Public Deliberation Consortium
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Deliberative Planning for Disaster Recovery: Re-membering New Orleans
No full textA strong turnout of a broad cross-section of the New Orleans population lent legitimacy to a unique public conversation about post-Katrina recovery priorities. Designed and conducted by AmericaSpeaks, Community Congress II brought together over 2500 New Orleanians, linked electronically across five different cities plus smaller satellite sites in 15 diaspora communities across the country. Table observations of 48 deliberative rounds, along with exit interviews, post-event focus groups with participants, and stakeholder interviews are used to address three central questions about the social processes of deliberation: What are the patterns of interaction at the tables across race and gender; how do the participants interpret the meaning of the event for themselves; and what were the outcomes in terms of legitimacy, influence, and social trust? The article contextualizes the event in the unfolding story of the recovery process and culls out the lessons learned for deliberative democracy. Community Congress II demonstrates that inclusive public deliberation does more than provide reasoned public input into difficult policy decisions. It does more than legitimate new public initiatives. It can foster social trust and social healing across the divides of race, culture, and wealth. But the benefits will be sustained only if they are reinforced by an institutional infrastructure of civic engagement
Is Information Good for Deliberation? Link-Posting in an Online Forum
No full textDoes information improve deliberation? Proponents of online deliberation argue that the availability of the Internet can solve two longstanding problems of citizen decisionmaking: that preexisting inequalities tend to be reproduced rather than minimized in deliberative forums and that citizen decisionmaking sacrifices the benefits of expertise. Because all deliberators online can access information during their discussion, deliberation should be more informed and more equal. We put those claims to the test by analyzing URL-link posting in an online deliberative forum composed of 25 deliberating groups. On the positive side of the ledger, we show that participants did take advantage of the informational capacities of the web. URL-link posting not only generated more interaction than did opinions posted without links but it also responded to what we call the scale and uptake problems of public deliberation. On the negative side of the ledger, far from equalizing deliberation, the availability of online information may have given additional advantages to already advantaged groups. This was true even in groups that were actively facilitated. The availability of online information may also have fostered discussions, in some instances, that were more opinionated than informed. Information in the Internet age is newly accessible, we conclude, but is also politicized in unfamiliar ways
Listening to the City: Difference, Identity, and Storytelling in Online Deliberative Groups
No full textThis study examines how members of deliberative groups tell and respond to personal stories during their disagreements. The study provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of some online discussions hosted by AmericaSpeaks in which New Yorkers discussed how to redevelop the site of the former World Trade Center after its destruction on September 11, 2001. Participants’ stories fell into four distinct types: adversarial argument, unitary argument, introduction, and transformation. These stories helped group members build arguments, maintain or challenge their group’s collective identity, display community values, and manage their conflicts. The findings of this study indicate that deliberative theory ought to more explicitly recognize storytelling as a legitimate form of deliberative discourse. Moreover, the study of storytelling during deliberative discussion can hold implications for group facilitators and others who wish to further deliberative ideals
A Three-Stage Evaluation of a Deliberative Event on Climate Change and Transforming Energy
No full textFormulating deliberative evaluation tools indicates an important new field for the practitioner of deliberative design due to the increasing adoption of deliberative policy mechanisms by governmental and non-governmental organisations. Evaluation tools aid the design, effectiveness and deliberative integrity and legitimacy of these mechanisms. Relatively few studies though have reflected on how to conduct evaluation. Here, we report on our formulation of a three-stage approach to deliberative evaluation, which we applied in an independent evaluation of a Courageous Conversation on Climate Change and Transforming Energy (March 2007), designed by the Ethos Foundation, Queensland, Australia. Overall, we found our schema successful in identifying both the positives and negatives of the design, of what could be applauded and what needed revision. More broadly, we advance that it offers a useful approach for practitioners to develop further, especially in getting the balance right on evaluating process and outputs, to which we have added inputs in reflection of deliberative design advances
Can Deliberative Democracy Work in Hierarchical Organizations?
No full textSome measure of equality is necessary for deliberative democracy to work well, yet empirical scholarship consistently points to the deleterious effect that hierarchy and inequalities of epistemological authority have on deliberation. This article tests whether real-world deliberative forums can overcome these challenges. Contrary to skeptics, it concludes that the act of deliberation itself and the presence of trained moderators ameliorate inequalities of epistemological authority, thus rendering deliberative democracy possible, even within hierarchical organizations
From Dahl to O’Leary: 36 Years of the “Yale School of Democratic Reform”
No full textA review of Kevin O\u27Leary\u27s book, Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America
Measuring Deliberation\u27s Content: A Coding Scheme
No full textThis paper details a content analysis scheme to measure the quality of political deliberation in face-to-face and online groups. Much of deliberation research studies the outcomes of deliberation, but there has been a lack of analysis of what groups actually do when tasked with deliberating. The coding scheme was developed out of the theoretical literature on deliberation and further enhanced by the empirical literature on small groups, deliberation, online political talk, and conversation analysis. Strict standards for creating coding schemes were followed to ensure a valid and reliable coding process. Results of the coding of deliberations on the topic of public schools suggest that participants produced a fairly high level of reasoned opinion expression, but not necessarily on the topic which they were asked to deliberate. It is hoped that the code scheme can be utilized by practitioners and researchers of political and social deliberations
Toward a Sociology of Deliberation
No full textThis essay draws insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory for the development of a sociological theory of deliberation. Most work on deliberative practice is strongly shaped by the concerns of deliberative democratic theory, and that theory tends to approach deliberation as a procedural mechanism for decision-making. Thus, there has been very little effort to theorize the sociological dimensions of deliberative practice. Bourdieu’s theory highlights a crucial dilemma in that practice. Efforts to infuse community politics with deliberation represent a politics of the most fundamental kind: a struggle to redefine the preferred categories, rules, roles, values, and behaviors that structure public life. But deliberation itself does not constitute a cohesive field of social activity. There is no common sense definition of what deliberation is, or how to tell a good deliberator from a bad one; moreover, as yet one can achieve no social distinction or status from embracing deliberation. Thus, members of a community engage in a fundamental political struggle without a shared sense of what they are doing or why they are doing it, and without the rewards of status or distinction that come with participation in an ongoing social field. Illustrated with examples from two years of ethnographic fieldwork into the practice of deliberation, this theory shows deliberation to be a fluid, sociologically complex and politically charged exercise