Public Deliberation Consortium
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The Varieties of Individual Engagement (VIE) Scales: Confirmatory Factor Analyses across Two Samples and Contexts
No full textThe field of public engagement, participation and deliberation is fraught with conflicting results that are difficult to interpret due to the very different methods and measures used. Theory advancement and consistent operationalization and assessment of key public deliberation and engagement variables will benefit considerably from standardized measures of constructs and the ability to compare across studies. In this article, drawing from social and educational psychology, we describe the theoretical bases for scales assessing eight varieties of participant engagement that may be experienced during participation activities: Active learning, conscientious, uninterested, creative, open-minded, closed-minded, angry, and social engagement. We describe our development of scales to measure these varieties of engagement, and results from three confirmatory factor analyses across two very different populations (college students and city residents) and three different engagement activities (reading background information, deliberating about ethical scenarios, completing an online survey). Finally, we examine evidence of the convergent and divergent validity of the scales by examining their relationships with each other and theoretically-relevant individual and situational characteristics. Findings indicate the scales have good psychometric properties and show evidence of construct validity. We discuss how these scales might be used in reflective practice and research, and identify questions that public engagement researchers and practitioners will find useful in their work
Binary Deliberation: The Role of Social Learning in Divided Societies
No full textThe aim of this paper is to outline a new framework based on an extension and of the current theories of deliberative democracy. The framework, which I call “Binary Deliberation” emanates from an analysis of the social learning phase of deliberative activity. Deliberation, in the theories of deliberative democracy, is usually treated as a decision-making procedure. However, this approach falls short to appreciate the full benefits of the deliberative process. Binary deliberation argues for an analytical separation between social learning and decision-making phases of deliberation in order to allocate a distinct sphere to those specific moments of deliberation oriented to interpretation of differences rather than making decisions. The paper will also discuss the findings of two case studies from Turkey analysing the interaction between Islamic and secular discourses in the Turkish public sphere. The findings reveal a significant convergence between Liberal Left and Islamic groups in their attitude towards democratic values. This convergence indicates a new tendency in Turkish politics, yet its benefits cannot be fully realised until these groups deal with each other within the spheres of social learning
Transformative Deliberations: Participatory Budgeting in the United States
No full textThis article develops two conceptual models, based on empirical data, for assessing deliberation and decision making within United States adoptions of Participatory Budgeting (PB). The first model is results oriented whereas the second model is process oriented. The two models evince the tension between inclusiveness and efficiency that emerge as U.S. PB tries accommodating the dual goals of improved short-term service delivery and democratic deepening. Each model satisfies one of these deliberate goals better. Results oriented deliberation is more effective at producing viable projects whereas process oriented is better at ensuring that all participants’ voices are heard. Variation suggests that decision-making in PBNYC exceeds citizens’ ability to make collective decisions with rational discourse. Rather, the structural conditions of district constitution, bureaucratic constraints, and facilitator skill impacted decision-making
Framing a Deliberation. Deliberative Democracy and the Challenge of Framing Processes
No full textAmong both scholars and practioners, the critical importance of framing processes in the realm of deliberative democracy has been neither formally acknowledged nor adequately studied so far. The purpose of this theoretical article is to craft and define the analytical concepts and methodological tools necessary to shed light on this complex relationship. After introducing the notion of ‘deliberative frame’, which is examined across two distinct framing processes – ‘primary’ and ‘derivative’ (or secondary) – this article presents ‘deliberative frame analysis’ (DFA) as a qualitative method which can uncover the ‘meta-frame’ and the specific issue framings (or the deliberative ‘frames’) within a deliberation. This is achieved by examining selected elements both of the organizational context and information materials, and will be illustrated by the example of a famous deliberative poll carried out at European level. Finally, the introduction of authentically competing frames (i.e. ‘counterframes’ and not merely counterarguments) into the deliberative setting, along with the structural possibility for ‘reframing’ in the course of the deliberation, is indicated as a substantive precondition for neutralizing the overall framing effects and thus avoiding a heavily biased deliberation outcome. The article therefore offers a more comprehensive understanding of framing processes as a key challenge for deliberative politics, particularly as regards the legitimacy claims of its various experiments and practices, which are increasingly common in most established democracies
Deliberative Democracy and the Neglected Dimension of Leadership
No full textAlthough deliberative democracy is flourishing as a political theory, there is a need to properly acknowledge and theorize upon the role of leadership in deliberative processes. Leaders arise in all political situations for traceable reasons and are an essential element of decision-making. Because deliberative democrats emphasize the necessity of deliberation between free and equal citizens for legitimate decision-making, this stands in stark contrast with the emergence and existence of leaders in deliberative settings. The current lack of engagement has numerous implications for deliberative democracy, but most importantly creates a serious gap between theory and practice. This paper takes a pragmatic view of these issues and seeks to analyze the different ways in which leadership occurs during deliberative practice and the potential this holds for recalibrating deliberative democracy. The analysis is limited to deliberative minipublics as a way to highlight and advance my arguments
Just-in-Time Exploratory Public Discussion
No full textThis essay describes a case study that successfully dealt two of the biggest challenges facing exploratory public discussion. By design, this category of discussion is typically separated from actual decisions and collaborative action and therefore lacks an element of urgency. The exploratory public discussions that prompted this report, which coincided with climate change conferences held in Cancún, Mexico, and Durban, South Africa, in 2010-2011, largely overcame this problem by preserving the exploratory nature of public discussion while trading on citizens’ interest in unfolding real-world events. We call the result “just-in-time” exploratory discussion, shorthand for the notion that public discussion can remain exploratory despite drawing on the motivational power of temporal urgency. By getting the timing of exploratory discussion right, we suggest, citizens will be ready, even eager, to participate. Proper timing also tends to reinforce the value of exploratory discussion. In short, a just-in-time approach is useful at both the front and back end of exploratory discussion. It helps get citizens interested and keeps them interested in using what they’ve discussed
Emerging Communication Technologies and the Practices of Enhanced Deliberation: The Experience of Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute
No full textA U.S. Department of State funded program, the Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute, has taught hundreds of high-school aged students from Eurasia and the United States practices of democratic deliberation using networked media. A survey of the program’s curricular innovations since 2006, involving integration of YouTube, Facebook, and documentary film, yields insight on how the advent and circulation of “(de-)liberation” technologies present pathways for young students to practice efficacious and convivial forms of cosmopolitan citizenship in our digital age
Whose Budget? Our Budget? Broadening Political Stakeholdership via Participatory Budgeting
No full textIn this thought piece, I attempt to contextualize New York City’s inaugural participatory budgeting (PB) process in the larger landscape of American political participation. I discuss how the bottom-up way in which stakeholders wrote the process’s rules in the first place, alongside the core role played by the two lead organizations, helped to broaden notions of stakeholdership among constituents. Ultimately, the first year’s primary achievement regarding political participation was not a specific set of outcomes, but a debut as an unfinished form of governance—one that began to engage traditionally marginalized constituents, to trigger their political imagination, and to prompt them to demand more
Democracy beyond aggregation:the participatory dimension of public deliberation
No full textDemocratic theory passed through two major developments during the last 20 years: the first one was deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy is a critique of the aggregative view of democracy that dominated post-war democratic theory. Instead of aggregation through elections, deliberative democracy proposes different forms of improving the quality of the democratic through public reasoning and argumentation. The second innovation in the democratic debate is the recent theory of representation that assumes that a renewal of representation is needed in order to reconstruct the quality of democracy. Both innovations in democratic theory shared one central assumption, namely that there is a crisis of democracy and that this crisis is linked to lack of quality in political will formation. Deliberative democracy and the new theory of representation disagree on two major issues, one theoretical and the other practical. Theoretically, they go beyond the opposition between representation and participation as they seek to move beyond Hobbes and Rousseau. On a practical level they disagree of the role of broadening participation in the process of improving the quality of democracy. In this article, I propose a different way of going beyond Rousseau that preserves the community of equals dimension. My proposal involves the integration of participation and representation through a new design. This new model, which is being broadly implemented by governments across the developing world, seems more promising because it can accept the critique to the sovereignty side of participation without relinquishing its equality dimension. It is only through the expansion of political equality through both participation and representation that contemporary democracies will be able to overcome their legitimacy crisis
The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe
No full textFrom its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This paper discusses what actually travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. We rely on science studies for a fundamental insight: it is not enough to simply speak of “diffusion” while forgetting the way that the circulation and translation of an idea fundamentally transform it (Latour 1987). In this case, the travel itself has made PB into an attractive and politically malleable device by reducing and simplifying it to a set of procedures for the democratization of demand-making. The relationship of those procedures to the administrative machinery is ambiguous, but fundamentally important for the eventual impact of Participatory Budgeting in any one context