Professor André Bächtiger is member of the EuComMeet project consortium leading Work Package : “Collection and analysis of data on past and current deliberative processes and development of new instruments”.
Since April 2015 André Bächtiger is professor of Political Theory and Empirical Democracy Research at the University of Stuttgart, his research focuses on optimal forms of deliberation, deliberative reforms in elite politics, the potential of citizen deliberation in direct democracy, the deliberative abilities of ordinary citizens, deliberation on political rights of foreigners, and the mapping and measuring of deliberation.
Interview
What are your goals and role in the EuComMeet project? And how such goals can be framed in the broader debate on the role of deliberative democracy?
Our work package has two goals: on the one hand it develops a new dataset of minipublics based on the Participedia platform, enhanced by an “observer survey” complementing missing cases and updating missing information. The databank will comprise over 120 minipublic cases conducted at the national and regional level in Great Britain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy and Finland as well as the European level (2000-2021). By focusing on a wide-range of potential antecedents of minipublic uptake, ranging from process design (e.g. purpose, size, composition), issue type (complexity and salience), political support (especially alignment of recommendations with preferences of political elites), and characteristics of the country context, the dataset provides a new springboard for exploring under what conditions minipublic recommendations are taken up in political systems (and when this is not the case).
On the other hand, our work package is also interested in how citizens themselves see the role of minipublics in a democratic system (compared to parliaments and executive forms of governance). We design a novel batch of conjoint experiments to analyse respective legitimacy perceptions of citizens in various European countries. Both projects adopt a “contingency approach” to deliberative innovations: we claim that the roles minipublics can play in democratic systems (also at a pan-European level) depends on different institutional and cultural contexts and must be aligned with (heterogeneous) citizen preferences for such innovations and their concrete designs. While the conjoint experiments are still in the making, our new databank suggests that there is a fairly “technocratic” road to minipublic success, i.e. uptake only happens when minipublics are organized top-down, are designed for policy appraisal and do not contest the policy preferences of political elites.