Public Deliberation Consortium
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Review of Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home by Susan Clark and Woden Teachout (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).
No full textReview of Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home by Susan Clark and Woden Teachout (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012)
The State of the Field in Light of the State of our Democracy: My Democracy Anxiety Closet
No full textThere is a large and troubling gap between the promise of deliberative innovations and the most prevalent practices of our largely dysfunctional democracy. A web of factors is widening this gap and increasing the urgency of addressing it. With democracy in crisis, the deliberative civic field is engaging in more collaborative efforts and in more pointed conversations about how to have a systemic impact. To have any chance of improving the state of democracy, our field needs to: 1) envision and work toward structural change; 2) find more compelling ways to describe empowered public participation and more welcoming entry points for experiencing it; and 3) address the challenge of equity head-on. As a field, we have begun to address the first two, though we have much more to do. Our field has been more reticent to address the challenge of equity
Democracy by Design
No full textRenewing US democracy will require an active and deliberative public, people who can work together to address pressing social and political problems. To engage effectively Americans need an understanding of how American democracy works, its foundations and the complex and sometimes changing dimensions to those foundations. Advocates for increasing active and deliberative citizen engagement need to work with reformers in different areas of democracy’s ecological system, integrating public engagement with reform efforts in justice and equal opportunity, knowledge and information development, and government integrity
Deliberative Civic Engagement in Public Administration and Policy
No full textThis article explores deliberative civic engagement in the context of public administration and policy. The field of public administration and policy is seeing a resurgence of interest in deliberative civic engagement among scholars, practitioners, politicians, civic reformers, and others. Deliberative processes have been used to address a range of issues: school redistricting and closings, land use, and the construction of highways, shopping malls, and other projects. Additional topics include race and diversity issues, crime and policing, and involvement of parents in their children’s education. Finally, participatory budgeting, which has been used with success in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989 and has been employed in over 1,500 cities around the world, has been one of the most promising forms of deliberative civic engagement. Finally, the article suggests what we must do to build a civic infrastructure to support deliberative civic engagement, including government, but also practitioners and scholars
Boosting the Local Economy of Ashland Ohio
No full textThis article summarizes an initiative to engage citizens in issues of building and supporting a local economy. It includes reasons for engaging the public; steps that were taken; and results of deliberative efforts
A 35-Year Experiment in Public Deliberation
No full textIn the late 1970s, a small group of academics and former government officials began an initiative that led to the creation of a network of National Issues Forums (NIF) in 1981. NIF-style deliberation is based on the assumption that the greatest challenge in collective decision making is dealing with the tensions that result when many of the things most people hold dear are brought into conflict by the necessity to act on a problem. Public deliberation is a naturally occurring phenomenon that makes use of the human faculty for judgment. The most powerful insight from the NIF experiment has been the recognition that democracy depends on constant learning and that deliberation is a form of learning
A Brief Reflection on the Brazilian Participatory Experience
No full textThe article highlights Brazilian participatory experiences such as the participatory budget and the policy councils and conferences. Based on research done by the author on daily routines and policy impacts of these forums, it is argued that there is still a long way before fulfilling normative expectations. In light of these challenges, reflections about how to move forward in the future are presented
Review of Democracy as Popular Sovereignty by Filimon Peonidis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).
No full textReview of Democracy as Popular Sovereignty by Filimon Peonidis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013)
The Design of Online Deliberation: Implications for Practice, Theory and Democratic Citizenship
No full textThe essay focuses on the role of design in online deliberation, and outlines three directions for future research. First, research must embed the study of the technical and organizational architecture of online discussion spaces, as an ongoing area of inquiry. Scholars need to take stock of varying available design choices and their potential effects on the deliberative quality of online public discourse. Second, looking more broadly, research must examine the design of deliberative processes as they manifest themselves via digital technologies. The author discusses the importance of surveying the broad array of processes that are currently employed, and the varying theoretical assumptions that they convey. Third, the essay concludes with an outline of possible implications that online deliberation endeavors may have on democratic citizenship, and calls for further research on the broader implications of this work for promoting healthy democratic societies
Beyond Deliberation: A Strategy for Civic Renewal
No full textTo expand opportunities for discussion and reflection about public issues, we should look beyond the organizations that intentionally convene deliberations and also enlist organizations that preserve common resources, volunteer service groups, civics classes, grassroots public media efforts, and partisan, ideological, and faith-based movements that have some interest in discussion. Many of these groups are not politically neutral; more are adversarial. But they have a common interest in confronting the forces and decisions that have sidelined active citizens in countries like the US. They are all threatened by the rising signs of oligarchy in the United States. Collectively, they have considerable resources with which to fight back. It is time for us to begin to stir and organize--not for deliberation, but for democracy