Public compliance with difficult political decisions in times of a pandemic: does citizen deliberation help?

Muradova, Lala and Suiter, Jane (2022) Public compliance with difficult political decisions in times of a pandemic: does citizen deliberation help? International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 34 (3), [edac026]. (doi:10.1093/ijpor/edac026).

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Abstract

Bridging deliberative democracy and crisis management scholarship, we construct theoretical expectations about the role of deliberative minipublics in fostering public compliance with difficult political decisions. Our expectations are tested with a randomized cross-national survey experiment (United States and United Kingdom, N = 2088), in which respondents read a realistic news item depicting a political decision-making process leading to the extension of COVID-19 lockdown measures that follows either a (1) citizen deliberation, (2) public consultation, (3) politician deliberation, or (4) nothing. The findings show minipublics are unlikely to foster public compliance during a health crisis. On the contrary, reading about a minipublic could decrease compliance when individuals are distrustful of minipublics. This study has implications for citizen participation, deliberation, and leadership during future pandemics.

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Published date: 9 November 2022

Keywords: deliberative democracy, democratic innovations, political participation, minipublic, citizens' assemblies, experiment, Covid 19, public compliance, difficult public policy, UK, US