2025

Mikko Värttö; Maija Jäske; Kaisa Herne; Kimmo Grönlund

We study the development of democratic attitudes and civic<br/>virtues in a deliberative mini-public (DMP). By democratic attitudes, we refer to support for different forms of democratic participation, such as taking part in a DMP, giving feedback to public service providers, or voting in a local referendum. By civic virtues, we refer to important skills for political participation, such as political knowledge, political effcacy, political trust, and preparedness for collective action. We contribute to the existing literature<br/>by introducing results from a controlled experiment in which citizens were<br/>randomly assigned into Citizens only or Mixed discussion groups, enabling<br/>to draw conclusions on the impacts of mixed-member deliberation. Our results show that among all participants, support for deliberative democracy,<br/>user democracy, and external political effcacy increased. Internal political<br/>effcacy increased when the item was formulated to concern local democracy. An important conclusion from including politicians in DMPs is that we<br/>did not see a more positive development of civic virtues in the groups with<br/>only citizen participants. Therefore, we can conclude that from a civic virtue<br/>perspective, the involvement of politicians in a mini-public has no negative<br/>impact