This study explored whether citizen participation empowers people, and examined the effect of empowerment expectation on intention to participate in future citizen participation programs. We also focused on three subscales of competence: deepening participants’ understanding of discussion themes, enabling mutual understanding among participants, and performance appraisal of citizen’s panel conference; and examined their relationships with measures of empowerment.<br />
We explored the “Citizen’s Report for Health” program, conducted from 2001 to 2002 in eight regions of Bavaria, Germany. They used the “Planning Cells” citizen participation and deliberation model, involving randomly selected citizens. Fifty residents from each region (n=405) attended a four-day meeting and discussed the suggestions for future health policies. A questionnaire survey was administered to 405 participants and 3500 non-participants (500 residents randomly selected from each of the seven regions) in early 2007. The main results were as follows: 1) participants revealed higher scores than non-participants regarding participation intention in a future opportunity, each subscale of competence, and, each subscale of empowerment, 2) both participants and non-participants determined the intention to participate in future participation programs by the empowerment expected to be gained. 3) Competence was the main determinant of each empowerment. We discussed the necessity to encourage people with no experience of citizen participation to foster greater expectations of empowerment to promote their participation.