Integrating Public Deliberation for Impact (i4i): Learning from the European Wave of Citizens’ Assemblies

公民大会（Citizens' assemblies，CA）--将随机选择的人聚集在一起讨论政治问题并提出建议的程序--在整个欧洲越来越多地被采用，作为一种将代表机构与公民重新联系起来并为气候变化等重大政策挑战制定解决方案的新方式。但CA真的有影响吗？如果是，有哪些影响？CA与政治体系的联系方式又是如何形成这些影响的？这些问题引发了CA支持者和怀疑者之间的激烈争论。然而，几乎没有强有力的证据提供全面的答案，因为现有的研究往往：只关注政策影响，忽视了CA对政治和政体的影响方式，在中长期影响评估之前就完成了过程，关注CA的内部设计特征，而很少关注CA与政治系统的整合特征，研究个案，从而限制比较，概括的见解。i4 i利用Weave计划的独特机会，汇集了来自比利时，德国和波兰的领先研究人员，对一体化设计和影响进行了首次全欧洲范围的系统比较分析。它建立了一个跨国家和国家以下各级的气候大会数据库，通过文献分析，过程观察，定性访谈，调查实验和定性比较分析（QCA）相结合，绘制其综合设计特征和政策，政治和政体影响，并分析它们之间的关系。该方法将通过以下方式作出重要的理论和经验贡献：发展和操作新的概念框架，包括CA的综合设计特征，CA对政治，政治和政策的影响，以及它们之间的因果关系，提供一个细致入微的和全面的实证分析，结合了综合设计特征和影响之间的关系的中N比较分析，深入案例研究因果机制如何运作。因此，信息4 i将使人们的理解超越关于审议进程是否具有政策影响的过于宽泛的辩论，而产生关于具体的综合设计如何产生或未能产生具体的政体、政治和政策影响的精细证据。这将有助于更现实地评估公共审议对当代欧洲民主国家的价值，既作为解决民主制度运作中广泛问题的改革，也作为对具体政策挑战的干预--在这些进程目前如雨后春笋般涌现的情况下，这一点至关重要。

Citizens’ assemblies (CA) - procedures that bring together randomly selected people to deliberate on political issues and to make recommendations - are increasingly adopted throughout Europe as a novel way to reconnect representative institutions with citizens and develop solutions for grand policy challenges, such as climate change. But do CAs really have an impact? If so, what kinds of impacts? And how are these impacts shaped by the ways that CAs are connected into the political system? These questions have provoked a heated debate between advocates of CAs and their skeptics. However, there is little robust evidence for providing a comprehensive answer because existing studies tend to: focus on policy impacts, neglecting the ways that CAs may have impacts on politics and polity, run alongside the process and finish before mid- and long-term impacts can be assessed, look at internal design features of CAs and pay little attention to the integrative features that connect CAs into the political system, examine individual cases, thus limiting comparative, generalizable insights. i4i takes advantage of the unique opportunity of the Weave program to bring together leading researchers from Belgium, Germany and Poland to conduct the first Europe-wide, systematic comparative analysis of integrative design and impacts. It builds a database of climate assemblies across national and subnational levels, mapping their integrative design features and policy, political and polity impacts and analyzing the relationships between them through a combination of documentary analysis, process observation, qualitative interviews, survey experiments and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The approach will make an important theoretical and empirical contribution by: developing and operationalizing new conceptual frameworks of CAs’ integrative design features, impacts of CAs on polities, politics and policies, and the causal relations between them, providing a nuanced and encompassing empirical analysis that combines a medium-N comparative analysis of the relationship between integrative design features and impacts with in-depth case studies of how causal mechanisms function. i4i will therefore move understanding beyond overly broad debates about whether deliberative processes have a policy impact or not to generate fine-grained evidence on how specific integrative designs produce or fail to produce specific polity, political and policy impacts. This will enable a more realistic assessment of the value of public deliberation for contemporary European democracies, both as a reform to address broad problems with the functioning of democratic institutions and as an intervention into specific policy challenges – of utmost importance when these processes are currently mushrooming.