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

公民大会(CA)--将随机挑选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，作为一种重新将代议制机构与公民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，会产生什么样的影响？这些影响是如何由CA连接到政治系统的方式形成的？这些问题在CA的拥护者和他们的怀疑者之间引发了激烈的辩论。然而，几乎没有强有力的证据来提供全面的答案，因为现有的研究倾向于：专注于政策影响，忽视CA可能对政治和政治产生影响的方式，在中长期影响可以评估之前与过程并行并完成，审视CA的内部设计特征，而很少关注将CA连接到政治系统的综合特征，审查个别案例，从而限制了可比性和概括性的洞察。I4i利用Weave项目的独特机会，将来自比利时、德国和波兰的顶尖研究人员聚集在一起，首次在欧洲范围内对一体化设计和影响进行系统的比较分析。它建立了国家和国家以下各级气候大会的数据库，绘制了它们的综合设计特征以及政策、政治和政治影响，并通过文献分析、过程观察、定性访谈、调查实验和定性比较分析(QCA)相结合的方式分析了它们之间的关系。该方法将通过以下方式做出重要的理论和经验贡献：开发和实施CA综合设计特征的新概念框架，CA对政治、政治和政策的影响，以及它们之间的因果关系，提供细微差别和包罗万象的实证分析，将综合设计特征和影响之间的关系的中N比较分析与深入的因果机制运作的案例研究相结合。因此，i4i将使理解超越关于审议过程是否具有政策影响的过于广泛的辩论，以生成关于具体的综合设计如何产生或未能产生具体的政治、政治和政策影响的细粒度证据。这将使人们能够更现实地评估公众审议对当代欧洲民主国家的价值，既是解决民主机构运作的广泛问题的改革，也是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之际，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.