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As part of our "Coming to Judgment" program, the Kettering
Foundation, the National Issues Forums Institute, and Public Agenda brought
together two juries of public and professional leaders to examine public progress
toward a coherent and viable judgment on the issues of energy and the rising
cost of health care.
The March 5 energy jury was asked to formulate a judgment on
the degree to which the deliberative public seemed to have moved toward a
coherent public judgment that might form the basis of viable actions on the
energy problem. The jury made its ruling after the presentation of research
analyzing the 2007 National Issues Forums on "The Energy Problem: Choices for
an Uncertain Future." The research shows how those who participated in forums
came to share a sense of the urgency of the energy issue and of taking measures
to deal with it.
On March 6, a jury, of largely the same members as the
previous day, was invited to make a judgment about aspects or complexities of
the health-care issue that should be addressed by the deliberative public this
year. Because health care had not yet been the subject of extended public
deliberation, the jury was not in a position to consider outcomes of public forums. Instead, the jury considered where they thought the deliberative
public most needed to focus, where increased sharing or understanding could
occur between the public and professional and political leaders, and what
tensions or points of misunderstanding might be explored. Helping to inform the
jury's deliberation was a 35-minute documentary, Paying for Health Care, featuring informal conversations by
citizens and interviews with health-care experts about how they see health care
affecting their lives and the nation.
The juries' deliberations were informed by the concept of
public judgment that Daniel Yankelovich, the cofounder of Public Agenda,
explores in his book Coming to Public
Judgment. Public judgment, Yankelovich says, is "highly developed
public opinion that exists once people have engaged an issue, considered it
from all sides, understood the choices it leads to, and accepted the full
consequences of the choices they make."
To ease the juries' deliberations, Yankelovich's concept of
public judgment was narrowed to these three stages of development:
Stage 1: Mass opinion is recognized when people are just
beginning to become aware of a particular problem or issue. They may not yet be
convinced that it is important or that anything needs to be done about it. They
are not yet aware of its implications or its impact, either on them personally
or on American society as a whole; there is evidence of wishful thinking,
blaming others, avoiding the real costs and consequences. Opinions swing from
one view to another, as swayed by specific events and information, and there is
little understanding of the views that people hold or the actions they think
should be taken.
Stage 2: Working
through reveals a dawning awareness of the problem's complexity and some of
the costs and consequences of trying to deal with it. People begin to recognize
the need for change and to understand differences among alternative views. They
begin to realize that the issue affects them in important ways and that they
may be implicated personally in causing or exacerbating the problem; they begin
to recognize the tensions among proposed courses of action and realize that
choosing any one of them involves certain conflicts with things they hold
valuable.
Stage 3: Resolution,
or public judgment, emerges as people begin to resolve the cognitive,
emotional, and ethical dimensions of the problem. They have begun to resolve
the tensions or conflicts involved and to accept certain trade-offs as the
inevitable cost of actions. They have wrestled with and have begun to reconcile
personal preferences and public needs, achieving some clarity about what is the
right thing to do. People have struggled with the various choices, confronted
their own ambivalence about them, and begun to accept the costs and
consequences. They are more clear about the conditions under which they are
willing to support a particular policy or approach; they have recognized
unwelcome or worrisome realities and reconciled conflicting emotions; and at
this point they recognize the ethical dimensions of the problem and have moved
to a point of clarity about the right thing to do.
For more than 25 years, the National Issues Forums have demonstrated the importance of public deliberation as a
means of moving toward public judgment. They have shown why a deliberative
public is a key element in democratic life and what the differences are between
responses to pollsters' questions and the more carefully considered judgments
that people make after examining each others' experiences in deliberative
public forums.
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