From Nudging to Deliberating: Balancing Agency and Self-Constitution in Citizens' Juries on Sustainable Food Systems

This repository contains the materials used in the treatments, as well as the data and code that replicates tables and figures for the following paper Title: From Nudging to Deliberating: Balancing Agency and Self-Constitution in Citizens' Juries on Sustainable Food Systems Abstract: The current debate in autonomy-centric behavioral public policy calls for a shift from "i-frame" interventions, which target individual decision processes, toward "s-frame" approaches that redesign the institutional contexts of public decision-making. We test this by embedding i-frame modules - bias alleviation (targeting agency) and value activation (targeting self-constitution) - within four Citizens’ Juries (deliberative s-frame) on sustainable food systems in Bogotá, Colombia. This layering generates a structural trade-off. While the deliberative s-frame increased civic capacity, the i-frame modules created cognitive friction: the bias alleviation intervention increased awareness and perceived time pressure but failed to reduce bias, while the value activation module shifted normative priorities from environmental to justice values without increasing average willingness-to-pay for conservation. These findings suggest that the 'citizen' identity formed in deliberation is distinct from the 'consumer' identity targeted by behavioral tweaks, and that democratizing policy requires prioritizing s-frame institutional design over i-frame cognitive correction.