It’s Not Just the Taking Part that Counts: ‘Like Me’ Perceptions Connect the Wider Public to Minipublics
It’s Not Just the Taking Part that Counts: ‘Like Me’ Perceptions Connect the Wider Public to Minipublics
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重要的不仅仅是参与：“像我一样”的观念将更广泛的公众与小公众联系起来
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Sofie Marien
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
James Pow;L. V. Dijk;Sofie Marien
许多审议民主人士都认为，小公共机构有潜力帮助提高民主决策的质量。然而，这些民主创新提出了一个悖论：当大多数公民无法参与时，小公共的使用如何被最大公众视为合法？在这篇文章中，我们解决这个问题的背景下，拉丰的论点，即迷你共和国的“捷径”的民主进程。我们通过假设非参与者认为小公共是合法的，当他们认为小公共参与者像他们一样时，当他们认为政治家不像他们时，我们对这一论点提出了挑战。同样，我们预计描述性相似性的相对重要性将与所讨论的问题有关。我们测试我们的假设在北方爱尔兰，在那里举行了一个minipublish的政体的宪法未来的突出和有争议的问题的深刻分歧的背景下。调查证据证实，“喜欢我”的看法构成了一个重要的预测微型公共合法性的看法。我们的研究结果具有影响的沟通的minipublish功能，以更广泛的公众，使用minipublics与传统的决策过程，并为进一步的实证研究。
Many deliberative democrats herald the potential of minipublics to help improve the quality of democratic decision-making. Yet these democratic innovations present a paradox: how can the use of minipublics be perceived as legitimate by the maxi-public when most citizens cannot participate? In this article, we address this question in the context of Lafont’s argument that minipublics amount to ‘shortcuts’ in the democratic process. We challenge this argument by hypothesising that non-participants perceive minipublics to be legitimate when they perceive minipublic participants to be like them – and when they perceive politicians to be unlike them. Similarly, we expect that the relative importance of descriptive similarity will be related to the issue in question. We test our hypotheses in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland, where a minipublic was held on the salient and contentious question of the polity’s constitutional future. Survey evidence confirms that ‘like me’ perceptions constitute a significant predictor of minipublic legitimacy perceptions. Our results have implications for the communication of minipublic features to the broader public, for the use of minipublics alongside conventional decision-making processes, and for further empirical research.