DLB - Who deliberates – and why? Evidence from a multi-layered survey experiment on deliberative democracy conducted in Lebanon

Deliberative Citizen Assemblies (DCAs) have come to be regarded as a form of “silver bullet” in the resolution of collective action problems and political conflict more generally. While there is now considerable evidence that such formats are efficient decision finding mechanisms and have positive effects on deliberators, there are three questions that have been largely overlooked by empirical work. First, do citizens that decide to participate in DCAs meaningfully differ from “average”? Second, why do citizens decide to participate? Third, do deliberative formats enjoy popular legitimacy when compared with other sources of policy decisions? This projects turns to Lebanon, a country plagued by clientelism, ethnopolitics, and government failure, to investigate these questions, and deploy a nationally representative, multi-layered survey experiment.