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  • "The process of involving people, even if they have different points of view, maybe conflicting points of view, is very important."

    Svetlana Chernikova

  • Coping With the Cost of Health Care:

    What Is The Public Voice?

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  • "We can improve the conversation and that directly impacts people's lives."

    Martin Carcasson

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    Mideast Network

  • "In our research, we look at what ideas community leaders have about the role of the public in deliberating issues and forming policy."

    Alberto Olivas

  • "When I'm working with the different Pacific Island communities, I must make sure that their way of being is always respected and regarded."

    Moerangi Falaoa

  • "You can't sustain an urban community without the voice of its citizens."

    Louise Spiegel

  • "Students have more of a sense that 'maybe we can do that, too.'"

    Katy Harriger

Podcasts

  • David Mathews discusses Education Research
  • Speaking of Politics Interview

Citizens and Public Choice

Democracy is rule by the citizenry, and citizens acquire the power to make a difference through their collective action. The question being pursued in Kettering’s research is how the collective action of citizens can be informed by sound judgment, which requires collective decision making through public deliberation.

Kettering calls judgment sound when decisions to act are consistent with what is most valuable to people. Public deliberation promotes sound judgment by moving from hasty reactions to more shared and reflective weighing of the consequences of action on what we hold dear. Rather than being informed by an outside authority, citizens are more likely to take responsibility for choices they make themselves. Through public deliberation, citizens can make sound collective decisions. Though people will not always agree, they will often come to a mutual understanding.

The foundation applies what it learns about deliberation to designing issue books that will prompt deliberative decision making on a variety of issues. Kettering research also investigates the opportunities for and the effects of deliberative decision making.

Click here to see a short video illustrating how deliberative decision making is entirely different from debating a proposal or from other problem-solving techniques like brainstorming and visioning.

Explore research in this area


Politics of Self-Rule: Six Public Practices
Democratic practices, the things people do to govern themselves, are variations of the things that happen every day in communities. In order for these routine activities to become public, communities don’t have to do anything out of the ordinary. They just have to do the ordinary in different ways. If the routine business of politics is done in ways that are open to citizens, the routines can become public practices.

Public Deliberation in Democracy
Public deliberation is crucial to combating the alienation of citizens who feel shut out of the political system, citizens who want a stronger hand in shaping their future but don’t see how they can make a difference.

Critical Junctures along the Path of Engagement
The Engagement Path lays out a framework for addressing the subject of public engagement. It creates a way of thinking about the topic at hand and identifies key hurdles people face as they move along the engagement path.

Reconnecting with Community
We must engage people in ways that actively ask them to think about and weigh their interests in relationship to those around them; to see larger societal needs at work; to imagine the possibilities for what can be achieved when we come together to act in the public realm. We must find better ways to foster the collective will and action among people to create change in our communities, then we must pursue an alternate path for politics and public life.

 Democracy’s Challenge: Reclaiming the Public’s Role
In scores of NIF forums across the country, citizens deliberated about their role in a democratic society. As they did, people repeatedly said something is wrong in the country, things are off track. Participants also saw something more fundamental, something deeper, below the surface that is far more troubling. They grappled to identify what troubled them, its causes, and what might be done about it.

 

 

Publications

  • Engaging Citizens

    Download Engaging Citizens Engaging Citizens is a working draft Kettering report that shares what ... [ MORE ]

  • Hope Unraveled

    Richard Harwood, president of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, argues that many America ... [ MORE ]

  • Making Choices Together

    If democratic politics is to operate as it should, the public must act. First, however, it must de ... [ MORE ]

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