ABSTRACT
The participation of ethnic minorities in deliberation processes has been often approached from the perspective of group interests in ethnically diverse settings or from the angle of multicultural democracy. Much less is known about the ways in which ethnic minority groups engage in deliberative processes organized in their communities. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature and aims to understand how ethnic groups engage in public deliberation. It compares the cases of local deliberation in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the constitutional deliberation forum organized at the national level in Romania. We reveal two contrasting realities. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the external interventions incentivize public deliberation and create an open space for active citizen engagement. In Romania, the participation was not taken into consideration as an option by the ethnic minorities, but it was perceived instead as another opportunity to highlight the collective demands as articulated traditionally by their representatives.
