The Legal Institutionalisation of Public Deliberation and the Embeddedness in the Democratic System: The Italian Case

Over the last few decades, the setting up of deliberative processes has gained prominence in many democratic countries. These processes, which can be considered as small parentheses in longer and complex policy-making processes, are designed and managed so that citizens can discuss and confront a plurality of viewpoints and arguments together with politicians, public officials, experts, and stakeholders, and can then convey reasoned recommendations to improve the design and implementation of public policies. Research on deliberative democracy has dealt with several issues pertaining to the quality, legitimacy, effectiveness, and sustainability of these democratic innovations. One of the issues that has attracted the attention of scholars concerns the legal institutionalisation of these practices, a recent and controversial phenomenon, which could strengthen or weaken the embeddedness of public deliberation in democratic systems. This article is aimed at addressing the issue of whether legal institutionalisation helps to embed public deliberation in democratic systems. It presents the findings of an empirical analysis of Italian deliberative processes, where a legislative framework made so-called “public debates” compulsory throughout the national territory between 2021 and 2023. Thereafter, in 2023, a new reform was introduced that substantially dismantled the policy. The short parabola of Italian public debates on major public works offers an opportunity to analyse the short-term effects of legal institutionalisation. The empirical findings of this case study suggest that the legal institutionalisation of public deliberation involves several trade-offs in the short term, so that embeddedness may be strengthened and weakened at the same time.