What is the difference between participatory democracy and deliberative democracy

Indeed, it is concluded that many citizens would welcome more opportunities to participate in, meaningful and consequential, deliberation. Keywords: participatory democracy , deliberative democracy , participatory deliberative democracy , political participation , deliberation , empirical democratic theory , liberal democracy. Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

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Oxford Handbooks Online. Publications Pages Publications Pages. First, whereas testing whether associations between variables differ between groups is vulnerable to omission of confounding variables, in SEM statistically adjusted mean scores across three groups minimize this vulnerability. In other words, adjusting the mean structure vector of mean statistics reduces the risk that the model is misspecified.

Secondly, SEM fully exploits information in a given covariance structure. To investigate our question, we use zero-order covariance matrixes among strong, weak, and moderate ideologues.

Model comparison has four stages. The first model Model 0 has no constraints and provides a base for model comparison. The second model Model 1 imposes equal constraints on the mean scores, minimizing the threat that the results are confounded. The third model Model 2 equalizes the variance of the analyzed variables in order to test the homogeneity of each variable among the three groups, and a difference between Model 1 and Model 2 indicates that the variance among the variables differs across ideological strength.

The final model Model 3 , which tests the covariance structure among the variables for strong, weak, and moderate ideologues, has three components representing both direct and indirect influences on follow-up engagement. The first tests whether the direct effects of perceived diversity and prior participation on follow-up engagement differ among the three groups. The second two components detect differences in the covariance between perceived diversity and cognitive and affective responses, and also between these responses and follow-up engagement.

It is thus the final model that tests the processes that lead from perceiving diversity during deliberation to engaging in follow-up actions among strong, weak and moderate ideologues. Figure 1 illustrates these processes. Cognitive and affective routes for the effects of perceived political diversity on follow-up action-taking. Data limitations. Before presenting the results, two central limitations should be noted both are addressed in our conclusion.

First, our reliance on cross-sectional data does not allow any claims regarding causality. Most importantly, our model assumes that cognitive and affective reactions come in response to political diversity perceived in a deliberative setting.

Because the questions asked about how respondents felt during the last meeting they attended, these reported reactions may or may not have been linked with exposure to diverse views and may have been produced by other events that occurred during deliberation.

In a similar vein, our reliance on self-reports means that some measures are weak and indirect. Especially the measures that tap cognitive and affective reactions are several steps removed from the actual processes, and also the perceived diversity measure may not accurately represent the diversity that was actually present. Nonetheless, while these limitations should be kept in mind and caution is needed when interpreting the results, we believe the advantages provided by being able to test our research question with these unique data justify the effort while also offering directions for future analyses that use more refined measures.

Before scrutinizing the processes underlying mobilization, we look at the relationships between the variables. These results offer the first insight into the tested relationships. We take the next step and account for ideological strength, first testing the mean scores among strong, weak, and moderate ideologues. Table 1 shows that strong ideologues are more participatory and knowledgeable than weak and moderate ones and are also less likely to report that they understood diverse views encountered during deliberation.

There are no pronounced differences among the groups with regard to reported emotions and perceived diversity, although strong ideologues are slightly more likely to report anger and less likely to report anxiety or enthusiasm.

Also, although they are more likely than weak and moderate ideologues to engage in follow-up actions, the differences are not substantial. We thus construct three models that test the associations among the analyzed variables among strong, weak, and moderate ideologues. The findings clearly suggest so. Table 2 describes the mean, variance, and covariance structure testing and the Figures 2—4 illustrate the direct mobilization through perceived diversity and prior participation, and the indirect effects exerted by perceived diversity on follow-up engagement via cognitive and affective routes.

Importantly, these effects are estimated after accounting for the influence that political knowledge has on all the variables. Paths from knowledge to cognitive and affective reactions are not shown. Third, perceived diversity elicits different affective responses among the three groups. Addressing the second part of our model, we ask whether cognitive and affective routes activated by perceived political diversity differentially encourage engagement in various follow-up acts among the three groups.

Furthermore, those citizens who are generally participatory also engage in follow-up actions. Finally, we address the processes through which perceived political diversity affects mobilization to follow-up action.

The figures show that strong ideologues who encounter diverse views do not become mobilized through increased cognition or elicited emotions. It is rather their habitual participation that motivates follow-up engagement. That is, although perceived diversity makes all the three groups understand this diversity more, only those with weak ideological commitments are mobilized to action by this understanding.

That is, moderates appear to react with positive emotions to diversity and also translate this enthusiasm into engagement in follow-up actions. Existing evidence supports two somewhat contradictory notions.

Deliberation that assembles diverse people is said to encourage political participation. However, exposure to dissimilar views, which should occur during deliberation, may pull citizens away from the democratic process. The research on deliberative versus participatory democracy has generally not scrutinized whether the association between exposure to dissimilar views and participation is moderated by such factors as ideological strength. This research, moreover, has not asked whether the mechanisms underlying this association differ for different ideological subgroups.

In this study we aimed to address these issues. We not only examined whether perceiving a deliberative forum to be politically diverse differently influences engagement in charitable, civic, or political follow-up actions among strong, weak, and moderate ideologues. We also focused on the underlying processes, asking whether ideological strength influences the way in which cognitive and affective reactions to diversity result in follow-up engagement.

Focusing on the associations between the tested factors we notably find that—on average and across the total sample—political diversity perceived during deliberation has no direct effect on mobilization to follow-up actions. It does, however, elicit cognitive and affective reactions, with the former having no effect and the latter encouraging engagement. Increased understanding does not have a special bearing, in that those who report understanding differences are not necessarily more mobilized.

In turn, consistent with prior scholarship, enthusiasm, anger, and anxiety positively influence the propensity to take part in follow-up actions. Terminating the analysis at the aggregate level would lead to a conclusion that attending a deliberative forum that is seen as politically diverse neither encourages nor discourages participation directly.

We took the next step, accounted for ideological strength, and asked whether processes that underlie the tested association differ among strong, weak, and moderate ideologues. We find that although perceived diversity elicits understanding and anxiety among strong ideologues, neither cognitive nor affective reactions mobilize this group to action.

Follow-up engagement among strong ideologues is related to their general civic and political participation rather than to diversity encountered in a deliberative forum. Perhaps, for this group, exposure to political discourse is sufficiently frequent and thus a single deliberation does not provoke cognitive or affective reactions to an extent that would encourage action. That is, strong ideologues may already know that politics happens in the world filled with plurality and conflicting values, and deliberation might be yet another activity that does not have central implications for their overall participation.

We need to caution against putting too much emphasis on these results, however, due to our reliance on self-reported and relatively weak measures. For moderates and weak ideologues, on the other hand, deliberation might provide a novel opportunity to encounter diverse citizens and hear new perspectives and thus taking part in public discussions may be especially cognitively and emotionally stimulating. Moderate citizens seem to be highly emotionally receptive to and affected by their deliberative experience.

Perceiving political diversity elicits their enthusiasm, which in turn mobilizes them to follow-up actions.

That is, for moderates positive rather than negative emotions or increased understanding matter to mobilization. This finding is consistent with some research, according to which moderates, who may be politically disengaged or have weakly differentiated cognitive structures, would rely on such simpler means to evaluate dissimilar views as peripheral message cues or affective evaluations.

Perhaps for these reasons political participation among moderates is influenced by their emotional reactions to diverse viewpoints. Weak ideologues, who fall in between strong and moderate ideologues on the political ideology continuum, incorporate aspects of both groups. For them, increased understanding is critical to follow-up engagement, in that weak ideologues not only report that perceived political diversity increases their understanding, but are also mobilized to follow-up actions by this understanding.

This finding can also be explained by the reviewed studies on political ideology and cognitive complexity: inasmuch as weak ideologues are more cognitively complex than the other two groups, they would process messages centrally. In other words, less entrenched in their convictions than strong ideologues and more politically informed than moderates, weak ideologues may be open to new perspectives that deliberation brings and rely on their cognitive maps to translate these perspectives into understanding and political engagement.

These conclusions need to be interpreted cautiously. As any study, ours comes with several limitations. As already mentioned, the cross-sectional design precludes any firm claims regarding causal direction. Although we conceptualize perceived diversity as preceding emotional and cognitive reactions, it might be the case that those citizens who are enthusiastic or who have extensive perspective taking abilities under- or overestimate political diversity. This limitation cannot be addressed, and we thus caution against drawing overreaching causal conclusions from our results.

Fortunately, the final outcome construct, follow-up engagement, was assessed by asking respondents whether they participated in any charitable, civic, or political activities as a direct result of the last meeting they attended.

Hence—at least with this measure—we tap the effects, albeit self-reported, produced by deliberation. This is an advantage over other cross-sectional studies that use general participation as the outcome variable, a variable for which we adjust treating it as exogenous. Our study suffers from the second perennial problem in survey research, the reliance on self-reported measures.

Most importantly, the measures of affective and cognitive reactions are weak and indirect, in that they are self-reports provided after a meeting occurred. Although we employ them to represent the routes through which citizens process diverse views, there is a leap between these measures and the actual processes, especially that emotions have components that may or may not be cognitively represented and easily available to self-report.

Future research should validate our results with more direct measures used during or immediately after deliberation, for example testing affect with physiological reactions and determining the extent to which people engage in cognitive processing by information recall. Such studies would increase our confidence in the results presented here and would more directly speak to the role that cognitive and affective responses play in the process underlying political engagement.

With regard to political diversity, our measure captures perceived, not necessarily actual, diversity. Although the data cannot determine whether the forums were politically diverse, in order for diversity to have any effect, it has to be noticed and opinion differences will not produce effects unless people are aware that diverse views are expressed Mutz, Also, our reliance on self-reports does not allow making any claims about the processes that actually occurred in the forums and that may influence the ways in which people react to diversity.

If a meeting is framed as a debate, entails personal attacks or silencing unpopular views then participants experience diverse opinions differently from how they do in a forum that is facilitated to promote deliberative ideals, by encouraging divergent views and giving them all equal weight.

As aforementioned, the meetings that our respondents reported attending appear to have met many requirements to be considered deliberative. In a similar vein, although we use perceived political diversity to represent exposure to dissimilar perspectives, there may be a disconnect between these two concepts. Nonetheless, exposure to politically diverse views entails encountering at least some views that are dissimilar and with which one disagrees.

We also believe that our measure is not as disconnected from political dissimilarity as some other conceptualizations often used in the debate on deliberative versus participatory democracy. Further, our study focused solely on ideological strength. We selected this factor not only because it is related to political knowledge, engagement, and interest, but also because it is pertinent in a sociopolitical climate that is polarized along ideological lines and among political activists.

Admittedly, scrutinizing ideological strength only gets us thus far, and scholars should test the moderating effects exerted by other characteristics, e. Such analyses would not only complement the findings presented here, but would also substantially benefit the scholarship. Finally, our outcome measure—engagement in follow-up actions—might obscure some differences in the effects generated by perceived diversity. Because respondents were simply asked whether or not they engaged in any charitable, civic, or political activities after the last meeting they attended, we cannot determine neither the kind nor the number of the activities that were undertaken.

Inasmuch as exposure to dissimilar views has differential effects on some activities and not on others, our single measure obscures those idiosyncrasies. Despite these limitations, our study offers results with both practical and theoretical implications.

Because the answer may depend on individual characteristics, the role that citizen-to-citizen deliberation, political discussion, network heterogeneity, or cross-cutting exposure play in participation should not be analyzed monolithically.

In other words, research concerned with the effects that political dissimilarity has on opinions or behaviors should more closely attend to individual characteristics. Our study tested ideological strength, but other factors should be scrutinized. Not accounting for the various moderating effects may obscure the existing complexity and result in inconsistent findings. We also show that testing the mean levels of various factors crucial to deliberation or political participation, even when broken up by individual characteristics, may also be missing the point.

While participation focuses on the actions themselves, deliberation focuses on the decision-making process that precedes policy-making. Examples of participation include polling, idea collection, surveys, and participatory budgeting.

There are different participation methods that all have their specific value. In the case of deliberation, reaching a consensus is usually the end goal. Interaction among participants — which often involves different stakeholders, public and private — often creates forms of communicative exchange that make possible eventual changes of positions and preferences. One of the main barriers to deliberation is the complexity of the process, which makes it difficult to scale and reproduce online.

It is often said that the combination of participation and deliberation comes with its own challenges. The 3 desirable criteria of direct democracy participation, deliberation, and equality are all different vertices of the same triangle. Because deliberation requires more organisation , it is also harder to scale.