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Abstract
The research reported here sets out in some detail an experiment in deliberative democracy that took place in Ireland in 2011. The We the Citizens initiative featured a nationwide pilot citizens' assembly, the first of its kind in Ireland. It recruited a random selection of Irish residents to deliberate on specific issues relating to the economy and also reform in Irish politics. The paper explains the background to this, setting out how it was done and presenting some headline results. The results also tell us something about contemporary Irish attitudes to the political system.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the (UK) Political Studies Association annual conference, Belfast, 3–5 April 2012, and at departmental seminars at the European University Institute, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University College Cork, and University College Dublin. The authors are grateful to the participants, and to this journal's anonymous referees, for their feedback and comments. The project was funded by Atlantic Philanthropies. The authors acknowledge the support of their colleagues, notably: Elaine Byrne, Caroline Erskine and Fiach MacConghail.
Notes
The Political Studies Association of Ireland associated itself with the initiative underlying this project. For more on the contributions of Irish political scientists to the debates aboutpolitical reform, see: www.politicalreform.ie
See: http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Publications/Publications_2011/PfG_Progress_Report_March_2012.pdf
For a sample of some of the more prominent ones, see: http://www.claimingourfuture.ie/ and http://www.2nd-republic.ie/site/
We had sought to recruit 150 members, not least so as to help in measuring statistically significant effects, but a combination of the timing of the event and the fact that we were clearly a private (not government-sponsored) enterprise affected our recruitment.
For the purposes of this experiment, and to ensure a ‘state of disagreement’ (Thompson, Citation2008: 502), we selected only those items that revealed either strong divisions of opinion or high degrees of undecidedness on the grounds that these were the areas where we were most likely to find change effects.
The decision to have a range of themes over the weekend rather than one was guided by advice from our scientific advisory board members. In order to maximize the potential of achieving significant change effects it was felt prudent to hedge our bets by covering more than one theme. In addition to these three themes, the final hour of Saturday afternoon was devoted to a brief discussion on the question of whether the Seanad should be reformed or abolished – an issue that is pertinent to current debates but not one that we had survey data to measure anything against.
The modus operandi was ‘café society’. Each table had a paper tablecloth. Colour markers were distributed and the CA members were encouraged to write, doodle and draw whatever they wished on the tablecloth. The same format had been used for our regional events. The tablecloths were saved and are in the process of being content analysed for an examination of the unmediated views of CA members.
In any event, because of the decision to break the weekend into a number of themes, there was not sufficient time to allow the CA members to work through the detail of the issues sufficiently so as to produce fine-tuned recommendations. This was the trade-off we faced resulting from our need to ensure maximum potential for measurable change effects. For details on the recommendations, see: http://www.wethecitizens.ie/pdfs/We-the-Citizens-2011-FINAL.pdf (pp. 50–58).
Although we cannot be sure about the extent to which this group of respondents read the briefing document, they knew that they would be requestioned and so might have had some incentive to read it.
As reported in the note to the caption for , significance was measured using one-tailed pairwise t-tests. We used one-tailed t-tests because we had theoretical expectations of the direction of the change.
In this context, it is worth noting that no monetary incentives were offered to the participants, other than covering their travel, meal and accommodation costs. This is unusual for deliberative experiments such as this, but we were prevented by University College Dublin's Ethics Committee from offering any form of monetary incentive.