Trade-offs and Triumphs: Examining the Commitment of Underrepresented Groups in Real-World Discussion Forums

Past research has shown that favorable opinion climates in host countries and opportunity structures reinforce each other to enable the political participation of marginalized communities. However, few studies examine the discursive participation of the underrepresented beyond parties, elections, or involvement in associations. We contribute a novel assessment of whether democratic innovations' promise to make marginalized voices heard is realistic or overstated by investigating the commitment of locally enfranchised immigrants, immigrant-origin citizens, women, the youth, people of low-income and the lower educated to deliberate with one another. Inviting two large samples (N=3000 each) of registered voters of the Swiss canton of Geneva from 2020 and 2021 to two real-world deliberative forums, we find that immigrants with the local right to vote and immigrant-origin citizens were more than twice as likely as their native peers to participate in two in-person deliberative assemblies with fellow residents and citizens. Low-income people were also more likely to participate, while we did not found any substantially increased discursive participation of women. The lower-educated and less politically active were less likely to commitment to discursive participation. These results showcase the potential trade-offs of hybrid democratic innovations for the discursive integration of underrepresented groups in Western democracies more generally.