As early as 1979, science analyst Dorothy Nelkin pointed out that much of what passed for participation in governance could best be understood as attempts by the powerful to co-opt the public.
The existing term it shares most in common with is participatory democracy, discussed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G D H Cole.
Many see participatory democracy as complementing representative democratic systems, in that it puts decision-making powers more directly in the hands of ordinary people.
Today, jury trials are practised in many democracies around the world including the US, UK, Russia, Spain, Brazil and Australia.
Perhaps no other institution of government rivals the jury in placing power so directly in the hands of citizens, or wagers more on the truth of democracy's core claim that the people make their own best governors.
For instance, government officials recently met selectively with concerned members of the public to discuss a controversial decision to build a road through a historically significant graveyard.
However, are these recent developments enough to shift the deeply entrenched public sector mindsets that have been formed out of historically shaped ways of thinking and reasoning?
These mechanisms gather information from the public who are or will be affected by those decisions to shape what sponsors focus on or invest their resources into.
Mechanisms for public participation include action planning workshops, citizens' jury, consensus conferences, and task forces.
This is the rarest engagement mechanism, because the sponsors (i.e., policy makers and regulatory actors) are not allowed to transfer their decision-making authority to the public.
Taking participatory democracy as an ideal for public engagement has significant consequences for how we apply the concept to issues with a scientific or technical element.
Instead of merely receiving inputs from various interested parties, a participatory model of consultation forces decision-makers to recognise the democratic accountability of their actions not merely every few years at elections, but in a more systematic, direct sense to citizens.
[9] Participation is also overtly "political" in that it is about humans, power and knowledge – all of which are inherently complex and which together make for a potent mix that requires sensitivity and careful planning.
Fairness addresses whether the public perceives their information was collected by sponsors in a way that equally represents the affected population.
So instead of recommending a perfect method of public engagement, working principles for such processes based on those used by PEALS at Newcastle University are listed below.
Americans performed much worse on questions about evolution and the Big Bang theory than respondents from different countries.
[4] While initially designed for emerging science-based technologies like CRISPR, the goals are sufficiently broad to function as an analytical tool, guiding our assessment of the effectiveness of public engagement efforts across various scientific topics.
[4] This has been observed in individuals' beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors concerning issues such as climate change, the Big Bang, and human evolution.
A 2020 survey-based study discovered that researchers in the U.S. and Canada generally support various public engagement goals, such as ensuring policymakers utilize scientific evidence, promoting a culture that values science, securing adequate research funding, helping people make better individual decisions using science, and fulfilling their duty to society.
[22] A focus group study involving 23 tenure-track science faculty members from a midwestern U.S. land-grant university in 2020 reported similar findings.
Faculty members also expressed concerns about being perceived as ideological or facing backlash for posting content that could generate criticism from within the university.
Especially on scientific topics, much public discussion takes place on platforms such as social media, which are inherently limited in their democratic and inclusive capacities.
[23] This has implications for public deliberation of science in an age when an increasing number of scientific issues, such as COVID-19 or climate change, are entangled with political affiliations.
Ideally, there should be a feedback loop from various public engagement modalities to the decisions made by legislative bodies or other policy-making institutions.
However, in reality, this is often not the case, particularly in the United States, where many federal agencies are legally limited in the extent to which they can offer the public formal decision-making opportunities.
For example, bioethics commissions established in the 1960s by Congress were supposedly designed to mediate engagement between scientists, lawmakers and the public.
[36] Low turnout rate in public meetings can lead serious sampling biases when attendees and non-attendees significantly differ in their interests.