Month: September 2026

Size Doesn’t Matter? For the Legitimacy of Deliberative Mini-Publics, It Does.

Justice demands that no one should do more ruling than being ruled, but that all should have their turn – Aristotle

This age-old quote demonstrates the aim of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs). In a DMP, a representative group of citizens comes together to discuss public issues and to create policy recommendations. Such initiatives aim to make the democratic system more participatory and rebuild political trust.

This research aimed to examine how the size of a DMP affects citizens’ perceptions of its legitimacy. While larger groups may enhance representativeness, they can hinder deliberation quality, process efficiency, and outcome efficacy. This study examined how citizens balance these dimensions of legitimacy and which size is seen as optimal.

We conducted two surveys (study 1: n = 516 UK citizens; study 2: n = 527 UK citizens), where participants read about the concept of a DMP and subsequently evaluated eight different group sizes on the four dimensions of legitimacy. Additionally, for each group size, participants filled in an overall evaluation item. Furthermore, participants had to decide how many citizens they thought a DMP should ideally consist of. Lastly, the participants had to indicate their general support for both DMPs and referendums.

The findings showed that the majority of participants (75%) made trade-offs between achieving representativeness and ensuring deliberation, efficiency, and efficacy. They rated the 100-citizen DMP as the most optimal, showing that most citizens intuitively balance the various legitimacy dimensions to come to a feasible size preference.

However, a substantial minority (25%) valued the involvement of large groups of citizens above other considerations. These participants believed DMPs should consist of more than 1,000 citizens. This group also expressed stronger support for referendums than for DMPs. Hence, for a subset of citizens, representativeness is the most important aspect of participatory democracy.

What Do We Learn From This?

As the majority perceived a 100-citizen DMP as most optimal in terms of balancing representativeness, deliberation, efficiency, and efficacy, this could be seen as a practical guideline for organizers of DMPs. However, we want to emphasize that 100 citizens should not be seen as a strict rule, as different contexts may require different approaches. Nevertheless, in any context, we believe it is important to reflect on how participatory initiatives will be perceived by citizens. DMPs may not always match what citizens expect in terms of size, and addressing this concern through clear communication about achieving a balance between ideals and feasibility may help garner support.

Furthermore, this research underscores the importance of using hybrid forms of democratic participation. Some formats promote debate while others ensure representation. By combining different models, the strengths of one can mitigate the weaknesses of the other. For instance, in Ireland, there have been several cases where a DMP formulated propositions that were subsequently approved by the population through a referendum. Such a two-stage format may help in meeting the expectations of all citizens and improve the trade-off between the various dimensions of legitimacy.

Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:

Waterschoot, Milena, Tessa Haesevoets, and Arne Roets. 2026. “The Optimal Group Size of Deliberative Mini-Publics: A Divide in Perceptions”. Policy Studies Journal 54(1): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12592.

About the Article’s Author(s)

Milena Waterschoot is a PhD candidate at the Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology of Ghent University. Her research revolves around deliberative democracy and violent extremism. 

Tessa Haesevoets is a senior researcher at the Department of Public Governance and Management of Ghent University. Her research interests include trust repair, participation, expert-based democracy, artificial intelligence, and public administration.

Arne Roets is an associate professor at the Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology of Ghent University. His research focuses on judgment and decision-making, moral and political psychology, participation, and intergroup relations. 

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Beyond One-Off Crackdowns: How Regularized Campaigns Can Sustain Compliance

In May 2026, China launched the sixth batch of its third round of central environmental inspections. Seven teams entered seven provinces and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. By June 9, they had inspected entities for rectification. The scale is striking, but the recurrence matters even more: this was not a one-off crackdown but another wave in a structured, recurring form of governance.

Governments everywhere face a familiar implementation problem. National leaders set rules, but local agencies enforce them. Those agencies may lack capacity, pursue competing goals, or protect economically important firms. Formal institutions help, yet discretion and regulatory capture can still produce uneven enforcement. One-off crackdowns can shake up the system, but their effects often fade once inspectors leave.

Our PSJ article identifies a hybrid of campaign-style enforcement and routine regulation: “regularized campaigns.” These are periodic, structured enforcement waves embedded in the ongoing routines of governance. They retain the visibility and intensity of a campaign while using repetition to signal that a policy priority—and the risk of scrutiny—will endure.

We examine China’s central environmental inspections, introduced in 2016. Using an original firm-level dataset that combines environmental monitoring, industrial output, administrative penalties, and citizen complains, we find that before the inspections, economically influential firms polluted more yet were punished less. A one-standard-deviation increase in a firm’s share of local industrial output was associated with 19 percent more environmental violations, even as influential firms faced fewer penalties. After the inspections became institutionalized, the relationship between economic influence and violations was no longer statistically significant. Just as telling, the gap remained closed in 2018—between the first and second full inspection rounds.

Why might repetition matter? These inspections targeted not only regulated firms but also the local officials responsible for enforcement. Recurring waves tied environmental performance to officials’ career incentives, reinforced the credibility of central priorities, and reduced the space for selective enforcement.

The broader lesson is not that every governance problem needs a permanent crackdown. Regularized campaigns can disrupt production, strain administrative capacity, and erode trust if they become indiscriminate. Their design matters: enforcement should be periodic rather than improvised, directed at both implementing agencies and regulated entities, transparent to the public, and calibrated to local conditions.

The underlying logic travels beyond China. In the United States, for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration again launched its annual Click It or Ticket high-visibility seat belt enforcement campaign in May 2026. That campaign targets drivers rather than the agencies that police them, but its regularity is the point: motorists have learned to expect the scrutiny to return. The settings differ, but the common challenge is to combine episodic intensity with institutional safeguards. When that balance is struck, campaigns can change expectations between enforcement waves and make implementation more even over time.

Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:

Shen, Shiran Victoria, Wing, Qi, and Zhang, Bing. 2026. “Regularized Campaigns as a New Institution for Effective Governance”. Policy Studies Journal 54(1): e70052. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70052.

About the Article’s Author(s)

Shiran Victoria Shen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, she was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2021-2022) and led the China Energy Program at the Standford Doerr School of Sustainability (2022-2025). Her Policy Studies Journal article, “Regularized Campaigns as a New Institution for Effective Governance,” contributed to her receiving the 2025 World Citizen Prize in Environmental Performance from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University. 

Qi Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Business and the School of the Environment, Nanjing University. Her research focuses on environmental economics and regulation, drawing on a multidisciplinary background in economics and environmental policy.

Bing Zhang is a professor in the School of Economics at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on environmental governance and policy, with an emphasis on their impacts on environmental performance and economic development. 

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As Medicaid Work Requirements Arrive, the Public Has Already Decided Who Deserves a Break

Beginning in 2027, many adults in nearly every state will, for the first time, have to demonstrate that they are working, volunteering, or in school in order to keep their Medicaid coverage. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, made these “community engagement” requirements national. Yet the most consequential detail is easily overlooked: the majority of those projected to lose coverage will not be ineligible. Instead, they will be tripped up by a myriad of complex bureaucratic barriers.

Scholars refer to these hurdles as administrative burdens, the learning, compliance, and psychological costs that individuals encounter in their interactions with government. A growing body of research has made clear that such burdens are rarely accidental. Indeed, they are often deliberate policy tools. And while they are less transparent, they nonetheless depend on public support to be enacted and sustained, just like any policy choice. This raises a straightforward question: when is the public willing to tolerate these burdens, and for whom? Put differently, what shapes Americans’ burden tolerance?

To examine this question, I fielded a survey of 4,177 Americans that contained an experiment. Each respondent read about four women applying for Medicaid (a woman with disabilities, a single mother, an able-bodied woman who had been out of work for more than a year, and a woman struggling with opioid addiction) and decided whether each should be allowed to apply online or required to apply in person. The vignettes also relied on racially and ethnically identifiable names that signaled whether each woman was White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian.

Two findings stood out. First, life circumstances drove nearly all findings. Respondents were most willing to ease the way for the woman with disabilities and the single mother, and least willing for the able-bodied unemployed woman and the woman with addiction. Indeed, respondents were frequently unwilling to extend the latter two any relief at all. Second, race and ethnicity barely registered. The beneficiary’s race or ethnicity had almost no effect on respondents’ choices. In short, the effect of life circumstances consistently overshadowed that of race and ethnicity. Importantly, this pattern held across liberals and conservatives alike, and among respondents high and low in racial resentment.

These patterns are more than an academic curiosity and have real policy implications. The new work requirements take direct aim at precisely the group toward which the public expresses the least generosity: “able-bodied” adults who are not working. The findings are therefore consistent with a political environment in which such burdens are unlikely to encounter much public resistance. This is because they are, at least in the political discourse, targeted at individuals whom the public has, in effect, deemed less deserving of assistance. Of course, given what we know about the effect of administrative burdens, the collateral damage will ultimately be much larger and affect both the “deserving” and “undeserving”.

For researchers, the findings open at least as many questions as they answer. Why does race wash out here? Is this a genuine null, or an artifact of how race is cued in a survey setting? Do these patterns extend to other programs and other types of burdens, or is Medicaid distinctive in this regard? And as states implement work requirements over the next two years, scholars are presented with a rare natural experiment: an opportunity to observe whether attitudes about who deserves relief shift once these burdens become tangible.

The politics of paperwork are opaque, but they are not neutral. As this latest round of requirements takes hold, it is worth remembering that the public already holds firm views about whose path to assistance should be smoothed — and whose should not. As such, these seemingly mundane administrative choices remain an important arena in the ongoing struggle over the reach of the American safety net.

Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:

Haeder, Simon F. (2026). “Assessing the Effect of Deservingness Cues on Tolerance for Administrative Burdens” Policy Studies Journal 54(1): e70043. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70043.

About the Article’s Author(s)

Simon F. Haeder, PhD, MPA, is an associate professor in the Division of Health Services Management and Policy at The Ohio State University College of Public Health. His research examines how people gain — or lose — access to health and health-protective services, with particular attention to administrative burden, provider networks and network adequacy, vaccination policy, school-based health services, and the federal regulatory process. His work has appeared in Health Affairs, JAMA, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, among others. He also writes frequently for general audiences, translating health policy research into accessible insights for policymakers and the public. 

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Coalition Opportunity Structures and Advocacy Coordination in Consensus and Majoritarian Democracies

Why do policy actors sometimes cooperate with their political opponents while at other times coordinating almost exclusively with like-minded allies?

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) argues that policy actors coordinate with others who share similar policy beliefs. This tendency, known as belief homophily, has become of the frameworks’ most established findings and a central explanation for the formation of advocacy coalitions. Yet an important question remains: Does belief homophily operate similarly across different political systems?

As part of the internationalization of the ACF research agenda, the concept of coalition opportunity structures was introduced to account for institutional differences between countries. Coalition opportunity structures refer to the institutional contexts within which coalitions operate, particularly differences between consensus and majoritarian democracies. Despite its theoretical importance, the concept has rarely been tested empirically.

In our recent article, we examine whether coalition opportunity structures influence the extent to which belief homophily matters for advocacy coordination.

Hypotheses

The ACF generally expects actors with similar policy beliefs to coordinate with one another. We argue that political institutions influence how strongly this mechanism operates.

In consensus democracies, policy change typically requires agreement among a broad range of actors. Consequently, actors have incentives to coordinate across coalition boundaries and maintain relationships with organizations holding different policy beliefs. In contrast, policy actors can more often pursue their goals through cohesive alliances of like-minded actors in majoritarian democracies. As a result, belief homophily is likely to play a stronger role in shaping coordination.

Based on this argument, we developed two main expectations. First, belief homophily should be a stronger driver of coordination in majoritarian democracies than in consensus democracies. Second, actors in majoritarian democracies may also be more likely to coordinate with influential actors because political influence is particularly valuable in contexts where policy change depends on political competition instead of broad consensus.

Methodology

To test these expectations, we analyzed climate policy subsystems in nine countries representing varying degrees of consensus and majoritarian democracy. The study draws on survey-based network data capturing long-term coordination relationships among governmental organizations, businesses, NGOs, research organizations, political parties, and other key policy actors.

We combined these network data with measures of policy beliefs, actor influence, and institutional context based on Lijphart’s measure of consensus and majoritarian democracy. We then applied a multilevel structural equation model to examine both the direct and indirect effects of coalition opportunity structures on coordination behavior.

Key Findings

Our findings show that coalition opportunity structures shape advocacy coordination.

First, actors in consensus democracies are more likely to coordinate action despite belief dissimilarity. In other words, coordination is less restricted to like-minded actors, and cross-coalition coordination is therefore more common. Conversely, actors in majoritarian democracies are more likely to coordinate with partners who share their policy beliefs. These findings suggest that belief homophily remains important across political systems, but its influence is substantially stronger in majoritarian contexts.

Second, actors in consensus democracies tend to have a larger number of coordination partners. This broader pattern of coordination contributes to greater interaction across belief differences and helps explain why belief homophily is weaker in these contexts.

Finally, we find more tentative evidence that actors in majoritarian democracies are more likely to coordinate with influential actors. While this result should be interpreted cautiously, it suggests that strategic alignment with influential actors may represent an additional coordination logic alongside belief homophily. The results of the structural equation model are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. The Results of the Structural Equation Model.

Why It Matters

Our findings contribute to the ACF by providing one of the first systematic empirical examinations of coalition opportunity structures. The study demonstrates that the relationship between policy beliefs and coordination depends on institutional context.

More broadly, the results highlight the importance of comparative policy process research. Advocacy coalitions do not emerge and operate in a political vacuum. The institutional rules of the game shape how actors coordinate, whom they choose as partners, and the extent to which coordination crosses coalition boundaries.

By showing how coalition opportunity structures influence advocacy coordination, our study helps connect macro-level political institutions to meso-level coalition behavior and advances a comparative understanding of advocacy coalitions.

Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:

Satoh, K., Gronow, A., Ylä-Antilla, T., Delicado, A., Schmidt, L., Swarnakar, P., Wagner, P.M., and Yun, S.J. 2026. “Coalition Opportunity Structures and Advocacy Coalition Coordination in Consensus and Majoritarian Democracies” Policy Studies Journal 54(1): e70067. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70067.

About the Article’s Author(s)

Antti Gronow is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests range from advocacy coalitions and social networks to political polarization and pragmatism. In addition to Policy Studies Journal, Gronow’s work has appeared in journals such as Governance, Public Administration, JPART and Global Environmental Change. He is one of the chairs of the steering committee of the 14-country comparative research effort “Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks” (see compon.org). 

Keiichi Satoh is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Hitosubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. His research interests range from climate change politics and policy processes to social network theory and methods. Like the other two authors of this blog post, Satoh is an active member of the Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks Project. His latest paper is “Ecological Modernization Theory and Climate Action” in the Oxford Handbook of Climate Action (ed. Paul Almedia). He is also the author of the agent-based modeling package for R software, “rABM).

Tuomas Ylä-Anttila is professor of political science at the University of Helsinki. He has published widely on policy processes and advocacy coalitions, climate change politics, policy and communication networks, and social movements in journals such as Policy Studies Journal, JPART, Journal of Communication, Governance, and Global Environmental Change. He chairs the international Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks research initiative (compon.org).

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