"Potential for deliberation among EU citizens" (with Marco R. Steenbergen, Jürg Steiner, and Marlène Gerber). Project sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, May 2010-April 2012.

This project evaluates the quality of citizen deliberation in the context of a pan-European deliberative poll, called Europolis. Europolis was carried out in Brussels in late May 2009. Almost 400 EU citizens from all 27 EU-countries were assembled to discuss the topics of third country migration and climate change during three days. Our project engages with the ongoing controversy in the literature whether transnational and cross-cultural deliberation can work and whether ordinary citizens have the requisite abilities to engage in high quality deliberation, i.e., to advance complex arguments with a focus on the common good and to listen to other participants’ arguments with respect. This project represents one of the few attempts to take an informed look at the actual process of deliberation in the small discussion groups. First results indicate that while overall deliberative quality in Europolis is not bad (even though it is quite far away from what classic deliberative philosophers would consider high quality deliberation), there is an important culture-class bias in the process of deliberating: compared to higher class participants from Western Europe, working class participants from Eastern and Southern Europe make less complex arguments with a focus on the common good and also rarely listen to other participants’ arguments with respect.

Publications:

Bächtiger, André, Kimmo Grönlund, and Maija Setälä (eds., 2012). Deliberative Mini-Publics. Promises, Practices and Pitfalls. Forthcoming ECPR Press.

Dryzek, John, André Bächtiger, and Karolina Milewicz (2011). "Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly." Global Policy 2: 33-42.

Gerber, Marlène, André Bächtiger, Susumu Shikano (2011). "The European Deliberative Citizen in Action? Evidence from a transnational deliberative poll (Europolis)." Paper presented at the 6th ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik, August 25-27, 2011.