This blog provides an overview of Marie Bruyndonckx’s masters dissertation, which was co-supervised by the University of Edinburgh and SPICe. It compares the public consultation processes of the Scottish Parliament and the European Commission. As with all guest blogs, what follows are the views of the author and not those of SPICe, or of the Scottish Parliament.
Background
The Scottish Parliament’s committees have asked the public for their thoughts and ideas for more than 25 years in their public consultations. This helps the Parliament’s MSPs to scrutinise issues and hear a wide range of views on a topic. Once a consultation closes, committees will consider the written evidence that has been submitted before taking further oral evidence, then writing a report with the insights and recommendations. This information can then be used to formulate new or revised policies or develop legislation. Over time, the Parliament’s committees have increasingly used digital tools to gather people’s opinions; today, it initiates a public consultation whenever it wants to scrutinise any new legislation or undertake an enquiry.
Two web-hosted platforms, YourViews and Engage, allow people to express their views on various committee inquiries. These consultations cover a variety of themes, ranging from very technical to more accessible topics. By offering people the opportunity to share their views online, the Parliament wishes to achieve its goals of participatory democracy, accountability, and transparency.
Previous research by Dr Adam Chalmers has tried to understand how the Parliament involves the public in decision-making. He looked at how citizens respond to online consultations. My investigation took this a step further by looking at how these consultations are created. I wanted to see how accessible and user-friendly they were.
The study
Several researchers have argued that public consultations might not work very well, expressing concerns over their democratic nature, people’s familiarity with them, and their actual influence on the real decision-making process. Carpini, Cook and Jacobs (2004, p. 321), for instance, have noted that those who do not support public consultation believe that it is “so infrequent, unrepresentative, subject to conscious manipulation and unconscious bias, and disconnected from actual decision making as to make it at best an impractical mechanism for determining the public will, and at worst misleading or dangerous”. With my master’s dissertation, I wanted to offer insights that can improve the public consultation process.
Previous investigations have shown that public consultations can have two main goals:
- gathering advice from experts who know a lot about the discussed issue
- getting opinions from as many different people as possible, including from those who might not know much about the topic.
I wanted to find out if it was possible to reach both these goals at the same time. The Scottish Parliament has often succeeded in this, although there have been times when it was difficult to meet both goals at once. Indeed, the current public consultation process has its flaws, but significant effort has been invested in it. For example, the public consultation on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill included both a short and long survey. This approach allowed respondents to decide how much time and detail they wanted to provide. As such, “experts” could present elaborate arguments and comment on the detail of the Bill, while “non-experts” could give shorter responses.
I was not only trying to give insights to the academic world, but also to those involved in designing consultations. In the case of the Scottish Parliament, that includes team members of SPICe, clerks, and the communications team. My research compared the design process of public consultations at the Scottish Parliament and the European Commission. Overall, the Commission seems to have a more standard approach to engaging with the public compared to the Scottish Parliament, which is more flexible in its approach.
For the study, I interviewed several public consultation designers, including three working at the Scottish Parliament. I also investigated the language of the questionnaires and webpages participants can access. I looked at eight pieces of legislation, four from the Scottish Parliament and four from the Commission, to see how easy their consultations were to understand.
Results from the study
Based on academic insights and my own observations, I drew several conclusions for improving the consultations at the Scottish Parliament. These fall into two main categories:
- Making the information that people read before a consultation easier to understand
- Making it easier for more people to get involved
Now, let us take a closer look at each of these categories.
Making the information that people read before a consultation easier to understand
Citizens who participate in online public consultations get access to a lot of information and documents. They do not only get a simple, short explanation of what the consultation is about but can also read several other parliamentary, legislative documents (depending on what kind of bill it is). The questions that respondents have to answer are also very important. Together, all these different texts and the language that is used in them can affect people’s decisions on whether to join in the discussion.
In past studies, researchers have found that providing respondents with clear and helpful guidance is important. However, those involved in designing the consultations should be careful not to give too much information all at once. The Scottish Parliament publishes various parliamentary documents when they ask for feedback on primary legislative bills. All that information might be overwhelming for potential respondents. However, in reality, there is little that the Scottish Parliament can do to reduce the volume of documentation accompanying legislation. Still, where consultations are not linked to specific pieces of legislation, the Scottish Parliament could consider the number of supporting documents provided, or the length of these documents.
Compared to the European Commission, the Scottish Parliament is not as rigorous when it comes to translating consultations. Whenever there is time, policymakers occasionally open consultations in multiple languages and allow people to respond in their preferred languages, for example, in the case of the Housing (Scotland) Bill or the Scottish Languages Bill. However, this is not standard practice. On the other hand, the European Commission has seen more people participating since they started translating the consultation documentation into more languages. If the Scottish Parliament wants more people to participate, they might want to think about translating more consultations. Still, it is important to note that this issue likely concerns the Commission more than the Scottish Parliament, as the Commission has a broader territorial scope. Moreover, the Parliament would likely conclude that the cost of translating consultation documents into multiple languages would not be justified.
Overall, the Scottish Parliament adopts a more flexible approach than the European Commission, which follows a more standardised approach in setting up the consultations. The latter provides clear, written-down guidelines to help designers. A document like that might be useful for the Scottish Parliament too. Scottish Parliament consultation designers are also flexible when drafting questions. The Commission usually uses a mix of open questions, meaning that people can freely answer them, and closed questions, which require participants to pick between pre-written answers. This allows them to get insights from experts and the wider public: experts tend to respond to open questions, and regular citizens respond to closed ones. The Scottish Parliament is more flexible and tailors questions to each specific policy issue at hand. Additionally, as previously mentioned, it sometimes aims to gather views from both experts and regular citizens by offering respondents the choice between filling out a short survey or a detailed questionnaire.
For this investigation, I also analysed the language used in consultation documents to see how easy they are to understand and how this influences participation. Generally, texts from the Scottish Parliament are less concrete than those from the Commission. This means that the documents from the Commission tend to be less abstract and have more tangible language than those from the Scottish Parliament. For example, a concrete word like “voting” refers to a specific action, whereas an abstract word like “engagement” is less specific and more difficult to measure. When a document is written in a way that is easy to understand, more people tend to get involved in the consultations. In other words, if the Scottish Parliament wants more citizens to participate, they could simplify and clarify their language. However, there are other elements than language that affect how many people take part and that might play a bigger role. In this regard, it is worth noting that my study was based on a small sample, which could have affected the results.
Making it easier for more people to get involved
Scottish Parliament staff put a lot of effort into advertising their public consultations. They send out emails to organisations that might be interested, use specialised news sources, and post on social media. However, they could reach even more people by using other forms of media, such as TV or radio advertisements or advertisements on a platform like YouTube. Yet, this approach would involve significant costs for the Scottish Parliament, an investment that might not be considered worthwhile.
As mentioned earlier, the Scottish Parliament has two websites where it publishes open consultations. Yourviews is slightly more formal than Engage, which the Parliament primarily uses for gathering ideas rather than opinions. The Commission’s digital public consultation initiatives were scattered in the past. However, in February 2024, the European Commission combined all the different platforms into one. To make it easier for people to find and take part in public consultations, the Scottish Parliament might also consider this change.
Another digital hurdle is the Scottish Parliament’s requirement, in most circumstances, for respondents to email a committee to respond anonymously to a consultation. This could discourage participation from people who wish to remain anonymous. Still, there are different opinions on whether allowing anonymous opinions is a good idea. Some claim that having transparent, clear sources of contributions is important. Others, on the other hand, think that allowing anonymous submissions might lead to more open and honest opinions, encouraging more people to participate.
A final factor within this category that affects public involvement is time. Firstly, for consultations that consist mainly of closed questions, it could be a good idea to add an estimate of the time it will take to complete the consultation. When people know in advance how much time they will spend in participating, they might be better able to decide whether they want to respond to a consultation. However, when a consultation consists of mainly open questions, it might be more difficult to estimate how long it would take to complete a questionnaire.
The time allowed for people to partake in public consultations also makes a difference in how many people get involved. When it comes to setting deadlines for giving feedback, the Scottish Parliament and the Commission have different approaches. The Commission sticks to a strict 12-week deadline, while the Parliament is more flexible, usually allowing around eight to nine weeks for people to have their say. This shorter time frame might make it hard for people – especially big organisations – to gather everyone’s opinions in time. This could lead to responses reflecting a narrower range of views and of an overall lower quality. However, in reality, it might be difficult for the Scottish Parliament to balance their consultations’ accessibility and meeting legislative deadlines. Indeed, when it wants to improve accessibility by allowing more response time, or by providing consultations in different formats or languages, this can slow down the process of drafting new policies.
Conclusion
In my dissertation, I explored how staff design public consultations at the Scottish Parliament and the European Commission and how they could improve this process. The findings revealed that both institutions are working harder to engage the public but still face some difficulties. Moreover, there are signs that the Commission has benefited from its more standardised approach of setting up consultations. For this reason, the Scottish Parliament, which is a bit more flexible, could try to develop a more systematic strategy for designing its engagement tools. It could do this by, for example, integrating the different digital consultation tools or providing consultations in a set time frame.
This investigation helped identify potential areas for improvement in how the Scottish Parliament asks the public for their opinion. Many things could be done better, like making the consultation documents easier to understand, reaching out to more people, and making participation in consultations more accessible.
If you would like to know more about public engagement at the Scottish Parliament, you can turn to other blogs provided by SPICe:
- Guest blog: Connecting deliberative practices in Parliament with participation and community engagement)
- Turning the lens inwards – the Citizen Participation and Petitions Committee’s Public Participation Inquiry
- Recommending a more participatory future – the Citizen Participation and Petitions Committee’s Public Participation Inquiry
- A shopping list for Scottish Parliament citizens’ assemblies? – the Citizen Participation and Petitions Committee’s Public Participation Inquiry
- Embedding Deliberative Democracy in a Participatory Parliament
- Guest blog: Tracking public engagement through the parliamentary process
Marie Bruyndonckx, Research intern, SPICe
Used source: Carpini, M.X.D., Cook, F.L. and Jacobs, L.R. (2004) ‘Public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature’, Annual Review of Political Science, 7(Volume 7, 2004), pp. 315–344.