Ascertaining jointness in decision-making requires the recipients of proposals to extend the base sequence of proposal-acceptance and make room for displays of agreement. However, the extension takes different forms, depending on the number of participants receiving a proposal and when the decision is to be carried out. On the basis of video-recordings from a participatory democracy workshop, the act of collaborative writing was used to observe how proximal proposals are transformed into joint decisions. The analysis reveals that displays of access and agreement to the proposal are achieved in a distributed manner among the participants. The access component is expanded to contain actions that delimit the content and scope of the proposal. These meta-decisions then result in a writable produced by someone other than the proposer to whom agreement is displayed. Given the proximal nature of the decision-making, commitment to future action can be bypassed. Instead, execution of the decision is deployed in a manner that retrospectively presents the sequence as a joint one. The study demonstrates the significance of the temporal, social, and material aspects associated with proposing and achieving jointness in multiparty proximal decisions.

Young citizens are increasingly being invited to take part in participatory democracy meetings as joint decision-making has grown popular in public administration. The backbone of participatory democracy is that some authority is granted to the citizenry and by drawing on video data (38 hours) from a year-long participatory project, this conversation analytic study shows that the adolescents are instructed to a deontic role rooted in epistemics, benefactive considerations, as well as temporal aspects relating to future citizenship and hope. The institutional representatives perform actions that determine how the adolescents should, in their turn, perform actions of influence. In this way, authority is ascribed through an ambivalent configuration in which compliance with the directives is supposed to establish a strengthened deontic position.

In this study, youth participation in a participatory democracy project is examined at the intersection of the deontic and emotional order. The data are drawn from a yearlong participatory democracy project where 14–15-year-olds meet with politicians and public servants to decide on a vision for how the community should be in 2050. By analysing their interactions, the present study shows how adult community representatives elicit adolescents’ negative emotional experiences and transform these into deontic building blocks in the impending decision-making. The analysis shows how the transformation of adolescents’ negative emotional experiences casts the adolescents as emotional perceivers and deontic objects, a role they are shown to comply with. Furthermore, this sets up a proximal deontic order that, in turn, re-establishes a distal deontic order, both in which the adolescents’ positions are subordinated and regulated. Ultimately, by inviting youths to participate in the democracy project itself as well as eliciting their negative emotional experiences the politicians and public servants are shown to use the youths as emotional gearwheels in an already set larger deontic machinery.