https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6315-4125
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ABSTRACT
Many citizens support the involvement of experts in political decision-making, yet we know little about how citizens react to expert opinions. Bridging recent evidence on technocratic attitudes and deliberative democracy, we study citizen responses to experts during influential deliberative mini-publics. Combining automated speech transcription of over 380,000 spoken words and quantitative text analysis, we estimate the topic prevalence in all expert testimonials, Q&A sessions, and other agenda items in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (2016–2018), one of the prime examples of impactful deliberative forums. We find that inputs of experts structure subsequent discussions but do not dominate them. This correlation persists with various measures of topic prevalence and is robust to several modelling approaches. We also find that participants tended to react less strongly to testimonials by female experts. These conditional effects should encourage organisers to invite experts with diverse backgrounds in order to enhance inclusive decision-making.
Acknowledgements
We thank Killian Daly for contributing valuable input at the early stages of the project, Letícia Barbabela for research assistance, and James Cross, David Farrell, Sarah King, Joseph Lacey, and students in the MSc Politics and Data Science at University College Dublin for comments on previous versions of the paper.
Data availability statement
The data and R scripts required to verify the reproducibility of the results in this article are available on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4Y1TBU.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These are Citizens’ Assembly, Citizens’ Jury/Panel, Consensus Conference, Planning Cell, G1000, Citizens’ Council, Citizens’ Dialogue, Deliberative Poll/Survey, World Wide Views, Citizens’ Initiative Review, The Ostbelgien Model, The City Observatory. They also state that these can be clustered into four types of purpose: 1. Informed citizen recommendations on policy questions; 2. Citizen opinion on policy questions; 3. Informed citizen evaluation of ballot measures; and 4. Permanent representative deliberative models.
2 These are Citizens’ juries, planning cells, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, citizens’ assemblies. Curato et al. (Citation2021, p. 7) argue that citizens’ initiative reviews should be considered a sixth model.
3 This value is considerably lower than the error rate of 3 per cent reported in Proksch et al. (Citation2019). We corrected Irish words that were always spelled incorrectly before calculating the word error rate (see SI Section B).
4 The total sample of texts used in the regression models is slightly smaller (see Table A1). The difference in observations occurs because the regression models only consider agenda items that were followed by a Q&A session within a window of two days and within the five subsequent agenda items.
5 We use the following R packages for preparing, analysing, and visualising the data: base (R Core Team, Citation2022), car (Fox & Weisberg, Citation2019), cowplot (Wilke, Citation2020), furrr (Vaughan & Dancho, Citation2022), ggeffects (Lüdecke, Citation2018), quanteda (Benoit et al., Citation2018), rio (Chan, Chan, Leeper, & Becker, Citation2021), stm (Roberts et al., Citation2019), texreg (Leifeld, Citation2013), tidyverse (Wickham et al., Citation2019), and xtable (Dahl, Scott, Roosen, Magnusson, & Swinton, Citation2019).
6 We exclude the following topics: General Proceedings; Voting/Results; Assembly Procedures; Voting; Ballots; Ballots: Results; Assembly Contributions.
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Notes on contributors
Stefan Müller
Stefan Müller is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. His research interests include political representation, party competition, political communication, public opinion, and computational social science.
Garrett Kennedy
Garrett Kennedy is a Research Executive at Red C Research and a former student of Politics and Data Science at University College Dublin. His research interests include party competition, political economy, political communication, and computational social science.
Tomás Maher
Tomás Maher is a former Politics and Data Science MSc student at University College Dublin.