Alan Renwick

This chapter examines the bases of deliberative mini-publics’ (DMPs) internal and external legitimacy and discusses how their outputs can influence collective decision-making. It addresses some of the most contentious issues in the field of democratic innovations today including: To what extent should deliberative mini-publics shape decision-making? Should DMPs be empowered to make binding decisions? Are they better off taking an advisory role? What is the basis of DMPs’ legitimacy in the first place?

Citizens are often accused of being disinterested and incapable of taking part in politics. This chapter demonstrates how deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) can be designed to address this issue, in a manner that conforms to norms of deliberative democracy. DMPs are, by design, venues that should facilitate balanced and critical deliberation among participants representing differing viewpoints. The design features of mini-publics, such as random selection and moderated small-group discussions, should thus at least to some extent correct potential biases in evidence. Mini-publics’ capacity for critical scrutiny can be further strengthened by specific design features that help participants to become more reflective in their own views.

Two voting system referendums in the same year in two countries with institutional and cultural similarities provide an excellent opportunity for comparison, particularly given the significant differences in how those referendums were regulated and conducted. In New Zealand, a well-funded and balanced official information campaign led the debate; in Britain, the debate was dominated by campaign organisations. Based on content analysis of newspaper coverage of the campaigns, this paper explores how regulatory differences between these two cases shaped the quality of debate as reflected in media discourse. It finds that they made a difference, suggesting that positive interventions to promote better debate can work. It also concludes, however, that contextual factors are crucial too: interventions that work in one context will not necessarily work in another.

High-quality information is widely regarded as essential for democratic referendum campaigns, but what this means and how it can be advanced has not been systematically studied. By reviewing existing literature and drawing on a survey of practice around the democratic world, this article addresses this gap by making three contributions. First, it identifies four key dimensions to high-quality information: accuracy; balance; accessibility; and relevance. Second, it identifies four strategies through which information quality may be advanced: controlling campaign finance; confronting misinformation; creating and disseminating quality information; and promoting quality discussion. Third, it examines existing knowledge on the most promising of these strategies, offering preliminary conclusions and pointers for further research. The article suggests that the optimal strategy has not yet been found, and that further research could help to develop it.

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.

Political scientists might hope to offer practitioners involved in debates about electoral reform insights regarding either the process of reform or its potential effects. In respect of each of these, the practitioners whom we engage might be either elite decision makers or the activists, journalists, and regular citizens who constitute the bedrock of democracy. The UK's electoral reform referendum of 2011 offers a good opportunity to explore the degree to which political scientists in fact offer original insights in these various areas. The article argues that, despite the great efforts that political scientists have expended in refining ever more sophisticated models of electoral system effects, elite practitioners have often—though not always—got there before us. By contrast, at least in the UK, practitioners sometimes fall short of political scientists in their understanding of how reform processes might unfold, and there is also a clear and strong need for political scientists to assist in educating public opinion. These findings have implications for how we should think about political science research: the research that practitioners most value is often not the research that has the highest prestige within the discipline.