Public Deliberation Consortium
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How and Why Deliberative Democracy Enables Co-Intelligence and Brings Wisdom to Governance
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Public Deliberation as the Organizing Principle of Political Communication Research
No full textDuring the past fifteen years, public deliberation has become an important focus of research, theory, and public practice. This has sometimes led to a variety of narrow conceptualizations that limit deliberation to particular forms of interaction, such as small group discussion, or to divergent conceptualizations deployed in different contexts, such as for media systems versus face-to-face discussions. To address this problem, we advance a flexible yet precise definition of deliberation that has the power to organize not only deliberation theory and research but also much of the larger body of work in political communication. As defined herein, deliberation includes both analytic and social processes and provides a unifying conceptual and critical framework for studying nearly the full range of political communication topics, including informal conversation, media and public opinion, elections, government institutional behavior, jury decision making, public meetings, and civic and community life. Using our flexible conceptualization, each of these research contexts amounts to a kind of deliberative critique and empirical analysis of public life
The Improbable Dream: Measuring the Power of Internet Deliberations in Setting Public Agendas and Influencing Public Planning and Policies
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Deliberative Democracy and the Problem of Scope
No full textThis article addresses the challenges of scaling up deliberative democracy beyond the level of individual communities. It begins with a general discussion of the problems that scope poses for deliberative democratic practice. It then proceeds to look critically at a range of initiatives that have, in recent years, attempted to overcome these problems in the American context. The concluding sections suggest guidelines and concepts aimed at helping practitioners approach large-scale public engagement more strategically, as well as areas that research and theory should explore
Political Polarization as Disagreement Failure
No full textA few events in recent American history are analyzed as “disagreement failures,” while others are described as exemplifying “disagreement success.” These terms are defined in order to support the conclusion that deliberative democracy requires both the celebration of disagreement and the crossing of multiple borders through dialogue. Such a “democracy of conversation” more specifically requires a culture that explicitly celebrates disagreement as an activity, meaning that it treats actual engagement in disagreement as a part of a life well-lived, and that it therefore routinely pushes for the inclusion of as many “sides” as possible in public talk. Supported in this way, cross-border, public conversation would be inherently democratic, community-building, and anti-totalitarian. Held regularly, such talk would help participants to see issues from multiple points of view, and would do so without asking them to give in to the non-thinking of mere tolerance. People who take part in such conversations would be more likely to face up to difficult issues politicians often avoid, and politicians would both be pushed and enabled to do better. In addition, such disagreement practice would cultivate respect for humanity, as participants observe themselves and others making sense, being civil, and in general doing a good job under presssure
How Balanced Discussion Shapes Knowledge, Public Perceptions, and Attitudes: A Case Study of Deliberation on the Los Alamos National Laboratory
No full textPrior research has demonstrated the potential impact of carefully orchestrated public forums, such as National Issues Forums and deliberative polls. Many public discussions, however, lack the careful design and focused purposes of such events, and it remains unclear to what extent informal conversations and public meetings can produce the same knowledge gains and attitude changes. If public meetings and conversations are to have similar impacts, they may require important features of deliberation, such as the balanced presentation of alternative viewpoints. To explore the associations of perceived discussion balance with issue knowledge, attitude integration, and the misperception of public attitudes, this study used cross-sectional survey data regarding how New Mexicans view Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The findings confirm the significance of perceived discussion balance for many—but not all—of the positive cognitive impacts of public discussions and conversations. Moreover, these findings show that deliberation is more scarce for some sub-publics than others, and the deliberative experience may be least common for those who need it most