Public Deliberation Consortium
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Review of The Professionalization of Public Participation edited by Laurence Bherer, Mario Gauthier, and Louis Simard (New York: Routledge, 2017)
No full textReview of The Professionalization of Public Participation edited by Laurence Bherer, Mario Gauthier, and Louis Simard (New York: Routledge, 2017)
Dialogue and Deliberation as Agonistic Resistance: Designing Interactional Processes to Reconstitute Collective Identities
No full textThis essay develops a theory of public dialogue and deliberation as agonistic resistance to authoritarian governance.Where authoritarian regimes value strict obedience to authority at the expense of freedom, deliberative democracy is predicated on the decentralization of power and the exercise of personal and political freedoms. As such, practices of dialogue and deliberation stand in direct contradiction to the values of authoritarian governance and hold the potential to constitute collective identities in ways that undermine the very conditions needed for authoritarianism to gain traction. Specifically, this essay argues that authoritarianism flourishes when particular in-group/out-group boundaries can be reified, thereby constituting a clear “us” defined against a threatening “them.” However, through the intimate achievement of dialogic and deliberative moments, various social identity roles can be made salient, which can soften group boundaries and help people to feel a sense of immediacy, respect, and connection with those who previously seemed Other
Review of Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive by Nicole Doerr (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
No full textIn Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive, Nicole Doerr uncovers the role of translators as a “third voice within deliberation, neither participants nor facilitators but advocates for specific individuals to be heard and understood. Her empirical research on translation of various types and in various settings also raises broader theoretical issues about direct versus representative democracy
Facilitating Vulnerability and Power in New Hampshire Listen’s “Blue and You”
No full textThis study examines the on-going work of New Hampshire Listens, a convener of deliberative conversations, specific to their work with police-community relationships. Attending particularly to the facilitators and planners of New Hampshire Blue and You in a small city, the study found systemic practices of early stakeholder involvement in the planning, holding space for disparate views, promoting storytelling, and creating intimate physical spaces addressed the vulnerability felt by participants. These practices distributed power among stakeholders, aided in preparing participants for the conversation, and fostered neutrality in the forum. They provide several ideas for how deliberation practitioners and scholars might respond to the present polarizing political context
Citizen Panels and Opinion Polls: Convergence and Divergence in Policy Preferences
No full textCitizen panels offer an alternative venue for gathering input into the policy-making process. These deliberative exercises are intended to produce more thoughtful and informed inputs into the policy-making process, compared to public opinion polls. This paper highlights a six day deliberative event about energy and climate issues, tracking opinion changes before and after the deliberation, as well as six months after the deliberation. In two of the five policy domains, opinions change as a result of the deliberation and these changes endure six months after the deliberation. The tracking of opinions across the three points in time reveals a pattern of convergence between panelists’ views and poll results for three of the five policy domains. Panelists were overly optimistic about many of the policy options prior to deliberation, but became more critical of these policies post-deliberation, moving their opinions closer to those of poll respondents
Stealth Democracy: Authoritarianism and Democratic Deliberation
No full textIn Stealth Democracy, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse seek to show that much of the American public desires stealth democracy --a democracy run like a business with little deliberation or public input. The authors maintain that stealth democracy beliefs are largely reasonable preferences, and the public does not want and would react negatively to a more deliberative democracy. This paper introduces an opposing authoritarian stealth democrats thesis that suggests that stealth democracy beliefs may be driven by authoritarianism and a variety of related orientations including poor political perspective taking and low cognitive engagement. These orientations may be ameliorated through democratic deliberation. Hypotheses are tested with survey and experimental data from deliberations with a RDD sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents and of 99 Canadian young adults. Using confirmatory factor analysis and OLS regression with cluster-robust standard errors, the paper finds that authoritarianism and related orientations strongly explain stealth democracy beliefs among deliberation participants and that deliberation significantly reduces stealth democracy beliefs and factors behind these beliefs
Democracy Transformed: Perceived Legitimacy of the Institutional Shift from Election to Random Selection of Representatives
No full textWhile democracy remains a firmly-held ideal, the present state of electoral democracy is plagued by growing disaffection. As a result, both scholars and practitioners have shown considerable interest in the potential of random selection as a means of selecting political representatives. Despite its potential, deployment of this alternative is limited by concerns about its perceived legitimacy. Drawing on an inductive analysis of the replacement of elections with random selection in two student governments in Bolivia, we explore stakeholders’ perceptions of the legitimacy of random selection by investigating both their overall support for randomly selecting representatives as well as the views that inform this support. Overall, we find that random selection is indeed accepted as a legitimate means of selecting representatives, with stakeholders broadly preferring random selection and recommending its use in other schools—views which are informed by a critical assessment of random selection’s relative merits. Moreover, we find that perceptions may be affected by contextual factors that extend beyond individuals’ own values. Our findings thus contribute to work on random selection, its contextual embeddedness, and on the values underpinning democratic structures
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Ikhwanweb: Deliberative Ethic/Voice in a Counterpublic’s Rhetoric?
No full textUsing counterpublic theory as framework and situating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a counterpublic, counterpublics being alternative, non-dominant publics who voice their oppositional needs and values through diverse discursive practices, the goal of this study is to: (a) Examine, in the context of the years preceding the 2011 Egyptian uprising, whether the Egyptian MB, as a counterpublic, portrays a deliberative ethic/voice in its cyber rhetoric; (b) Explore whether traditional/Western ideas of deliberation are upheld or challenged in the cyber rhetoric of the Egyptian MB; and (c) Comment on the role of Ikhwanweb, as a counterpublic sphere, in providing the Egyptian MB a space to demonstrate its deliberative potential. By looking for traits and evidences of deliberative ethic in the Egyptian MB’s cyber rhetoric—in a ‘text’ produced by an Islamist organization functioning within a secular/authoritarian socio-political ‘context’—the overarching purpose of this analysis is to make sense of : (a) an Islamist organization’s role as a counterpublic and its deliberative potential in a non-democratic setting; (b) the implications of this for thinking about deliberation between diverse groups of social agents in non-democratic cultures; and (c) the role of the Internet in facilitating counterpublics’ deliberative potential in authoritarian contexts. Thus, from a heuristic standpoint, this study is an endeavor towards contributing to a key question that animates public deliberation: how can we engage/engage with voices that hold (or are assumed to hold) anti-deliberative attitudes and/or those that operate within non-democratic socio-political contexts
Deliberation in Democracy\u27s Dark Times
No full textThis piece reflects on the on the legacies of democratic deliberation, particularly mini-publics in responding to issues of disinformation, bigotry and nativism that has entered the political mainstream today. It aims to provoke conversations about the limitations of mini-publics in promoting democratic renewal and reconsider the functions of these forums in democracy\u27s \u27dark times.\u2
Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism
No full textAuthoritarianism is gaining around the world. Statistics show that deliberation shrinks when authoritarianism grows. In the face of authoritarian repression, directly promoting and organizing deliberation is likely to fail. However, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (2011) find that nonviolent campaigns have a strong record of success against authoritarian states. Although nonviolent campaigns are not themselves deliberative or aimed at building deliberative democracy, I argue that some of the reasons that make them successful also stand to benefit public deliberation. Thus the most promising strategy for expanding deliberation in an increasingly authoritarian world is to support nonviolent campaigns and to reinforce strategies of nonviolent confrontation that also yield deliberation. Jürgen Habermas anticipated this argument in his defense of social movements. Revisiting that aspect of Habermas’ thought challenges interpretations that treat him as a theorist of calm, rational discourse