A History of Ideas

How Kettering’s Research Has Evolved

The following article is based on remarks delivered by Kettering President David Mathews at the foundation’s Deliberative Democracy Exchange in 2008

The Kettering Foundation grew out of the inventive tradition in an area of the United States where so many things, from the pop-top can to the airplane, were perfected. Charles F. Kettering is best known for the automobile self-starter, and our founding trustees were contemporaries of the Wright brothers. The founders were often inventors, known for their patents more than their degrees. They had bold imaginations; whatever the problem, none was too large or daunting. If they could make a machine that would fly or one that would start itself, then bring on world hunger.

The founders, like all human beings, were also prone to think that the answers to the problems that they were focused on were within their own fields, so they looked for scientific or technical solutions. But as we now know, sadly and tragically, world hunger is not necessarily caused by the failure of plants to produce; it’s more often caused by the failure of political systems.

So the focus of the foundation’s research gradually shifted from disciplines like physical chemistry to what might be called political chemistry. In political chemistry, we have concentrated on democracy and what makes it work as it should, which led us to pay particular attention to the role of citizens. The most mysterious element in political chemistry is the sometimes exasperating, always unpredictable, free and occasionally terrified citizenry, the sovereign power in a democracy.

The Citizenry and Alienation

By the 1970s, citizens in the United States were becoming seriously alienated from the political system. The system was suffering from a massive loss of public confidence. At the time, this loss was attributed to an unpopular war in Vietnam and a beleaguered president, Richard Nixon.

Yet, even when the war was over and new presidents took office, Kettering discovered that this lack of confidence had grown into a profound sense of alienation. We were feeling a shift in the tectonic plates of our political system. Americans felt shut out of their own democracy. Of course they could vote, yet voting by itself didn’t seem enough to make the difference the citizenry thought it should make. The voice of the people didn’t have as much influence as the voices of moneyed interests. Scholars later pointed out, in many ways, the public had been shoved to the sidelines.

Starting with this problem, the foundation first assumed that the solution was more information on policy decisions and more openness in government. Both were beneficial, but they didn’t stem the loss of confidence. And neither information nor access came to terms with another shift in the tectonic plates—a diminished sense of political efficacy and responsibility in the citizenry.

Choice and Responsibility

People are more likely to take responsibility for what they have decided than what has been decided for them. So the foundation began to look at the role of public choice in politics, particularly the most difficult kind of choices, those that have to be made when there is a discrepancy between what is happening in society and what people feel should be happening—yet without any agreement on what should be done.

How, we wondered, given the intensity of the serious controversies associated with major issues, could even well-informed citizens make shared decisions?

The answer seemed to be through what is called moral reasoning or public deliberation. It increases the chances that decisions will be shared because it recognizes and deals with value-driven differences about what should be done. People weigh various options for acting on a problem against what they consider most valuable, and this creates a political environment conducive to working through disagreements. This careful weighing also promotes sound decisions, that is, decisions where the action taken is consistent with what the public considers most important.

Although public deliberations don’t result in total agreement, they can create enough mutual understanding for citizens to move ahead on controversial issues.

Making Things and Power

The focus on choosing rather than just being informed is helpful in promoting responsibility, but it raises another question: who will carry out the decisions? People tend to feel responsible for the choices they have made, yet the foundation realized that they feel even more responsible for the things they have decided to make through their collective efforts. For instance, when people organize a neighborhood watch or build a playground for children they tend to own the products of their work.

While there are certainly examples of collective efforts making a difference nationally and internationally (look at the environmental movement), the work people do together usually begins where they live—in their communities. After a natural disaster—as when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast—people said over and over again that they needed to come together as a community to rebuild the community.

We heard a similar refrain in communities facing less catastrophic, but equally persistent, chronic problems, such as poverty and crime. Consequently, our focus expanded from policy issues to communities—places where people had to work together in order to survive and prosper.

We also learned a great deal from people who began adapting our briefing books on national issues for use on local problems. These citizens wanted to do more than understand issues and one another; they wanted to join forces and act on their problems. This capacity to work together—to produce something—gives citizens a measure of the power they need to make a difference.

Communities and Democratic Practices

As the foundation brought communities and their institutions (like schools) more into view, it made another discovery. The more we looked at what was happening in communities, particularly those holding deliberative forums, the more we realized that deliberative decision making is actually at the center of a much larger political universe.

Public deliberation or choice work is but one element in a cluster of practices that can open the political system to citizens. These practices make politics accessible by recognizing that the way citizens go about doing the work of citizens is different (not better, just different) from the way institutions go about doing theirs.

For instance, institutions give names to problems that reflect their expertise and the solutions they offer. Citizens, on the other hand, name problems in ways that reflect their deepest concerns, the things they hold most valuable.

People’s concerns are often intangible, as illustrated in a story Wendell Berry tells about the reaction of a group of farmers listening to an economist explain that they could make more money if they rented rather than bought land. The economist was technically correct. Yet one farmer challenged him, pointing out that his people didn’t come to this country to be renters.

The name given a problem—and who gets to name it—has powerful political consequences. So when citizens give names to problems that capture what they consider valuable, the practice “opens” politics to them. That is, people recognize and own their problems.

The foundation has been able to identify six of these practices. They range from the way problems are named to the way decisions are made and implemented. The practices are not separate techniques but rather facets that make up the whole of public politics, sometimes called deliberative democracy.

Public forums that are deliberative draw on or set the stage for all of these practices. In this way, the forums model what democracy can be like. They don’t reveal another kind of politics like direct democracy, but rather democracy in its most basic or primary form.

Learn and Sustain

The most significant of all of the practices we identified is civic or collective learning. It was particularly evident in high-achieving communities. This kind of learning isn’t a matter of acquiring information or being reflective; it is the mode in which these communities approach everything they do.

Like the best students in a class, high achievers not only look at what is going on around them but also are constantly experimenting with new approaches to old problems. Being in a learning mode, they know how to fail successfully. Success is not their only goal; drawing useful lessons from their experiences, whether or not they are successful, is equally important. So when some projects fail, as they inevitably do, these communities are able to keep moving ahead. When they run into barriers, they are more likely to bounce back than crash.

This particular insight about learning has shaped the way the foundation goes about its research. We learn from what others are learning through joint agreements. The foundation lays out the questions it is trying to answer, and the other party to the agreement, which is usually a civic association or NGO and not a research organization, describes the experiment it is attempting and what it hopes to find out. The two lists are seldom the same, yet where they overlap creates an opportunity for joint learning.

Learning grows when people are able to compare findings that speak to the same questions. So organizations with joint learning agreements come to Kettering for workshops, usually twice a year, until the contract has ended. The results of the learning go to the parties doing the experiments because they come from them, and they often share the results with others in their field. Then, the foundation disseminates what it has learned through publications, workshops, and the Deliberative Democracy Exchange in the summer.

To be clear, Kettering is in the research business, not the conference business. That said, however, the exchange of findings from serious, systematic experiments provides the basis for most everything the foundation has to offer.

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