks and finally after several months to see if reflection in judgements persist. Finally, we will control for a set of dispositional variables such as the need for cognition, need for affect, political interest, trust and so on, to account for individual differences in reflective judgements.

Method

Investigating on this Core Activity will entail to:

• Perform a literature review on how deliberative processes can help foster reflective judgements. This will provide theoretical ground for the hypotheses;
• Measure reflective judgements after deliberation with a series of proxies
in four experimental conditions: 1) online (and mediated via facilitator) deliberative discussion; 2) online (and non mediated) deliberative discussion; 3) online information condition (in order to disentangle the role of pure information from that of discussion); 4) pure control condition (entailing people only filling out pre- and then post- surveys);
• Analyse the results from the previous phases and propose accordingly some scenarios for developing new deliberative protocols to enhance reflective reasoning.

Who’s in the first line

Dublin City University will lead this Core Activity, with the contribution of the University of Stuttgart and University of Siena

Meet our Team Members!

Expected outcomes

D7.1: Report on literature review on reflective judgements and deliberation – Report on literature review on reflective judgements and deliberation. 

D7.2: Report on results from variables of interest – Report on results from variables of interest will be discussed during an online workshop with the other EUComMeet partners. 

D7.3: Articles in high-impact journals – We will transform our report D7.1 into scientific articles which will be submitted to specialised peer-reviewed political science journals. 

D7.4: Proposal for new protocols for reflective societies – This will be a short essay, tables and infographics on deliberation and reflectivity, including pragmatic proposals, which will be directed to a broad public sphere (officials, politicians, activists and interested citizens

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