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Eight criteria are discussed for microcosms or mini-publics that can offer input to policy. These include demographic and attitudinal representativeness, sample size, the opportunity to engage policy arguments for and against proposals for action, knowledge gain, opinion change, distortions from polarization and domination by the more advantaged, and whether there are identifiable reasons for the final considered judgments. These criteria are applied in depth to four case studies from different parts of the world: California (on a statewide basis), the city of Ulaanbaatar (capital of Mongolia), two projects in Uganda (in Bududa and Butaleja), and a European-wide Deliberative Poll in Brussels engaging a sample from all twenty-seven countries deliberating in twenty-two languages. These four cases illustrate the prospects and challenges of applying Deliberative Polling to specific policy choices. They illustrate different entry points for the considered judgments of the public. Both qualitative and quantitative data are considered in each project.

This chapter applies the four questions on deliberative democracy raised in Chapter 4 to a local decision-making case in a town in China. Collaborating with a leading expert on local democracy in China, researchers assisted the government of Zeguo township, Wenling City (about 300 km south of Shanghai), in using Deliberative Polling to make key decisions about what infrastructure to build. The outcome of the project showed that making deliberative democracy practical can accomplished under challenging conditions.

Deliberation encourages participants to reason with one another chapter 6 details how cultural biases often impede such reasoning. Cultural predispositions are an indication of people’s beliefs along two dimensions: hierarchical-egalitarian and individualism-collectivism. The first relates to whether government should regulate individual behavior and the second to whether government should provide a social safety net. US political parties and subsequent policies map onto these dimensions, with Republicans more likely to identify as hierarchical individualists and Democrats more likely to identify as egalitarian collectivists. As outlined here, deliberative processes, such as the CIR and Deliberative Polling, ask participants to overcome their cultural predispositions in the interest of reaching the best decision possible. Deliberation can produce such results, particularly when the available evidence clearly favors specific policy proposals. On values-based questions, however, deliberative participants may ultimately rely on their cultural cognitions to reach decisions.

Deliberative processes generally result in increased issue-specific knowledge for participants and can lead to opinion change as a result. The question asked in chapter 9 is: Does this translate into increased knowledge and opinion change for the wider public who these processes aim to assist? The chapter summarizes research suggesting that voters often lack the information they need to cast their votes on ballot measures. As detailed in this chapter, studies of Citizens’ Initiative Reviews (CIRs) show the reviews can help voters overcome these information deficiencies. Voters who read the CIR statements were more likely to form opinions that aligned with the balance of information and arguments provided by review participants. Further, voters tend to find the statements both reliable and useful and learn new information about the ballot measure, even if that information does not align with their cultural predispositions.