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Reach participants
Ability to reach potential participants (e.g., to mitigate biases around self-selection, who is reachable, etc.).
How this is performed now...
- Panel providers Panel providers typically maintain large pools of pre-recruited participants from which they draw. They may actively recruit to fill any gaps, as these lists are typically unrepresentative of the wider population.
- Citizens' assembly organizers Citizens’ assemblies organizers commonly recruit with 2-stage democratic lottery, which involves a round of mailed invitations and then a round of stratified random selection. There is also some use of door-knocking, random phone number dialing, and other recruitment methods. In the global south, where the infrastructure that these approaches rely on can be scarce, alternative in-person methods have been used.
Related Resources
Experimental Practice
SORT-EU Network
A collaborative coalition coordinated by Sortition Europe bringing together more than 30 organizations across EU member states to advance democratic participation through sortition-based methods. Partners handle in-country recruitment and communication within their respective member states, maint...
Research
Global Assembly Selection and Recruitment Workshop
Workshop examining recruitment methodologies for Global Citizens' Assemblies, exploring tensions between sortition and inclusive representation, and proposing adaptive approaches like purposive boosts and iterative review. The workshop identified concerns that random selection may exclude margina...
Research
Selective Voices in Deliberative Mini-Publics: Self Selection and Citizens’ Assembly Participation in the US.
Alexandra Cirone's empirical work on self-selection biases in citizens' assembly participation, presented at the Stanford Workshop on Democratic Governance and New Technology. The workshop examines how voting and governance systems are being adapted for online platforms, addressing challenges lik...
Experimental Practice
Community Host model
A four-step method for recruiting globally representative participants: random location lottery using population data, recruiting local community hosts, having hosts recruit diverse local candidates, then using sortition with stratification to select final participants. The 2021 Global Assembly u...
Related goals and research questions
Goal: There are cheap and efficient ways of recruiting participants that can account for differences in response rates to different types of invitation methods (mail phone door-knocking etc).
What kinds of recruitment methods reach which kinds of people?
Urgent
For a given budget, location, panel size, and unique quotas, how can we design a recruitment plan that will maximize response rates and the representativeness of the sample?
Urgent
What are the most efficient ways of recruiting participants?
Urgent
Goal: Response rates that enable selection algorithms to accurately select panels that represent the whole population by mitigating the impacts of self-selection biases.
What are the best approaches to recruiting a participant pool that captures the complexity and intersections of society while minimising self-selection biases?
Urgent
What strategies can be used to motivate participation in less-democratic contexts?
Urgent
How can we handle the real-world failure modes of recruitment?
Urgent
How can we quantify the fairness of different approaches to sampling the population?
Urgent