TWO SELECTIONS ON DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
Harry C. Boyte, "Beyond Deliberation: Citizenship as Public
Work"
Boyte is co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship
and is the co-chair of the Civic Practices Network Advisory Board.
This paper was delivered at the PEGS Conference, February 11-12,
1995. It is available in full at this site.
Introduction
Two models of civic competence predominate in our time. In particular,
there has emerged as both complement and challenge to the competencies
suggested by the liberal understanding of politics a communitarian
approach to politics, focused on deliberation and discussion.
In contrast to a liberal focus on redistributive justice as the
end of politics, the deliberative democracy advanced especially
by Jurgen Habermas and associated with a "communitarian"
critique of liberalism stresses democracy as aimed at shared
understandings or values. To "rights" they add "responsibilities."
To "private opinion" they add "public judgment."
To instrumental politics, they add the concept of a public world
of value in itself, an arena for pursuing the "common good."
All of these emphases suggest sets of competencies, enriching
those of the liberal citizen.
Yet neither a liberal, rights-based view of the citizen nor a
communitarian, deliberative view of citizenship and politics is
sufficient. We need to bring back a third understanding of citizenship
as effective, skilled, public-spirited work in solving our common
problems. Questions of rights and responsibilities are important.
But public work shifts the focus to a much richer understanding
of civic agency: the capacities, powers, and skills that the citizen
needs to acquire for she or he to become a serious and accountable
actor and creator in public affairs.
The Deliberative Public Sphere
Jurgen Habermas is perhaps the leading theorist of a public world
built upon mutual communication. Communicative theory for Habermas
holds potential to "locate a gentle, but obstinate, a never
silent although seldom redeemed claim to reason, a claim that
must be recognized de facto whenever and whereever there is to
be consensual action."
In the 1990s, Jurgen Habermas has many offspring. Calls for "deliberation"
have proliferated. Deliberation appeared as a central theme at
the 1994 convention of the American Political Science Association.
Sheldon Hackney, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
has undertaken a "National Conversation" aimed at recreating
a public realm for public discussion aimed at common understanding
across the sharp and bitter divides that separate Americans. And
many creative and practical experiments in public deliberation
have multiplied. These range from the American Health Decisions
network of citizen forums in 19 states, dedicated to stimulating
citizen deliberation about policy and value questions related
to health care, to the several thousand National Issues Forums
facilitated by the Kettering Foundation and the
Public Agenda Foundation, which each year explore different perspectives
on critical public issues. A range of media projects called "public"
or "civic" journalism seek to bring citizens more directly
into the conversation of democracy.
Deliberative citizenship challenges the thinner concepts stressed
by conventional liberal theory and the practices of interest group
and welfare state politics. For the liberal citizen or the liberal
theorist, government and politics are largely concerned with protecting
democratic rights (especially of minorities and the relatively
powerless), and with distributing them fairly, along with goods
and services.
A generation ago, a liberal democratic consensus seemed virtually
unchallenged, at least among elite opinion leaders. As Louis Hartz
put it in his classic 1955 statement, The Liberal Tradition in
America, America "begins and ends" in liberal democratic
individualism. "The master assumption of American political
thought has [always] been atomistic social freedom." President
Dwight Eisenhower's distinguished Commission on American Objectives
summed up elite opinion with its "paramount goal of the United
States...to guard the rights of the individual and to enlarge
his opportunity."
In those years, liberal social critics, while celebrating the
"end of ideology," worried that one consequence was
a loss of public purpose. "The fundamental political problems
of the industrial revolution have been solved," wrote Seymour
Martin Lipset in 1960. Daniel Bell spoke about the "exhaustion
of political ideas." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., fretted that
Americans seemed gripped by "torpor" and "weary
and drained."
No longer. The sixties brought a far broader range of groups into
politics. "Citizen participation" became a touchstone
of many government programs. And a number of training centers,
across the political spectrum, developed to spread out what had
been the skills of essentially elite groups of lobbyists.
The skills of the liberal state today are regularly taught by
grassroots activist organizations to many thousands of civic leaders
-- how to lobby, make one's case, mobilize supporters, target
adversaries, build coalitions and the like. Moreover, widespread
technologies of mobilization have developed reflecting such an
approach to politics. Direct mail fund solicitations and canvasses by door to door or telephone are striking examples.
The problem is that simply expanding the number of players in
the political game has done little to change the nature of the
game itself. We have an explosion of demands, strategies, and
mobilizations aimed at winning resources and rights. We have also
seen, simultaneously, the radical splintering of civic culture.
The ideal of a public life of deliberation has emerged in this
context as the alternative to the incivility, rancor, and meanness
that characterize public talk today. America resembles more a
maelstrom of grievance and special claims than either the
tranquil post-political world envisioned by liberals a generation
ago or the world of participatory democracy, equality, and beloved
community envisioned by sixties' visionaries. As Cornel West has
put it,
Calls for deliberation retrieve an understanding of citizenship
that has been eclipsed. Deliberative theorists stress processes
through which citizens come to understand values like public discussion,
civility, and a commitment to the common good, and practice skills
of listening, imagining, and judging, as well as presenting. In
John Dewey's terms, a deliberative vision rests upon a notion of democracy as a "shared Way of life…"
Deliberative Democracy
Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland, Civic Practices Network.
This paper is available at this site.
Deliberative democracy rests on the core notion of citizens and
their representatives deliberating about public problems and solutions
under conditions that are conducive to reasoned reflection and
refined public judgment; a mutual willingness to understand the
values, perspectives, and interests of others; and the possibility
of reframing their interests and perspectives in light of a joint
search for common interests and mutually acceptable solutions.
It is thus often referred to as an open discovery process, rather
than a ratification of fixed positions, and as potentially transforming
interests, rather than simply taking them as given. Unlike much
liberal pluralist political theory, deliberative democracy does
not assume that citizens have a fixed ordering of preferences
when they enter the public sphere. Rather, it assumes that the
public sphere can generate opportunities for forming, refining,
and revising preferences through discourse that takes multiple
perspectives into account and orients itself towards mutual understanding
and common action.
Deliberative democracy in its predominant usage today means expanding
the opportunities of citizens themselves to deliberate. This is
meant to respond to several kinds of problems:
direct plebiscitary democracy. Despite the intentions of
the framers of the Constitution, a direct-majoritarian version
of democracy has been in the ascendancy in the United States since
the nineteenth century, and depletes our capacities for reasoned
deliberation. In this version of democracy, those mechanisms that
compel decisions to conform directly to existing majority opinion are seen as more democratic than those that filter decisions through representation.
The ascendancy of opinion polls, talk show democracy, referendums,
and primaries are manifestations of this. As a result, policy
questions become oversimplified and stylized, and our capacity
to solve increasingly complex public problems declines.
interest group representation. The increasing organization
of citizens into interest groups has tended to turn politics into
a competition of interests narrowly defined. The advocacy explosion
of recent years has helped to democratize access to the halls
of power, but has also generated a kind of "hyperpluralism"
that makes it increasingly difficult to address questions of common
purpose and revise programs that may have outlived their
usefulness. This hinders our capacity to innovate to solve new
problems.
professional political class. Citizens have become increasingly
disengaged and cynical about politics because they see it as an
exclusive game for professionals and experts, such as politicians,
campaign managers, lobbyists, pollsters, journalists, talking
heads. Technocratic approaches within public administration exacerbate
this sense of the displaced citizen.
Deliberative democracy introduces a different kind of citizen
voice into public affairs than that associated with raw public
opinion, simple voting, narrow advocacy, or protest from the outside.
It promises to cultivate a responsible citizen voice capable of
appreciating complexity, recognizing the legitimate interests
of other groups (including traditional adversaries), generating
a sense of common ownership and action, and appreciating the need
for difficult trade-offs. And one of the central arguments of
deliberative democratic theory is that the process of deliberation
itself is a key source of legitimacy,and hence an important resource for responding to our crisis of governance.
Forms and examples of deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy can exist in many forms and combinations,
and can be complementary to various other mechanisms that ensure
democratic representation and efficient administration. Thus,
we can see deliberative democratic forms used not only for shaping
an independent citizen dialogue, but for complementing deliberations
by a city council, state legislature, or administrative agency.
Indeed, the Madisonian tradition itself can be viewed as a deliberative
democratic synthesis of classical republicanism and emerging pluralism
that contains considerably more room for citizen
deliberation than James Madison himself would have allowed. Some
examples are the following:
state health reform. The Oregon Health Plan of 1990 was
arrived at by combining a process of community deliberation on
health values with several other forms of deliberation. An independent,
nonpartisan grassroots group (Oregon Health Decisions) conducted
48 open community meetings around the state to discuss underlying
health values that citizens might hold in common and that might
guide the reform efforts. An appointed Health Services Commission,
which included public interest group representatives, used the
reports from these meetings to guide its own deliberations in
establishing a treatment priorities list, and took further guidance
from expert panels,public hearings, and a public opinion poll. The legislature framed its own deliberations accordingly, and passed the reform plan
with overwhelming bipartisan political support. It also had broad
support from affected constituencies and organized grassroots
groups, including those whom national public interest groups claimed
would be affected adversely. In the years prior to the passage of the bill, Oregon Health Decisions had held several hundred community meetings and
two state-wide health care parliaments, and used these to educate
legislators about health values deliberation in the reform process.
See Community Meetings Shape Oregon Health Plan. For a more general
introduction to community dialogue on health values, see Bruce
Jennings, Voices of Value: What Americans Expect from a Health
Care System, A Report from American Health Decisions, 1995.
environmental dispute settlement. Environmental Dispute
Settlement, or Alternative Dispute Resolution, relies on a stakeholder
model for organizing deliberation, rather than on open community
meetings. A limited number of representatives from affected interests
agrees upon rules that are conducive to mutual understanding of
each other's interests and perspectives, and seeks common ground
for action. The internal rules of dialogue that structure negotiations
are among the closest real-world approximations we have to the
philosophically demanding conditions of "discursive democracy"
and "communicative rationality" found in the influential
writings of Juergen Habermas. The circle of deliberation can be
extended considerably by communication of stakeholder representatives
with their grassroots constituencies during the negotiations.
This form of deliberative democracy has guided state legislatures
in policy making and agency officials in rule making. It is often
convened and facilitated by administrative officials in agencies
such as EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Forest
Service, leading some scholars to speak of "deliberative
cultures" emerging within regulatory agencies. An increasing
number of environmental officials, in fact, are aware not only
of the practical techniques, but of the theoretical discussions
of deliberative democracy. And policy analysts have begun to pay
increasing attention to how policy designs can and should encourage
citizen deliberation in confronting complex problems and tradeoffs.
See the discussion of Environmental Dispute Settlement, and extensive
references, in Civic Environmentalism, by Carmen Sirianni and
Lewis Friedland.
National Issues Forums (NIF). Utilizing issue books prepared
by the Kettering and Public Agenda Foundations, citizens convene
within various institutional settings to deliberate about public
problems, the pros and cons of specific solutions, and to reflect
on the underlying values and deeper motivations at play. The goals
of these forums are to enhance learning of public issues through engaged discussion of options, to help form a public with the skills needed for democratic dialogue and reasoned judgment, and to help define the interests
of the public. The range of issues is broad, with three issues
chosen per year, and groups can be formed in virtually any setting:
schools, churches, senior centers, libraries, literacy programs. At the
local level, some groups use NIF methodologies and materials to
address issues on the local agenda, and thus move from deliberation
to action. This is also the case with groups using materials of
the Study Circles Resource Center. See the National Issues Forum
home page, developed in collaboration with the Civic Practices Network and
ONline @UW Publishing Group.
the deliberative poll. James Fishkin's deliberative opinion
poll is based on the conviction that credible deliberative democracy
requires a representative sample of the population, rather than
self-selected citizen participation in community meetings and
dialogue groups, or organized stakeholder participation in dispute
resolution. It builds upon citizens juries and the ancient Athenian
Council in design, but assembles a larger representative sample
of several hundred in an effort to model what the electorate as
a whole would think if, hypothetically, it could be immersed in
intensive deliberative processes. It is designed especially to
influence the selection of candidates at the beginning of the
American presidential primary season, before the rush of early
primaries. The deliberative poll was first conducted in Britain
on national television in 1994 with a representative sample of
three hundred voters considering the issue of crime, and they
seem to have developed a more complex understanding of the issue
than previously held.
The National Issues Convention premiers in the U.S. in January
1996 on PBS, with the Kettering Foundation and National Issues
Forums providing moderators and briefing materials on three issues
selected from opinion polling (America's global role, pocketbook
pressures, and the troubled American family). Participants will
frame questions for candidates. Kettering, NIF and other partners will extend
Public Deliberation '96 beyond the January convention.
public journalism. Public journalism, or civic journalism,
engages the press in directly helping to revive civic life and
public dialogue. It does this in various ways: by convening town
meetings where citizens have the opportunity to discuss public
problems, question candidates skillfully and in-depth, review
policy options, discuss solutions at work in other communities,
set an action agenda, and even to facilitate voluntary citizen
action (e.g. on neighborhood crime). News and election coverage
gives priority of place to citizens' own voices. Civic journalism
interprets the public's right to know expansively and assumes
the responsibility for enhancing those conditions that permit
citizens to constitute themselves as a deliberative public. It
also challenges citizens to deliberate responsibly, in view of
conflicting views and interests of other citizens and even of
themselves (e.g. a demand for more services, but an unwillingness
to pay for them, or to cut other favored programs). In this way,
it seeks to hold citizens themselves accountable to standards
of complex and responsible deliberation, even as it assists citizens
in holding their elected leaders accountable. See the essays and
cases in the CPN Journalism section.
Some Relevant Issues
There are many issues that need to be addressed in refining and
evaluating deliberative democracy as a source of democratic renewal.
A few of the most important ones are the following:
complementarity of deliberative forms. No major theorist
sees deliberative democracy as supplanting representative democracy.
But there has been little systematic attention to the conditions
under which "deliberative complementarities" could improve
our democratic institutions and civic culture, and how various
civic, political and administrative actors can develop the appropriate capacities. How can city councils, state legislatures, and administrative
agencies include citizens in meaningful and innovative forms of
deliberation? This is an important touchstone for renovating our
Madisonian deliberative heritage, and a needed bulwark against
the forms of plebiscitary democracy that are eroding it.
difference and inclusiveness. Deliberative theory can tend
to privilege speech that is too narrowly rationalistic and argumentative,
and hence marginalize those groups (women, minorities) whose styles
of discourse might differ from this. In addition, it can presume
too great an initial basis for commonalty, and downplay the degree
of struggle for recognition that might need to occur before a
more inclusive sense of common interest can be forged. Deliberative
practice, by contrast, tends to be much more attuned to forms
of speech (storytelling, expressions of hurt, anger and injustice)
that situate participants in specific contexts and groups, and
that reference inequalities in ways that can be productive of
mutual understanding and common action.
is deliberative democracy possible on complex national policy
issues? The failure of the Clinton health care reform has
raised the issue of whether a more deliberative approach might
have served as a sounder, albeit longer term foundation for reform.
Such a deliberative approach to public discussion could have focused
on health values and cultural expectations, and to underlying causes of increased health costs for which the public has had little realistic appreciation (aging population, high technology). The Kettering and Public
Agenda Foundations, as well as the Hastings Center, American Health
Decisions, and the American Civic Forum, presented elements of
this alternative deliberative approach, both before and after
the plan's defeat. Is it possible to learn from this failure in
such a way that refines such an alternative, and convinces a significant
enough segment of the American leadership class to go forward
with it on a subsequent reform occasion? Or is such an approach
simply unworkable in light of short political election cycles,
deep ideological divisions within the leadership class, and the
complexity of issues. And will deliberative democracy be enough
to counteract the tendency of the public itself toward wishful
thinking and its unwillingness to come to grips with the hard
choices?
Selected readings
David Mathews, Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Public
Voice . Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1994.
This is the clearest and most popularly accessible account of
deliberative democracy as a response to the crisis of
politics and the displacement of citizens in America today. Mathews
draws upon the research of the Harwood
Group on citizen alienation, and the experiences of his own Kettering
Foundation and the National Issues Forums.
He presents a complex account of the conditions under which public
officials feel threatened by public participation,
and those under which they recognize the need for public involvement.
He links deliberative democracy to a
broader tradition of action-oriented community problem solving
and capacity building.
James Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy.
New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995.
An excellent, clear theoretical introduction to the problems of
plebiscitary democracy in America, and an argument
for how we need to link political equality with democratic deliberation.
Fishkin presents the argument for a
deliberative opinion poll, and the tradition upon which this draws.
This serves as the basis for the January 1995
National Issues Convention in Austin, Texas. This book also gives
greater recognition to other forms of civic
engagement than Fishkin's earlier writings.
Daniel Yankelovich, "The Debate That Wasn't: The Public and
the Clinton Plan," Health Affairs 14:1 (Spring
1995), 7-24, and symposium, 24-36.
A forthright exposition of how public opinion would have to educate
itself through deliberative processes if it were
to come to grips with the costs, complexities and tradeoffs of
national health reform, and the underlying values that
should guide it. Drawing upon the work of the Kettering and Public
Agenda Foundations, Yankelovich argues that
this is possible over a 3-5 year extended process, but not in
the kind of accelerated push that the Clinton
administration attempted. Various health policy analysts challenge
how and whether such deliberation is possible on
such an issue. Clearly, a more specific set of strategies for
a deliberative democratic approach to national policy
making is needed. (Some elements of this were discussed among
administration officials and civic practitioners in
late 1994, but too late for action.)
Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books,
1980 (reissued by University of
Chicago Press in paperback in 1984).
This is a major theoretical contribution in this area. It grounds
theorizing in the everyday practices of members of a
New England Town Meeting and an alternative service collective,
and articulates the conditions under which they
do -- and ought -- to choose either adversary or unitary democratic
practices.
Jane Mansbridge, "Democracy, Deliberation, and the Experience
of Women," from the Kettering Political
Education Series' HIgher Education and the Practice of Democratic
Politics. Dayton, Ohio: Kettering
Foundation, 1991.
This article explores two schools of feminist thought which shed
light on the nature of deliberative democracy. One
stresses women's power of nurturance and relationships. A second,
more combative school concentrates on
asymmetrical power relations between men and women. Both lines
of feminist thought favor a more participatory
democracy and constitute a fertile source of new ideas and perspectives.
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for
a New Age. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
An eloquent and influential critique of "thin democracy,"
and an elaboration of strong democracy as a way of living.
This book discusses the various functions of strong democratic
talk as essential features of citizen deliberation and
common action. Chapter 7 ("A Conceptual Frame: Politics in
the Participatory Mode") represents the core of the
argument.
Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992.
The editor's introduction is one of the clearest short statements
of the theory of the public sphere in English. It
concisely summarizes Habermas's masterwork, while offering sympathetic
criticism. While it is written primarily for
academics, within this genre it is quite straightforward. The
other essays in this volume are also quite interesting,
especially those by Michael Schudson, Mary Ryan, and Harry Boyte.
Boyte develops an important critique of the
deliberative tradition based on the more pragmatic, public work
of citizens. (The latter is developed at greater
length in Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work,
by Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari, Temple
University Press, 1996, and in Harry Boyte, Beyond Deliberation:
Citizenship as Public Work.) Habermas'
concluding essay reconsiders his theory of the public sphere thirty
years after it was originally published, and
modifies it to take account of modern communication technologies
and the struggle to transform civil society in
Eastern Europe and the West.
Michael Briand, Building Deliberative Communities, Pew Partnership
for Civic Change, 1995.
This report to the Pew Partnership presents a clear and accessible
introduction to the basic concepts of deliberative
democracy, and presents the "community convention" as
one example of this. It is available online, where further
information on the Pew Partnership and how to order publications
can also be found.