Assessing the substantive outputs of deliberative minipublics: a categorical framework for policy recommendations

Abstract Deliberative minipublics (DMPs), such as citizens’ assemblies (CAs), comprising randomly selected citizens, have become an increasingly popular means to complement traditional political decision-making. DMPs are claimed to overcome the challenges of liberal democracy by democratizing policy-making and enhancing the epistemic value of public decisions. To date, research has largely focused on DMPs’ internal processes or their role within the broader political system. There is, however, still a limited number of studies analyzing the substantive outputs of such deliberative fora, i.e., their policy recommendations. This research note proposes a categorical framework for analyzing and comparing DMPs’ recommendations across cases. It was built on existing theoretical approaches to public policy outputs and policy advice. To adapt the theory to the specificity of DMPs, we used the insights from nine in-depth interviews and two focus groups conducted with citizens, policy experts, stakeholders, and civil servants, who evaluated recommendations from ten CAs in Poland. A total of 20% of recommendations from ten Polish CAs ( n = 130) were initially pilot-coded to refine the framework and then to test its reliability. The study provides an easily applicable tool for comparative analysis of DMPs’ outputs across cases without requiring contextual data. The provided categories of recommendations may help further research on the relationship between DMP designs and the quality of their recommendations, also contributing to the study of DMPs’ policy impact.