Maija Setälä

The need to find rapid yet fair and legitimate policy responses to climate change has prompted calls for more democratic deliberation in climate policymaking. Democratic deliberation, however, contains varying normative goals, which may have diverse effects on participants of climate deliberation. We distinguish three types of deliberation: ‘Habermasian’ deliberation emphasizing the quality of justification, integrative deliberation emphasizing mutual understanding, and inclusive deliberation emphasizing consideration of affected interests. To analyze the impacts of these types, we conducted a population-based, randomized lab-in-the-field experiment, where three treatment groups deliberated Finland’s climate policies face-to-face online. We induced the deliberation types through different discussion norms and exercises taken in the beginning of deliberation. We report the treatments’ impacts on participants’ climate knowledge, policy attitudes and affective polarization. Overall, we find little support for our hypotheses, and some findings actually go against our expectations. The unexpected findings can be partly explained by group composition and resulting enclave deliberation. In addition, short deliberation time may have contributed to the modesty of the effects. Our results both confirm earlier findings on the impact of deliberation on participants and highlight the importance of opinion diversity in climate deliberation.

Citizens’ Assemblies and other deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are institutions designed to foster democratic deliberation. AI systems, especially large language models (LLMs), have been suggested as tools to scale up the breadth and depth of DMPs. We distinguish six core functions within democratic deliberation – representation, perspective-giving and taking, inquiry, co-creation, integration, and decision-making – and point out some potential benefits of AI in each of these functions. Our case study presents the results of the Citizens’ Assembly on Energy, organised in Finland in 2025, in which an LLM was used in inquiry, co-creation, and integration. We found that while LLMs have some shortcomings in terms of inquiry, especially in creating questions for experts, they can ease the workload of human facilitators and deliberators in co-creation and integration. Our findings contribute to the emerging debate on the optimal division of labour in deliberative processes between human deliberators, facilitators, and generative AI.

Deliberative mini‐publics have become commonplace in policymaking on complex issues such as climate policies. When assessing the macro‐political impacts of deliberative mini‐publics, it is important to examine how information about their procedures and outcomes is transmitted to the wider public. We conducted a field experiment to compare the effects of reading a mini‐public statement to those of reading mediated information on a mini‐public. Our experiment is based on a Citizens' Jury on forest use in Northern Finland, and it makes use of an actual piece from the media as well as an original mini‐public statement. Using data collected from a panel of adults living in the region, we analyzed the effects that reading the statement or a newspaper article had on knowledge, policy support, perceived legitimacy, and efficacy in forest and climate change policy. Results show that reading the statement increased factual knowledge. Reading the news story covering the mini‐public, in turn, had mixed impacts on factual knowledge. Furthermore, the news story seems to have reduced the perceived legitimacy of forest management, whereas the full statement had no effect on legitimacy beliefs. We conclude that the macro‐political impacts of mini‐publics depend on the type of media from which citizens receive information.

This article revisits the problems of electoral democracy, especially affective polarisation, from the perspective of the theory of deliberative democracy. Some authors representing ‘realist’ views of democracy have concluded that empirical findings regarding affective polarisation challenge not just the idea of representative democracy as responsive government but also the prospects for deliberative democracy. We point out certain problems and limitations in this conclusion and discuss how theories of deliberative democracy might actually help find remedies for affective polarisation. We apply a recent distinction by Hartman et al. as an intermediate-level conceptualisation that helps translate the theory of deliberative democracy into deliberative practices. To illustrate the potential of deliberative practices, we analyse how forums for citizen deliberation such as deliberative mini-publics could help counteract affective polarisation. We reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of deliberative forums from a systemic perspective.

Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are democratic innovations through which a random sample of lay citizens are gathered to deliberate in small groups on political topics. There are various models for DMPs. This chapter presents the general idea behind DMPs together with their goals and characteristics, as well as discussing their ‘internal’ and ‘external’ effects. In other words, we review processes of taking part in DMPs and the effects of deliberation on participants, placing them within the broader institutional setting of a political system. We also discuss their impacts on policies and society at large. Finally, the prospects of DMPs are evaluated based on empirical and normative studies.

This article argues that the representation of future generations is likely to remain inadequate because of the lack of accountability mechanisms characteristic of representative relations among contemporaries. Two problems pertaining to the representation of future generations and their interests are distinguished, namely misrepresentation and negligence. Misrepresentation refers to ill-informed, biased, and purposive interpretations regarding the interests of future generations, whereas negligence involves future interests not being properly considered in policymaking. While these two problems are often intertwined, misrepresentation is a problem of epistemic and normative judgments, whereas negligence is a motivational problem. The interests of future generations are especially likely to be neglected in cases of so-called intergenerational conflict, that is, situations of welfare tradeoffs between present and future generations. Inclusive democratic deliberation is a remedy for misrepresentation, but its capacity to address negligence may be more limited. Finally, the article remarks on the role of future-regarding deliberation in representative democratic systems.

Mandatory vaccination mightseem like a straightforward solution for reaching a sufficient vaccine coverage during a pandemic. However, the effectiveness of mandatory vaccination is undermined if the public does not perceive such a compulsory policy as acceptable. We report a population-based survey experiment (n = 1,131), conducted in Finland, that addresses the effects that different ways of framing a mandatory vaccination program have on three outcome variables: (1) the perceived acceptability of the program, (2) the willingness to take the vaccine voluntarily, and (3) the preparedness to refuse the mandatory vaccine. In the 2 × 3 factorial experiment, the respondents were presented with one of three justification alternatives that stressed the benefits of the program for either the economy, health, or basic rights. The justification was accompanied with one of two thresholds for herd immunity (70 or 90 percent). We found that the justification and the threshold for herd immunity interact when it comes to the acceptability of the program and the willingness to take the vaccine voluntarily. Importantly, justifications drawing on health were ineffective at the lower threshold level but very effective when the threshold was high. The preparedness to refuse a mandatory vaccine was low and reacted weakly with the experimental treatments.

Previous studies suggest that information from deliberative mini‐publics helps voters make informed and reflected judgements and act accordingly. Despite a growing body of literature, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This study examines three causal mechanisms for affecting voting intentions in a referendum: 1) factual knowledge, 2) trusted information proxy, or 3) perspective‐taking of the opinions of others. The data come from a referendum on a municipal merger in Korsholm, Finland. In a field experiment, a statement from a citizens' jury on the merger was released to a treatment group and differences in opinions and voting intentions were compared with a control group that did not receive the statement. Causal mediation analysis examines which of the three causal mechanisms best explains how the jury's statement affected intended voting behaviour. We find that reading the statement increased factual knowledge, trust, and perspective‐taking, but only increased factual knowledge affected voting intentions.

Accountability is present in many types of social relations; for example, the accountability of elected representatives to voters is the key characteristic of representative democracy. We distinguish between two institutional mechanisms of accountability, i.e., opportunity to punish and requirement of a justification, and examine the separate and combined effects of these mechanisms on individual behavior. For this purpose, we designed a decision-making experiment where subjects engage in a three-player trust game with two senders and one responder. We ask whether holding the responder accountable increases senders’ and responders’ contributions in a trust game. When restricting the analysis to the first round, the requirement of justification seems to have a positive impact on senders’ contributions. When the game is played repeatedly, the experience of previous rounds dominates the results and significant treatment effects are no longer seen. We also find that responders tend to justify their choices in terms of reciprocity, which is in line with observed behavior. Moreover, the treatment combining punishment and justification hinders justifications that appeal to pure self-interest.