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Introduction
Deliberative democracy at its heart is concerned with connecting citizens to politics, but there is a legitimate concern that not all citizens can, will, or want to participate in deliberation. The ideal of inclusiveness in deliberative democracy (Dryzek, 2009) is what grants legitimacy to political deliberation because all those affected should have the right to have their voices heard and every perspective should be equally considered (Dryzek, 1990; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996). This demands that participation extends beyond the privileged and politically engaged, to marginalized citizens and minorities; and that different views and ideologies are represented in political deliberation (cf. Young, 2000; Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2008).
Thus far, research on willingness to deliberate reveals a mixed picture. Two studies suggest a low willingness to participate in political deliberation (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002; Mutz, 2006), while a third is more positive (Neblo et al., 2010). One factor that distinguishes the third (Neblo et al., 2010) study is that it offers a proposal for engaging in citizen deliberation under the auspices of a deliberative minipublic.
Minipublics are a subset of democratic innovations that involve participation of ordinary citizens in small-group deliberation applied to collective issues, with a view to influencing policy. Specific definitions of a minipublic vary considerably (see Ryan and Smith, 2014), but the particular form in focus here comprises randomly selected members of the public (Smith, 2012) participating in a structured process that seeks to achieve high-quality deliberation (Ryan and Smith, 2014). 1
Mutz (2006) suggests that it is this very type of public ‘cross-cutting’ deliberation that is unappealing to (United States) citizens, in contrast to Neblo et al.’s (2010) more optimistic finding in respect to deliberation in a (hypothetical) minipublic. Studies in respect to recruitment for actual deliberative minipublics themselves reveal a mixed picture. Citizens appear willing to participate in broad terms (Smith, 2012), although the extent of this enthusiasm is strongly contested (e.g. Jacquet, 2017).
These conflicting findings may reflect an incomplete model of the factors that drive deliberative participation. In this paper I explore the question through the lens of personality, which is a well-established and useful construct for understanding a variety of behaviors, including political participation. 2 Its application yields the potential to...