Situating Deliberative Mini-Publics in the Political Economy: A neo-Gramscian Analysis of the Positive Low Energy Futures Citizens' Panel

This research will investigate how deliberative democracy in practice is shaped by its political economic context. Climate change poses a 'super wicked' (Levin et al., 2012) problem to policymakers due to the economic path dependencies that challenge the implementation of ambitious and appropriate policy. Where the former economic path dependency is rooted in international competitiveness, the latter is linked to corporate pressure on policymakers that must be alleviated in lockstep with election cycles. It is this gap between the scientific consensus on climate change and policy that has led deliberative democracy scholars to the conclusion that policy reflective of the issue's gravity is best achieved through 'more democracy, not less' (Willis, 2020, p. 82). While the interaction between representative democracy and the political economy is at the crux of such a diagnosis, there has been very little attention paid to the ways in which deliberative democracy takes place and is shaped by the same political economic context.
Utilising a neo-Gramscian lens, this research will examine from a theoretical and empirical perspective how political economic factors limit deliberative democracy, both materially and culturally. This will be achieved through the analysis of a citizens' panel planned by Lancaster University's Climate Citizens research group to assist the developers of the Positive Low Energy Futures (PLEF) energy model. As a demand-side model of the energy system, PLEF emphasises the impossibility of the UK meeting its net-zero target of 78% below 1990 levels without reducing energy consumption significantly. By encouraging citizens to think about energy restraint rather than the type of technological solutions usually recommended from supply-side energy models, PLEF directly engages with the political economic factors that limit emission reduction in the UK.