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Civic
Dictionary
Deliberative
Democracy
Prepared
by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland
editor-in-chief and research director
of the Civic Practices Network
Deliberative
democracy rests on the core notion of citizens and their representatives
deliberating about public problems and solutions under conditions
that are conducive to reasoned reflection and refined public judgment;
a mutual willingness to understand the values, perspectives, and
interests of others; and the possibility of reframing their interests
and perspectives in light of a joint search for common interests
and mutually acceptable solutions.
It is thus
often referred to as an open discovery process, rather than a
ratification of fixed positions, and as potentially transforming
interests, rather than simply taking them as given. Unlike much
liberal pluralist political theory, deliberative democracy does
not assume that citizens have a fixed ordering of preferences
when they enter the public sphere. Rather, it assumes that the
public sphere can generate opportunities for forming, refining,
and revising preferences through discourse that takes multiple
perspectives into account and orients itself towards mutual understanding
and common action.
Deliberative
democracy in its predominant usage today means expanding the opportunities
of citizens themselves to deliberate. This is meant to respond
to several kinds of problems:
- Direct
Plebiscitary Democracy
Despite the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, a
direct-majoritarian version of democracy has been in the ascendancy
in the United States since the nineteenth century, and depletes
our capacities for reasoned deliberation. In this version of
democracy, those mechanisms that compel decisions to conform
directly to existing majority opinion are seen as more democratic
than those that filter decisions through representation. The
ascendancy of opinion polls, talk show democracy, referendums,
and primaries are manifestations of this. As a result, policy
questions become oversimplified and stylized, and our capacity
to solve increasingly complex public problems declines.
- Interest
Group Representation
The increasing organization of citizens into interest groups
has tended to turn politics into a competition of interests
narrowly defined. The advocacy explosion of recent years has
helped to democratize access to the halls of power, but has
also generated a kind of "hyperpluralism" that makes it increasingly
difficult to address questions of common purpose and revise
programs that may have outlived their usefulness. This hinders
our capacity to innovate to solve new problems.
- Professional
Political Class
Citizens have become increasingly disengaged and cynical about
politics because they see it as an exclusive game for professionals
and experts, such as politicians, campaign managers, lobbyists,
pollsters, journalists, talking heads. Technocratic approaches
within public administration exacerbate this sense of the displaced
citizen.
Deliberative
democracy introduces a different kind of citizen voice into public
affairs than that associated with raw public opinion, simple voting,
narrow advocacy, or protest from the outside. It promises to cultivate
a responsible citizen voice capable of appreciating complexity,
recognizing the legitimate interests of other groups (including
traditional adversaries), generating a sense of common ownership
and action, and appreciating the need for difficult trade-offs.
And one of the central arguments of deliberative democratic theory
is that the process of deliberation itself is a key source of
legitimacy, and hence an important resource for responding to
our crisis of governance.
Forms
& Examples
Deliberative
democracy can exist in many forms and combinations, and can be
complementary to various other mechanisms that ensure democratic
representation and efficient administration. Thus, we can see
deliberative democratic forms used not only for shaping an independent
citizen dialogue, but for complementing deliberations by a city
council, state legislature, or administrative agency. Indeed,
the Madisonian tradition itself can be viewed as a deliberative
democratic synthesis of classical republicanism and emerging pluralism
that contains considerably more room for citizen deliberation
than James Madison himself would have allowed. Some examples are
the following:
- State
Health Reform
The Oregon Health Plan of 1990 was arrived at by combining
a process of community deliberation on health values with several
other forms of deliberation. An independent, nonpartisan grassroots
group (Oregon Health Decisions) conducted 48 open community
meetings around the state to discuss underlying health values
that citizens might hold in common and that might guide the
reform efforts. An appointed Health Services Commission, which
included public interest group representatives, used the reports
from these meetings to guide its own deliberations in establishing
a treatment priorities list, and took further guidance from
expert panels, public hearings, and a public opinion poll. The
legislature framed its own deliberations accordingly, and passed
the reform plan with overwhelming bipartisan political support.
It also had broad support from affected constituencies and organized
grassroots groups, including those whom national public interest
groups claimed would be affected adversely. In the years prior
to the passage of the bill, Oregon Health Decisions had held
several hundred community meetings and two statewide health
care parliaments, and used these to educate legislators about
health values deliberation in the reform process. See Community
Meetings Shape Oregon Health Plan. For a more general
introduction to community dialogue on health values, see Bruce
Jennings, Voices of Value: What Americans
Expect from a Health Care System, A Report from American
Health Decisions, 1995.
- Environmental
Dispute Settlement
Environmental Dispute Settlement, or Alternative Dispute
Resolution, relies on a stakeholder model for organizing deliberation,
rather than on open community meetings. A limited number of
representatives from affected interests agrees upon rules that
are conducive to mutual understanding of each other's interests
and perspectives, and seeks common ground for action. The internal
rules of dialogue that structure negotiations are among the
closest real-world approximations we have to the philosophically
demanding conditions of "discursive democracy" and "communicative
rationality" found in the influential writings of Juergen Habermas.
The circle of deliberation can be extended considerably by communication
of stakeholder representatives with their grassroots constituencies
during the negotiations. This form of deliberative democracy
has guided state legislatures in policy making and agency officials
in rule making. It is often convened and facilitated by administrative
officials in agencies such as EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers,
and the U.S. Forest Service, leading some scholars to speak
of "deliberative cultures" emerging within regulatory agencies.
An increasing number of environmental officials, in fact, are
aware not only of the practical techniques, but of the theoretical
discussions of deliberative democracy. And policy analysts have
begun to pay increasing attention to how policy designs can
and should encourage citizen deliberation in confronting complex
problems and tradeoffs. See the discussion of Environmental
Dispute Settlement, and extensive references, in Civic
Environmentalism, by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland.
- National
Issues Forums (NIF)
Utilizing issue books prepared by the Kettering and Public
Agenda Foundations, citizens convene within various institutional
settings to deliberate about public problems, the pros and cons
of specific solutions, and to reflect on the underlying values
and deeper motivations at play. The goals of these forums are
to enhance learning of public issues through engaged discussion
of options, to help form a public with the skills needed for
democratic dialogue and reasoned judgment, and to help define
the interests of the public. The range of issues is broad, with
three issues chosen per year, and groups can be formed in virtually
any setting: schools, churches, senior centers, libraries, literacy
programs. At the local level, some groups use NIF methodologies
and materials to address issues on the local agenda, and thus
move from deliberation to action. This is also the case with
groups using materials of the Study Circles Resource Center.
- The
Deliberative Poll
James Fishkin's deliberative opinion poll is based on the conviction
that credible deliberative democracy requires a representative
sample of the population, rather than self-selected citizen
participation in community meetings and dialogue groups, or
organized stakeholder participation in dispute resolution. It
builds upon citizens juries and the ancient Athenian Council
in design, but assembles a larger representative sample of several
hundred in an effort to model what the electorate as a whole
would think if, hypothetically, it could be immersed in intensive
deliberative processes. It is designed especially to influence
the selection of candidates at the beginning of the American
presidential primary season, before the rush of early primaries.
The deliberative poll was first conducted in Britain on national
television in 1994 with a representative sample of three hundred
voters considering the issue of crime, and they seem to have
developed a more complex understanding of the issue than previously
held.
The
National Issues Convention premiers in the US in January 1996
on PBS, with the Kettering Foundation and National Issues
Forums providing moderators and briefing materials on three
issues selected from opinion polling (America's global role,
pocketbook pressures, and the troubled American family). Participants
will frame questions for candidates. Kettering, NIF and other
partners will extend Public Deliberation '96 beyond the January
convention.
- Public
Journalism
Public journalism, or civic journalism, engages the press in
directly helping to revive civic life and public dialogue. It
does this in various ways: by convening town meetings where
citizens have the opportunity to discuss public problems, question
candidates skillfully and in-depth, review policy options, discuss
solutions at work in other communities, set an action agenda,
and even to facilitate voluntary citizen action (e.g. on neighborhood
crime). News and election coverage gives priority of place to
citizens' own voices. Civic journalism interprets the public's
right to know expansively and assumes the responsibility for
enhancing those conditions that permit citizens to constitute
themselves as a deliberative public. It also challenges citizens
to deliberate responsibly, in view of conflicting views and
interests of other citizens and even of themselves (e.g. a demand
for more services, but an unwillingness to pay for them, or
to cut other favored programs). In this way, it seeks to hold
citizens themselves accountable to standards of complex and
responsible deliberation, even as it assists citizens in holding
their elected leaders accountable. See the essays and cases
in the CPN Civic
Communication section.
Some
Relevant Issues
There
are many issues that need to be addressed in refining and evaluating
deliberative democracy as a source of democratic renewal. A few
of the most important ones are the following:
- Complementarity
of Deliberative Forms
No major theorist sees deliberative democracy as supplanting
representative democracy. But there has been little systematic
attention to the conditions under which "deliberative complementarities"
could improve our democratic institutions and civic culture,
and how various civic, political and administrative actors can
develop the appropriate capacities. How can city councils, state
legislatures, and administrative agencies include citizens in
meaningful and innovative forms of deliberation? This is an
important touchstone for renovating our Madisonian deliberative
heritage, and a needed bulwark against the forms of plebiscitary
democracy that are eroding it.
- Relation
to Action & Ongoing, Practical Collaboration
In some forms of deliberative democracy, there is a tendency
to divorce public debate from common action to solve problems.
Thus, citizens engage in discourse, but public officials act.
Or those who have a history of community problem solving through
organized groups are excluded from deliberations that seek a
statistically representative sample of unorganized, "ordinary"
citizens. Or citizens are convened for a discrete event, but
are not provided with ongoing opportunities to collaborate nor
compelled to confront the action consequences of their deliberative
work. Such forms of deliberation can certainly add something
to a public discourse that is generally nondeliberative. But
we need to be aware of their limits, and ask how we might embed
deliberative forms in contexts of ongoing public work and practical
action.
- Difference
& Inclusiveness
Deliberative theory can tend to privilege speech that is
too narrowly rationalistic and argumentative, and hence marginalize
those groups (women, minorities) whose styles of discourse might
differ from this. In addition, it can presume too great an initial
basis for commonalty, and downplay the degree of struggle for
recognition that might need to occur before a more inclusive
sense of common interest can be forged. Deliberative practice,
by contrast, tends to be much more attuned to forms of speech
(storytelling, expressions of hurt, anger and injustice) that
situate participants in specific contexts and groups, and that
reference inequalities in ways that can be productive of mutual
understanding and common action.
- Is
deliberative democracy possible on complex national policy issues?
The failure of the Clinton health care reform has raised the
issue of whether a more deliberative approach might have served
as a sounder, albeit longer term foundation for reform. Such
a deliberative approach to public discussion could have focused
on health values and cultural expectations, and to underlying
causes of increased health costs for which the public has had
little realistic appreciation (aging population, high technology).
The Kettering and Public Agenda Foundations, as well as the
Hastings Center, American Health Decisions, and the American
Civic Forum, presented elements of this alternative deliberative
approach, both before and after the plan's defeat. Is it possible
to learn from this failure in such a way that refines such an
alternative, and convinces a significant enough segment of the
American leadership class to go forward with it on a subsequent
reform occasion? Or is such an approach simply unworkable in
light of short political election cycles, deep ideological divisions
within the leadership class, and the complexity of issues. And
will deliberative democracy be enough to counteract the tendency
of the public itself toward wishful thinking on health and its
unwillingness to come to grips with the hard choices?
Selected
Readings
David Mathews,
Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Public Voice .
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
This is the
clearest and most popularly accessible account of deliberative
democracy as a response to the crisis of politics and the displacement
of citizens in America today. Mathews draws upon the research
of the Harwood Group on citizen alienation, and the experiences
of his own Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums.
He presents a complex account of the conditions under which public
officials feel threatened by public participation, and those under
which they recognize the need for public involvement. He links
deliberative democracy to a broader tradition of action-oriented
community problem solving and capacity building.
James Fishkin,
The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
An excellent,
clear theoretical introduction to the problems of plebiscitary
democracy in America, and an argument for how we need to link
political equality with democratic deliberation. Fishkin presents
the argument for a deliberative opinion poll, and the tradition
upon which this draws. This serves as the basis for the January
1995 National Issues Convention in Austin, Texas. This book also
gives greater recognition to other forms of civic engagement than
Fishkin's earlier writings.
Daniel Yankelovich,
"The Debate That Wasn't: The Public and the Clinton Plan," Health
Affairs 14:1 (Spring 1995), 7-24, and symposium, 24-36.
A forthright
exposition of how public opinion would have to educate itself
through deliberative processes if it were to come to grips with
the costs, complexities and tradeoffs of national health reform,
and the underlying values that should guide it. Drawing upon the
work of the Kettering and Public Agenda Foundations, Yankelovich
argues that this is possible over a 3-5 year extended process,
but not in the kind of accelerated push that the Clinton administration
attempted. Various health policy analysts challenge how and whether
such deliberation is possible on such an issue. Clearly, a more
specific set of strategies for a deliberative democratic approach
to national policy making is needed. (Some elements of this were
discussed among administration officials and civic practitioners
in late 1994, but too late for action.)
Jane Mansbridge,
Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1980 (reissued
by University of Chicago Press in paperback in 1984).
This is a
major theoretical contribution in this area. It grounds theorizing
in the everyday practices of members of a New England Town Meeting
and an alternative service collective, and articulates the conditions
under which they do—and ought—to choose either adversary
or unitary democratic practices.Jane
Mansbridge, "Democracy,
Deliberation, and the Experience of Women," from the
Kettering Political Education Series' Higher Education and
the Practice of Democratic Politics. Dayton, Ohio: Kettering
Foundation, 1991.
This article
explores two schools of feminist thought which shed light on the
nature of deliberative democracy. One stresses women's power of
nurturance and relationships. A second, more combative school
concentrates on asymmetrical power relations between men and women.
Both lines of feminist thought favor a more participatory democracy
and constitute a fertile source of new ideas and perspectives.
Benjamin
Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New
Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
An eloquent
and influential critique of "thin democracy," and an elaboration
of strong democracy as a way of living. This book discusses the
various functions of strong democratic talk as essential features
of citizen deliberation and common action. Chapter 7 ("A Conceptual
Frame: Politics in the Participatory Mode") represents the core
of the argument.
Craig Calhoun,
ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992.
The editor's
introduction is one of the clearest short statements of the theory
of the public sphere in English. It concisely summarizes Habermas's
masterwork, while offering sympathetic criticism. While it is
written primarily for academics, within this genre it is quite
straightforward. The other essays in this volume are also quite
interesting, especially those by Michael Schudson, Mary Ryan,
and Harry Boyte. Boyte develops an important critique of the deliberative
tradition based on the more pragmatic, public work of citizens.
(The latter is developed at greater length in Building America:
The Democratic Promise of Public Work, by Harry Boyte and
Nancy Kari, Temple University Press, 1996, and in Harry Boyte,
Beyond Deliberation:
Citizenship as Public Work.) Habermas' concluding essay reconsiders
his theory of the public sphere thirty years after it was originally
published, and modifies it to take account of modern communication
technologies and the struggle to transform civil society in Eastern
Europe and the West.
Michael Briand,
Building Deliberative
Communities, Pew Partnership for Civic Change, 1995.
This report
to the Pew Partnership presents a clear and accessible introduction
to the basic concepts of deliberative democracy, and presents
the "community convention" as one example of this. It is available
online, where further information on the Pew Partnership and how
to order publications can also be found.
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