A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Who will not deliberate? Attrition in a multi-stage citizen deliberation experiment




AuthorsMaija Karjalainen, Lauri Rapeli

PublisherSpringer Netherlands

Publication year2015

JournalQuality and Quantity

Volume49

Issue1

First page 407

Last page422

Number of pages16

ISSN0033-5177

eISSN1573-7845

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-014-9993-y


Abstract

This article examines the determinants of attrition in deliberative mini-publics. We approach attrition from a social psychological and a socioeconomic perspective and draw several hypotheses. We find that age and life situation are the primary predictors of attrition, but also having a negative opinion about immigration and reluctance to expose oneself to conflicting opinions play an important role. We use data from a citizen deliberation experiment organized in Finland in 2012. The data allows us to analyze attrition in several stages of recruitment, resulting in 207 people from an initial population of 12,000 participating in a deliberation experiment. The topic of the discussions was immigration, and the experiment was designed to test the theoretical assumptions of enclave deliberation. Our results feed the ongoing discussion about equality and representation in deliberative mini-publics and highlight the importance of social psychological variables in explaining attrition.




Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 14:46