Background/Objectives: CenteringPregnancy (CP) is a group prenatal care model that empowers pregnant women through risk assessment, education, and social support. CP participants have more contact time with providers compared to those in traditional prenatal care. Despite contradictory findings in the literature, this study aimed to determine if CP leads to better health outcomes for women and their infants. Methods: A quasi-experimental design was used. Data were collected from hospital birth records of both CP participants and those receiving traditional prenatal care from 2018 to 2020. Various treatment effect models for observational data were used to assess CP’s effectiveness. Results: CP improved women’s access to prenatal care and reduced rates of preterm birth and perinatal death compared to traditional prenatal care. It also resulted in longer gestation periods and better infant birth weight outcomes. However, no significant differences were found in delivery type (vaginal or C-section) or breastfeeding initiation and continuation between the two groups. Conclusions: These findings provide compelling evidence that CenteringPregnancy can lead to significantly improved maternal and infant health outcomes by demonstrating its effectiveness in a real-world clinical setting.

This study theorizes on narrative sense making a qualitative analysis of online dialogs for healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that sensegiving and sense-taking processes between storytellers and storywitnessess produce stories as paradoxical artifacts of sensemaking, fixing interpretations of equivocal circumstances yet composed of multiple meanings. Rather than resolving tensions between order and disorder, stories hold these opposites together to imply imperfect linkages across space-time (spatiotemporal in/congruity) and to facilitate imperfect identification with characters and storytellers (positional in/congruity). The very act of storytelling in this context indicates perceived disorder, as occasions for telling emerge out of multiple possible interpretations. This study demonstrates how narrative in/congruity produces precarious storied order(s) amid the always present multiplicity of meanings.

In this essay, we use applied rhetorical criticism to analyze how facilitators navigate online deliberation in the Washington Climate Assembly, a public deliberation process held virtually in January and February 2021. We draw on interviews with organizers and facilitators and from observational notes taken by the research team during Assembly deliberations. This analysis focuses on the Assembly's online note-taking practices. Previous research has recognized note-taking as an important element to the design of democratic processes, and we argue that note-taking modalities constitute a form of deliberative guidance. We examine the Assembly's use of note-taking modalities for deliberative guidance across spatial and temporal dimensions, thus expanding the concept of deliberative guidance into other forms of communication. Additionally, results revealing shortcomings in note-taking suggest employing augmented note-taking practices during online public deliberation processes, with implications for scoping, staffing, and budgeting of such processes, as well as the potential application of artificial intelligence.

BACKGROUND:CenteringPregnancy (CP) has been expected to produce beneficial outcomes for women and their infants. However, previous studies paid little attention to testing variations in CP's effects across women from different demographic groups. This study aimed to test how multiple demographic factors (obesity, race, ethnicity, marital status and socioeconomic status) moderate CP's effects on health outcomes.METHODS:This study employed a quasi-experimental design. De-identified hospital birth data were collected from 216 CP participants and 1159 non-CP participants. We estimated the average treatment effect of CP on outcome variables as a baseline. Then we estimated the average marginal effect of CP by adding each of the moderating variables in regression adjustment models.RESULTS:CP produced salutary effects among those who were obese or overweight and unmarried as well as women with lower socioeconomic status. These salutary effects were also strengthened as maternal age increased. However, CP was ineffective for Hispanic/Latinx women.CONCLUSIONS:CP produced more beneficial health outcomes for high-risk women such as obese, unmarried women and those with lower socioeconomic status. These are meaningful findings from a public health perspective.

Evolving US media and political systems, coupled with escalating misinformation campaigns, have left the public divided over objective facts featured in policy debates. The public also has lost much of its confidence in the institutions designed to adjudicate those epistemic debates. To counter this threat, civic entrepreneurs have devised institutional reforms to revitalize democratic policymaking. One promising intervention is the Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR), which has been adopted into law in Oregon and tested in several other states, as well as Switzerland and Finland. Each CIR gathers a demographically stratified random sample of registered voters to form a deliberative panel, which hears from pro and con advocates and neutral experts while assessing the merits of a ballot measure. After four-to-five days of deliberation, each CIR writes an issue guide for voters that identifies key factual findings, along with the most important pro and con arguments. This study pools the results of survey experiments conducted on thirteen CIRs held from 2010 to 2018, resulting in a dataset that includes 67,120 knowledge scores collected from 10,872 registered voters exposed to 82 empirical claims. Analysis shows that reading the CIR guide had a positive effect on voters' policy knowledge, with stronger effects for those holding greater faith in deliberation. We found little evidence of directional motivated reasoning but some evidence that reading the CIR statement can spark an accuracy motivation. Overall, the main results show how trust in peer deliberation provides one path out of the maze of misinformation shaping voter decisions during elections.

Climate change presents multiple challenges to rural communities. Here, we investigated the toxicological potential of the six types of particulate matter most common to rural Arkansas: soil, road, and agricultural dusts, pollen, traffic exhaust, and particles from biomass burning in human small airway epithelial cells (SAECs). Biomass burning and agricultural dust demonstrated the most potent toxicological responses, exhibited as significant (p < 0.05) up-regulation of HMOX1 (oxidative stress) and TNFα (inflammatory response) genes as well as epigenetic alterations (altered expression of DNA methyltransferases DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B, enzymatic activity, and DNA methylation of alpha satellite elements) that were evident at both 24 h and 72 h of exposure. We further demonstrate evidence of aridification in the state of Arkansas and the presence of winds capable of transporting agricultural dust- and biomass burning-associated particles far beyond their origination. Partnerships in the form of citizen science projects may provide important solutions to prevent and mitigate the negative effects of the rapidly evolving climate and improve the well-being of rural communities. Furthermore, the identification of the most toxic types of particulate matter could inform local policies related to agriculture, biomass burning, and dust control.

Psychological phenomena have long been a focus of research on democratic deliberation, particularly concerning policy knowledge and attitudes and other issues addressed in conventional scholarship on political psychology. Yet in recent years, the subject matter of psychological research on deliberation has expanded to include a wider array of issues, ranging from lay conceptualizations of deliberation, to phenomena not foregrounded in traditional political psychology scholarship, including emotions, social identity, communication goals, relational schemata, and social learning. This essay summarizes key findings from prior research on psychological dimensions of deliberation, and then delineates recent deliberative scholarship that explores a broader range of psychological phenomena. Finally, this essay introduces the six new articles that make up this special issue. These articles offer novel theoretical and empirical insights on a number of current themes concerning psychological aspects of deliberation, while expanding knowledge concerning established areas of inquiry.

From July-August, 2020, the nonprofit organization Healthy Democracy convened a seven-week pilot test of an online Citizen Assembly on the state of Oregon's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pilot project presented a unique research opportunity because its organizers had ten years of experience running the Citizens’ Initiative Review, a face-to-face minipublic authorized by the State of Oregon to write voting guides for the wider electorate on ballot measures. This case study compares survey data from the Citizen Assembly pilot with the prior Citizens’ Initiative Reviews and provides analysis and recommendations that could improve the design and execution of future online assemblies.

The development of theories of citizens’ political communication has been hindered by a debate over whether such communication is best characterized as deliberative or non-deliberative. This article aims to overcome that impasse with a new account of citizens’ political communication informed by theories of message production and sense-making: the goals–sense-making–justification (GSJ) model. This model holds that citizens’ political-communicative behavior is influenced by multiple goals and cognitive plans, which generally vary in different contexts. This variation helps to explain why citizens’ informal political discussions during non-election periods rarely feature reason-giving—and so can be understood as non-deliberative—whereas such discussions during major-election campaigns often feature the reason-giving that is characteristic of deliberation. Moreover, the model demonstrates how cognitive plans developed in informal political discussions over repeated major-election cycles enable citizens to engage competently in reason-giving during formal deliberations.

From July–August, 2020, the nonprofit organization Healthy Democracy convened a seven-week pilot test of an online Citizen Assembly on the state of Oregon's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pilot project presented a unique research opportunity, because its organizers had ten years of experience running the Citizens’ Initiative Review, a face-to-face minipublic authorized by the State of Oregon to write voting guides for the wider electorate on ballot measures. This case study compares survey data from the Citizen Assembly pilot with the prior Citizens’ Initiative Reviews and provides analysis and recommendations that could improve the design and execution of future online assemblies.

This study aims to conduct an assessment of emergency information sharing between the government and the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, this study intends to explore how the government provides emergency information on the pandemic to the public, how the public provides input to the government, and how the government and the public work together to respond to the pandemic. This study employed a mixed case study method focusing on the Oregon Citizen Assembly on COVID-19 Recovery and the Oregon State Government's pandemic response activities. This study found that ordinary citizens were overall satisfied with pandemic information provided by the state government, but they reported that they did not have sufficient opportunities to share their input with the government. Online mini-publics can serve as a meaningful and deliberative forum for civic participation during pandemics.

Research on deliberative mini-publics has neglected two topics: the information on which deliberation is based, and communication techniques by which mini-publics convey their findings to the public. This article sheds light on those two topics, by showing that a criterion for evaluating information – intersubjective relevance – structures information within mini-publics and information that mini-publics share with the wider public. The article explains how information satisfying that criterion can foster intersubjectivity, deliberation and desirable outcomes of deliberation. The article proposes a theoretical model to explain those associations, and presents evidence from the Citizens’ Initiative Review, lending support for the model.

Authoritarian or illiberal regimes control a growing number of states throughout the world. Among the information strategies that these regimes use to gain and maintain support are the dissemination of false or misleading policy information and the use of manipulative policy frames. Deliberative mini-publics can partially counter those strategies by distributing accurate policy information and employing non-exploitative policy frames that affirm the dignity of members of the polity as free and equal citizens.

Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them.

At smaller social scales, deliberative democratic theory can be restated as an input-process-output model. We advance such a model to formulate hypotheses about how the context and design of a civic engagement process shape the deliberation that takes place therein, as well as the impact of the deliberation on participants and subsequent policymaking. To test those claims, we extract and code case studies from Participedia.net, a research platform that has adopted a self-directed crowd-sourcing strategy to collect data on participatory institutions and deliberative interventions around the world. We explain and confront the challenges faced in coding and analyzing the Participedia cases, which involves managing reliability issues and missing data. In spite of those difficulties, regression analysis of the coded cases shows compelling results, which provide considerable support for our general theoretical model. We conclude with reflections on the implications of our findings for deliberative theory, the design of democratic innovations, and the utility of Participedia as a data archive.

Participedia (PP; www.participedia.net) is an open global knowledge platform for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement. It represents an experiment with a new and potentially powerful way to conduct social science research: crowdsourcing data on participatory processes from researchers and practitioners from all over the world and making that data freely available for analysis. This article reflects on the potential of PP to realize its long‐term aim of answering the basic research questions: what kinds of participatory processes work best, for what purposes, and under what conditions? Initially the article reviews the data model that informs PP and the types of comparative analysis it might enable. Our analysis draws on the PP data to explore the relationship between aspects of institutional design (including facilitation, forms of interaction, and decision methods) across a range of democratic innovations represented on the platform. The study offers important insights on institutional design, but also on the potential for crowdsourcing data from disparate communities.

Burkhalter et al.’s (2002) self-reinforcing model of democratic deliberation is well established, but lacks an account of legitimacy, which is a key element of most democratic-deliberative theories. We extend Burkhalter et al.’s model by proposing a new model called “symbolic-cognitive proceduralism,” which explains how democratic-deliberative processes generate legitimacy, and how such legitimacy contributes to the social reproduction of deliberation. Our proposed model accounts for perceived and normative legitimacy, at interpersonal and macro-social levels of analysis, over short and long time-spans, and accords with substantial empirical evidence.