Political scientists from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, in cooperation with Participation Factory and the Center for Public Opinion Research (CVVM) and under the auspices of the City of Liberec, organized the very first forum of ideological opponents on Sunday, September 7, 2025. Its aim was to find out whether citizens would change their attitudes towards pressing social issues after a process of deliberation.
Approximately 40 people gathered at the Barvířská Elementary School in the center of Liberec to participate in an experiment prepared by a group of political scientists from the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. The research was conducted as part of the HORIZON project Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response (AuthLIB), funded by the European Commission. The project examines populism, illiberalism, and political and social polarization in Europe. Led by Petra Guasti, associate professor of democratic theory at Charles University, the researchers explored whether the citizens of Liberec were able and willing to change their attitudes when they received balanced information on key issues and discussed them with their opponents with the help of facilitators with corresponding experiences.
The recruitment of participants was carried out by the Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM) of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which identified and invited citizens with strong opinions on traffic calming in Liberec and migration. This gave researchers the opportunity to compare whether there is greater potential for changing opinions on a topic that many perceive as local, or on attitudes to an issue that is much more complex in scope.
The whole forum was divided into two parts. In the morning session, citizens listened to a lecture on traffic calming in the city center, which opened a subsequent discussion on the topic of transport services in Liberec. For example, one survey by STEM/MARK conducted in 2024 underlined that transport is one of the most important issues of interest to locals. Under the guidance of experienced facilitators from Participation Factory, smaller groups engaged in a process of deliberation, sharing their own opinions and experiences, and testing the extent to which respondents were willing to accept the positions of their opponents or change their own opinions. The afternoon session continued in the same sense, focusing on the issue of migration from a local, national, and global perspective.
Deliberation and the implementation of participatory forums with citizens is perceived, especially in Western Europe, as one of the key democratic innovations that can contribute to enhancing democracy. It is also one of the ways in which democratic decision-making can potentially be improved. Abroad, it is even common for the outputs of deliberative forums to have a direct influence on the implementation of state policies. This is well known, for example, in Ireland, where citizens’ forums have contributed to the legalization of abortion and other progressive norms. At the local and federal levels, forums are regularly held in the Federal Republic of Germany, for instance. Liberec is one of the few cities in the Czech Republic that has experience with citizen involvement in the form of participatory activities. It is already implementing measures within the framework of participatory budgeting and regularly conducts citizen consultations. In cooperation with the Barvířská Elementary School, which provided its premises for the forum, the city council also sponsored this very first forum, which brings together ideological opponents.
“The deliberation process is essential for studying democratic innovations. Our goal was to find out whether there would be greater or lesser shifts in the opinions of ideological opponents and what could influence the attitudes of participating citizens. We are most interested in the potential and conditions for deradicalization and, by extension, for mitigating polarization throughout society. We did indeed observe shifts in opinion on both topics studied, although preliminary results show that these shifts are relatively minor,” points out Petra Guasti in terms of the initial preliminary results. “A truly wide range of opinions was expressed during the discussions. We were surprised by the extent to which citizens linked the topic of migration to their own experiences, the moments when they tried to convince their fellow discussants of the correctness of their own opinion, and in some cases, how naturally some people applied disinformation narratives in their arguments,” she adds. The researchers will now process the data from the surveys and subsequently interpret it in scientific publications.
