Do citizens’ assemblies really have an impact? If so, what kinds of impacts? And how are these impacts shaped by the ways that the assembly is integrated into the political system?

These questions have provoked a heated debate between advocates of citizens assemblies and their skeptics. Citizens’ assemblies (CA) – procedures that bring together randomly selected people to deliberate on political issues and to make recommendations – are increasingly adopted throughout Europe as a novel way to reconnect representative institutions with citizens and develop solutions for grand policy challenges, such as climate change. Yet, despite this wave of assemblies, there is little robust evidence for providing a comprehensive answer because existing studies tend to: 

• focus on policy impacts, neglecting the ways that CAs may have impacts on politics and polity,
• run alongside the process and finish before mid- and long-term impacts can be assessed,
• look at internal design features of CAs and pay little attention to the integrative features that connect CAs into the political system,
• examine individual cases, thus limiting comparative, generalizable insights.

The i4i project brings together researchers from Belgium, Germany and Poland to conduct the first Europe-wide, systematic comparative analysis of integrative design and impacts. It builds a database of climate assemblies across national and subnational levels, mapping their integrative design features and policy, political and polity impacts and analyzing the relationships between them through a combination of documentary analysis, process observation, qualitative interviews, survey experiments and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).The approach will make an important theoretical and empirical contribution by:

• developing and operationalizing new conceptual frameworks of  CAs’ integrative design features,  impacts of CAs on polities, politics and policies, and the causal relations between them.
• providing a nuanced and encompassing empirical analysis that combines a medium-N comparative analysis of the relationship between integrative design features and impacts with in-depth case studies of how causal mechanisms function.

i4i will therefore move understanding beyond overly broad debates about whether deliberative processes have a policy impact or not to generate fine-grained evidence on how specific integrative designs produce or fail to produce specific polity, political and policy impacts. This will enable a more realistic assessment of the value of public deliberation for contemporary European democracies, both as a reform to address broad problems with the functioning of democratic institutions and as an intervention into specific policy challenges – of utmost importance when these processes are currently mushrooming