Maija Setälä

• PhD
• Professor at University of Turku

Tämä raportti käsittelee energia-aiheisen kansalaiskokouksen toteutusta sekä sitä, miten kansalaiskokouksen eri vaiheissa hyödynnettiin tekoälyä. Turun yliopiston ja Suomen ympäristökeskuksen tutkijat järjestivät tammi–helmikuussa 2025 energia-aiheisen kansalaiskokouksen osana strategisen tutkimuksen Flaire-hanketta. Tavoitteena oli laatia tilannek...

This article revisits the problems of electoral democracy, especially affective polarisation, from the perspective of the theory of deliberative democracy. Some authors representing ‘realist’ views of democracy have concluded that empirical findings regarding affective polarisation challenge not just the idea of representative democracy as responsi...

This article argues that the representation of future generations is likely to remain inadequate because of the lack of accountability mechanisms characteristic of representative relations among contemporaries. Two problems pertaining to the representation of future generations and their interests are distinguished, namely misrepresentation and neg...

Based on a case study of a Citizens’ Jury on climate policies in Finland, this chapter examines the prospects and the challenges associated with using deliberative minipublics in future-regarding policymaking processes. The Finnish government has set an ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2035. In Spring 2021, the government sponsored...

This chapter introduces the central questions addressed in this book. What are the challenges associated with making long-term decisions in democratic systems? How can we encourage people — and political actors more specifically — to think more carefully about the future? How can we encourage and support future-regarding collective actions? How can...

This chapter offers some concluding thoughts on the study and practice of future-regarding governance. Drawing on the analyses in this book, the editors argue that societies must learn to navigate fundamental tensions if they are going to act in future-regarding ways and to achieve their shared long-term objectives. There are tensions, first, betwe...

Theoretical works suggest that populist attitudes are associated with demands for direct democracy in the form of referendums. However, it remains unclear how populist attitudes relate to other direct-democratic instruments such as citizens' initiatives. We therefore examine whether populist attitudes affect the attitudes toward the Citizens' Agend...

Tämä tutkimusraportti ja siinä esitetyt tulokset perustuvat lokakuussa 2022 tehtyyn kansalliseen kyselytutkimukseen (n=3 821), jossa kartoitettiin kansalaisten ilmastoasenteita, ilmastohuolta ja ilmastotietoa.

This book explores the challenges and possibilities of future-regarding governance in democratic systems. It brings together political philosophers, democratic theorists, empirical political scientists, and policy experts to examine how democratic systems could better consider future consequences of policy choices. It examines these topics from dif...

Bringing together ten leading researchers in the field of deliberative democracy, this important book examines the features of a Deliberative Mini-Public (DMP) and considers the contributions that DMPs can make not only to the policy process, but also to the broader agenda of revitalising democracy in contemporary times.

A decade ago, it would have been impossible to imagine that a caregiver, a bus driver and a rail worker, together with 147 other ordinary citizens, could shape France's policy on climate change. Ordinary citizens have long been disparaged for their political apathy. They could not be bothered to vote or join a political party. They trust experts le...

Bringing together ten leading researchers in the field of deliberative democracy, this important book examines the features of a Deliberative Mini-Public (DMP) and considers the contributions that DMPs can make not only to the policy process, but also to the broader agenda of revitalising democracy in contemporary times.

Introduction DMPs should be consequential. Participants who experience taking part in a mini-public may find the exercise valuable in its own right, but without impact outside the process, DMPs are at risk of becoming insignificant talking shops that do little to enhance the quality of collective decision-making. This, indeed, was one of the early...

Introduction Taking part in a DMP is a unique experience. Even though these processes are gaining increasing popularity, only a handful of citizens will have the privilege of being selected to participate in a DMP. Being in a mini-public is comparable to being selected to a jury – a unique experience designed to reach a considered judgement among a...

Introduction The increasing popularity of DMPs raises expectations as to what these forums can achieve. A Financial Times editorial declared that ‘deliberative democracy is just what politics needs’, referring to the power of citizens’ assemblies to address political polarization (The Financial Times, 2019). A year later, an editorial in The Guardi...

Introduction In her latest book, Hélène Landemore (2020) writes of ‘open democracies’ in which ordinary citizens have a more significant role in our systems of democratic representation. For her, recent examples of DMPs, such as the ambitious Icelandic experiment of 2010–13 or the French Climate Assembly, represent important steps towards a renewed...

Introduction The burgeoning literature on DMPs has studied and debated the merits of this form of democratic innovation. It is striking that this field of research contains no unanimously accepted definition of DMPs. As explained in Chapter One of this book, our goal is not to determine which definition is the most appropriate. Rather, we work with...

Introduction Citizens’ lack of knowledge is often used as an argument against their participation in policymaking (for example, Schumpeter, 1943). How can we expect citizens to deliberate if they lack information, feel disinterested in politics and are unable to convey coherent policy preferences (Achen and Bartels, 2016)? Compared to politicians a...

Introduction DMPs are not simply forums for discussion; they are also designed to reach conclusions. In a few cases, as explored in Chapter Seven, these conclusions are treated as binding upon subsequent decision-makers. In most cases, they are instead intended to inform downstream decision-makers, whether elected politicians, officials or referend...

Introduction Successful recruitment is key to a meaningful mini-public deliberation. There is a need to ensure that the deliberating sample represents as many interests as possible that will be affected by the decisions at hand; otherwise, the whole endeavour risks losing legitimacy. This is because the basis for engaging lay citizens in deliberati...

Mandatory vaccination mightseem like a straightforward solution for reaching a sufficient vaccine coverage during a pandemic. However, the effectiveness of mandatory vaccination is undermined if the public does not perceive such a compulsory policy as acceptable. We report a population-based survey experiment (n = 1,131), conducted in Finland, that...

Accountability is present in many types of social relations; for example, the accountability of elected representatives to voters is the key characteristic of representative democracy. We distinguish between two institutional mechanisms of accountability, i.e., opportunity to punish and requirement of a justification, and examine the separate and c...

One of key goals of deliberative mini-publics is to counteract expert domination in policymaking. Mini-publics can be expected to democratize expertise by providing citizens with good opportunities for weighing expert information. Yet, there are concerns about undue influence of experts even within mini-publics. We test these expectations by analys...

Previous studies suggest that information from delibera-tive mini-publics helps voters make informed and reflected judgements and act accordingly. Despite a growing body of literature, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This study examines three causal mechanisms for affecting voting intentions in a referendum: 1) factual knowledge, 2) trusted i...

Accountability is present in many types of social relations; for example, the accountability of elected representatives to voters is the key characteristic of representative democracy. We distinguish between two institutional mechanisms of accountability, i.e., opportunity to punish and requirement of a justification, and examine the separate and c...

Researchers of the University of Turku convened a Citizens’ Jury in April 2021 to deliberate on climate actions, commissioned by the Climate Policy Roundtable and Ministry of the Environment. The Citizens’ Jury was composed of 33 randomly selected citizens who discussed the climate actions included in the Medium-term Climate Change Policy Plan and...

This article studies citizens’ intertemporal opinions in the context of a proposed municipal merger in Finland in 2019. We ask how important citizens regard short- and long-term aspects of politics concerning the merger. Using a survey sent to a random sample of citizens (N = 320), we studied the impact of a Citizens’ Jury on developing intertempor...

Turun yliopiston tutkijat toteuttivat huhtikuussa 2021 ilmastotoimia arvioivan puntaroivan kansalaisraadin ilmastopolitiikan pyöreän pöydän ja ympäristöministeriön tilauksesta. Kansalaisraatiin osallistui 33 satunnaisesti valittua kansalaista, jotka muodostivat keskustellen puntaroidun kansalaismielipiteen keskipitkän aikavälin ilmastosuunnitelman...

Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are gaining popularity as a way to engage ordinary citizens in policymaking. From climate assemblies to online citizen panels on Covid19, these initiatives raise questions about effective approaches to democratic reform as well as the future of democracy itself. Bringing together ten leading scholars in the field of...

This chapter describes the outputs of DMPs: both the conclusions that mini-publics reach and the ways in which these are presented to wider audiences. It also investigates how these outputs are developed and how much meaning should be attached to them. There are substantial variations across DMPs on these matters. Nevertheless, all mini-publics pre...

Citizens are often accused of being disinterested and incapable of taking part in politics. This chapter demonstrates how deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) can be designed to address this issue, in a manner that conforms to norms of deliberative democracy. DMPs are, by design, venues that should facilitate balanced and critical deliberation among pa...

This chapter uses real-world examples to show how DMPs can be integrated into the wider democratic system, supplementing and reinforcing institutions of representative democracy and beyond, thus presenting the conceptual, actual and potential role of DMPs. The relationship of DMPs to the key arenas and practices of will formation and decision makin...

Deliberative mini-publics do not a deliberative democracy make. Yet the surge of deliberative mini-publics around the world is a reminder of the growing appetite for finding ways to do democracy differently. Even if DMPs cannot alone cure all of democracy’s ills, they have proved themselves able to make a major contribution. This chapter provides a...

This chapter examines the bases of deliberative mini-publics’ (DMPs) internal and external legitimacy and discusses how their outputs can influence collective decision-making. It addresses some of the most contentious issues in the field of democratic innovations today including: To what extent should deliberative mini-publics shape decision-making...

This chapter focuses on core design features concerned with the ‘deliberative experience.’ It starts by identifying the guiding principles in design – inclusiveness, equality in participation and integrity – and then discusses core design features relating to the deliberative experience. DMPs are dynamic processes. Flexibility and appropriateness o...

This chapter discusses the procedure of selecting participants to DMPs. It underlines the importance of a representative sample in order to guarantee diversity of opinions and participants. In comparison with other possible methods – election through voting, a corporatist system where the participants are appointed by civil society organisations an...

This chapter introduces the principal core design features of Deliberative Mini-Publics (DMPs): their composition; the format of their deliberations; the topics they discuss; and their outputs. Drawing mostly on the POLITICIZE inventory of DMPs organized by national and regional public authorities across Europe since 2000, this chapter argues that...

In this article, we examine whether a deliberative mini-public can provide a trusted source of information in the context of a polarized referendum. Political polarization gives rise to selective distrust of those on the 'other side'. The Citizens' Jury on Referendum Options in Korsholm, Finland, was organized in conjunction with a polarized refere...

Tämä kansalaiskeskustelun loppuraportti käsittelee sitä, miten asiantuntijatiedon saaminen sekä puntaroiva kansalaiskeskustelu vaikuttavat kansalaisten näkemyksiin koronatoimien hyväksyttävyydestä. Raportti pohjautuu Turun yliopiston tutkijoiden vuonna 2021 toteuttamaan kansalaiskeskusteluun ja sitä koskeviin kyselyaineistoihin.

This article examines whether democratic deliberation can enhance participants’ capacity to consider future generations’ perspectives and willingness to make sacrifices to ensure their well-being. In addition to normal deliberation, we are interested in the effects of a mental time travel exercise where deliberators imagine themselves in the future...

The normative point of departure in this article is that mini-publics can “complement” representative democracy only if they enhance inclusive processes of mutual justification among elected representatives who are responsible for public decisions. This article distinguishes three different roles of mini-publics in representative decision-making. M...

This article examines the use of a Citizens' Jury as a source of voter information in the context of a government-initiated (top-down) referendum. Several studies show the capacity of the Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) to enhance voters' knowledge and capacity of judgement in ballot initiative processes. However, similar procedures have not been...

Deliberative mini-publics are supposed to help those who do not take part make more enlightened judgements and act accordingly. Both theoretical and empirical studies suggest this to be the case, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This study examines three causal mechanisms for affecting voting behaviour in a referendum: 1) factual knowledge...

Most representative democracies seem to experience dwindling levels of legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what people want from parliamentary decision-making. In this study, we test the impact of outcome favourability, actor involvement, and justifications on the perceived legitimacy of a parliamentary decision-mak...

Deliberative democracy entails a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. To that end, people engage in an exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at the right answer or the best judgement they can make in the circumstances. Of course, in practice a shared judgement may be impossible to reach. Yet while compromise may...

This article argues that it is important to analyse different democratic innovations in terms of their functions in democratic systems. For example, while citizens’ initiatives have a role in agenda setting, practices of citizen deliberation should help collective will-formation and referendums facilitate collective decision making. The article pro...

Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions

Helmikuussa 2019 Mustasaaressa järjestettiin kansanäänestysvaihtoehtoja arvioiva kansalaisraati ennen kunnallista, neuvoa-antavaa kansanäänestystä kuntaliitoksesta Vaasan kanssa. Kaksikielinen raati puntaroi kuntaliitoskysy-mystä neljän päivän ajan sekä laati julkilausuman, joka sisälsi aiheen kannalta tärkeimmät tosiasiat sekä tärkeimmät perustelu...

Deliberative democracy has been the main game in contemporary political theory for two decades and has grown enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines, and in political practice. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, as well as exploring and c...

This study examines the association between self-reported health and the propensity for supporting citizens’ initiatives in Finland. Democratic innovations such as the citizens’ initiative provide novel ways for citizens to express their preferences, but whether people in poor health make use of such possibilities remains unclear. The data come fro...

This study examines the association between self-reported health and the propensity for supporting citizens' initiatives in Finland. Democratic innovations such as the citizens' initiative provide novel ways for citizens to express their preferences, but whether people in poor health make use of such possibilities remains unclear. The data come fro...

Despite increased scholarly attention, there is still limited knowledge on how empathy works in democratic deliberation. This article examines the role of empathy in citizen deliberation with the help of a deliberative experiment on immigration. First, a random sample of citizens was surveyed regarding their opinions on immigration. Based on their...

This article examines whether the Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland has enhanced inclusion in processes of political agenda-setting. Democratic innovations such as CIs have been proposed as a solution to the challenges facing Western democracies. CIs are expected to increase political inclusion by allowing citizens to set the political agenda an...

The relationship between health and political participation has become a prominent topic within political science in recent years. Poor health is often found to be connected to lower voter turnout, whereas the relationships may differ for other forms of participation. Nevertheless, may lead to potential democratic problems when it cannot be ascerta...

Despite some prominent critics, deliberative democrats tend to be optimistic about the potential of deliberative mini-publics. However, the problem with current practices is that mini-publics are typically used by officials on an ad hoc basis and that their policy impacts remain vague. Mini-publics seem especially hard to integrate into representat...

In the study of deliberation, a largely under-explored area is why some participants polarise their opinion after deliberation and why others moderate them. Opinion polarisation is usually considered a suspicious outcome of deliberation, while moderation is seen as a desirable one. This article takes issue with this view. Results from a Finnish del...

This report makes a review of the use of democratic innovations, i.e. institutions that increase and deepen democratic participation, at the national and local levels in Finland. The report takes advantage of a variety of data and materials, including the Finnish National Election Study from 2015 (FNES2015). The citizens’ initiative was introduced...

This paper analyzes the institution of Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland from the perspective of normative arguments used to justify its adoption, that is, inclusion in processes of political agenda-setting. The CI was adopted in 2012 as a part of the constitutional reform – it allows 50 000 Finnish citizens to make a legislative initiative to b...

http://oikeusministerio.fi/fi/index/julkaisut/julkaisuarkisto/1468219625672/Files/OMSO_28_2016_Eduskuntavaalitutkimus_2015.pdf

No abstract is available for this article.

When like-minded people discuss with each other, i.e. engage in ‘enclave deliberation’, their opinions tend to become more extreme. This is called group polarization. A population-based experiment with a pre-test post-test design was conducted to analyze whether the norms and procedures of deliberation interfere with the mechanisms of group polariz...

Theories of deliberative democracy maintain that outcomes of democratic deliberation are fairer than outcomes of mere aggregation of preferences. Theorists of impartial justice, especially Rawls and Sen, emphasize the role of deliberative processes for making just decisions. Democratic deliberation seems therefore to provide a model of impartial de...

In this chapter, two different instruments of involving citizens and users in public sector are analyzed. More precisely, we focus on deliberative mini-publics and user-driven innovations. The chapter puts forward two empirical cases where these instruments have been experimented in Finland. These cases illustrate how the use of these instruments o...

The first comprehensive account of the booming phenomenon of deliberative mini-publics, this book offers a systematic review of their variety, discusses their weaknesses, and recommends ways to make them a viable component of democracy. The book takes stock of the diverse practices of deliberative mini-publics and, more concretely, looks at preco...

This article analyzes trust in public institutions. In both theoretical literature and empirical research, a link between social trust and institutional trust has been established. Our aim is to cast additional light on this relationship. In particular, we test whether institutional trust is dependent on citizens’ perceptions of how well institutio...

This chapter gives a summary of all initiative practices discussed in this book. The aim is to compare different forms and designs of initiative instruments, and to evaluate their functions and impacts in different political systems. The historical and political backgrounds of citizens’ initiatives are summarized, and the procedures of making popul...

The article analyses and evaluates the use of deliberative mini-publics in the context of representative democracy. Based on an overview of the use of referendums and mini-publics, it is argued that the use of mini-publics has often been comparable with the use of ad hoc referendums. Some recommendations are made on how deliberative mini-publics sh...

This article analyses the impact of decision-making methods on democratic deliberation. An experiment was designed to study the effects of two distinct decision-making methods. This citizen deliberation experiment took place in November 2006. The topic was: ‘Should a sixth nuclear power plant be built in Finland?’ A random sample of 2,500 people wa...

This article analyzes whether democratic deliberation enhances ‘civic virtues’ such as political knowledge, efficacy, trust, and preparedness for political and other collective action. The empirical analysis is based on an experiment held in November 2006 in Finland. The topic of this citizen deliberation experiment was nuclear power. Two treatment...

The present paper analyzes determinants of confidence in public institutions. In both theoretical literature and empirical research, a link between social trust and institutional confidence has been established. The present paper casts additional light on this relationship. Our analysis also draws on Warren’s (1996) argument that institutional trus...

This article studies how citizens’ evaluations of the political system and its actors affect their propensity to vote. Based on the earlier theoretical and empirical research, we analyse the concepts of political trust and satisfaction that are often used in survey research. We argue that political trust has to do with the normative expectations to...

Supporters of representative democracy tend to be critical of referendums. They argue that referendums give citizens more responsibility for political decisions than they have either the capacity or the competence to take. Moreover, they argue that referendums may undermine representatives' accountability. In this article, these arguments about res...

Despite much political and academic debate on referendums and initiatives, they are still exceptional events in the national‐level politics of most western European democracies. The numbers of government‐initiated referendums have remained relatively steady since the 1940s. More than half of government‐initiated referendums held since the 1970s hav...

This article analyses the potentialities of parliamentary www-sites to enhance the publicity of decision-making in representative democracies. We introduce two different models that emphasize the role of publicity in representative systems. Jeremy Bentham argued that publicity is needed to enable citizens to control the acts of the representatives....

This paper analyzes the main features of rational choice theory and evaluates it with respect to the conceptions of Lakatos' research program and Laudan's research tradition. The analysis reveals that the thin rationality assumption, the axiomatic method and the reduction to the micro level are the only features shared by all rational choice models...

Being a rich Western European country, Finland certainly belongs to the wired world. Based on a comparison of different aspects related to the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, such as research, development and employment, the OECD (2000) classifies Finland as a high ICT-intensive country. According to survey results, most Finn...

Demokratianäkökulmasta voidaan vaatia, että toimivaltuuksien jakautuminen EU:n ja sen jäsenvaltioiden välillä olisi läpinäkyvää. Tämä toteutuisi parhai-ten perustuslaillisessa, eriytetyssä federalismissa. Myös EU:n tulevaisuutta koskevassa keskustelussa on esitetty, että unionin kehittyminen perustus-lailliseksi liittovaltioksi on avain sen demokra...

The aim of this article is to analyze the explanations for the increased number of referendums in Western European states. Bogdanor has explained this by the unfreezing of political alignments and institutions. After classifying referendums in 18 Western European states, it will be observed that especially the number of referendums introduced by ci...