Justin Reedy

Recent deliberative systems research has emphasized the need to “scale up” deliberative mini-publics by exploring connections between mini-publics and broader arenas of policymaking. Less is known, however, about how the policy environment in a state or region might itself influence a deliberative event. In this article, we set out to examine how the internal dynamics of mini-publics are affected by the scaling-up process of connecting to larger policymaking domains. To better understand how the external role of deliberation affects the internal dynamics, we analyze two notable cases of deliberative forums addressing public problems. In both cases, the 2017 Our Coastal Future Forum in South Carolina and the 2020 Oregon Citizens’ Assembly on coronavirus disease-19 recovery, citizen participants grappled with the challenge of scaling up to larger policy outcomes. We conduct a thematic analysis of transcripts from both events, focusing on how citizens discuss their role in influencing policy and talk about the potential for policy output from the mini-publics. The analysis reveals that the scaling-up process invites a pragmatic orientation within deliberation, centering on issues of efficiency, scope, and efficacy.

From July–August, 2020, the nonprofit organization Healthy Democracy convened a seven-week pilot test of an online Citizen Assembly on the state of Oregon's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pilot project presented a unique research opportunity, because its organizers had ten years of experience running the Citizens’ Initiative Review, a face-to-face minipublic authorized by the State of Oregon to write voting guides for the wider electorate on ballot measures. This case study compares survey data from the Citizen Assembly pilot with the prior Citizens’ Initiative Reviews and provides analysis and recommendations that could improve the design and execution of future online assemblies.

Psychological phenomena have long been a focus of research on democratic deliberation, particularly concerning policy knowledge and attitudes and other issues addressed in conventional scholarship on political psychology. Yet in recent years, the subject matter of psychological research on deliberation has expanded to include a wider array of issues, ranging from lay conceptualizations of deliberation, to phenomena not foregrounded in traditional political psychology scholarship, including emotions, social identity, communication goals, relational schemata, and social learning. This essay summarizes key findings from prior research on psychological dimensions of deliberation, and then delineates recent deliberative scholarship that explores a broader range of psychological phenomena. Finally, this essay introduces the six new articles that make up this special issue. These articles offer novel theoretical and empirical insights on a number of current themes concerning psychological aspects of deliberation, while expanding knowledge concerning established areas of inquiry.