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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?
Video Podcast
"We can improve the conversation and that directly impacts people's lives."
Martin Carcasson
DDEX
Ibtesam, Rhanda Slim
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
Politics of Self-Rule: Six Public Practices
Democratic practices, the things people do to govern themselves, are distinctive, yet they are just variations of the things that happen every day in communities—but without involving many citizens.
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.
These practices are reflected in the ordinary questions people ask one another when something threatens their collective well-being. Their conversations revolve around such questions as: “What’s bothering you?” “What do you think we should or can do about the problem?” “If we did what you suggest, what do you think might happen?” “Would it be fair?” “Would we be better off?” “Is there a downside?” “If there is, should we change our minds about what should be done?” “What would you (and others you can call on) be willing to do to solve the problem?”
After a community acts, the conversation picks up again around another set of questions: “What happened?” “Did we get what we wanted?” “Did we learn anything?”
The Practices
Kettering has selected a set of terms that it uses to describe what is going on politically when people ask these everyday questions. Each term identifies one of the public practices mentioned above.
When people talk about what bothers them, Kettering would say that they are “naming” their problems. “Naming” is a political practice because the name that is given a problem affects what is done to solve it.
When people talk about what can be done, they propose options, and when all the options are put on the table, they create a framework for tackling a problem. The “framing,” which is the term Kettering uses, structures everything that happens thereafter. A framework with only one option sets in motion a political debate that is very different from what happens if there are multiple options on the table.
When people move on to assess the possible consequences that might result from one course of action or another, Kettering would say they are “
deliberating
.” They are weighing possible consequences against what is deeply important to them.
Most people are suspicious of any proposal that looks like a free lunch. So they keep their eyes out for the downsides, for costs or tradeoffs that have to be made. That is all part of assessing or weighing. You can hear it going on over any lunch counter or watercooler in the country, even though no one would call what people are doing deliberation. They are mulling over or sorting out what they hear, perhaps changing their minds as they learn about someone else’s experience. Eventually, they may settle on some work that they need to do with other citizens, something they want a government to do, or both.
Once a decision is made about how to proceed, people test to see if anyone or any group is willing to act on the decision, which is a political practice Kettering calls “making commitments.”
Commitments produce collective political will. When citizens then join forces to do something, we refer to that as “public acting,” a practice that brings the many and various resources a citizenry has to bear on a problem. Action is normally followed by evaluating what was accomplished, which the foundation has labeled “civic learning” in order to distinguish collective from individual learning. This practice provides the political momentum needed to follow through on difficult problems.
All six of these practices are part of the larger politics of self-rule, not stand-alone techniques. They rest inside one another, the way the Russian matreshka dolls do. Naming, framing, and deliberating are included when people learn from the commitments they made (or didn’t make) and the actions they took.
Public Judgment
Of all the practices, Kettering has done the most research on the way citizens make decisions, particularly on how first impressions and hasty reactions can turn into more shared and reflective “public judgments.”
The ancient Greeks called the discourse of collective decision making “the talk we use to teach ourselves before we act,” and Aristotle described the process of deciding political issues as “moral reasoning.”
Kettering uses the word
deliberation
for public decision making. In the United States, citizens have been joining citizens to make choices on issues of common concern since the colonial town meetings.
So, by no conceivable stretch of the imagination could public deliberation be called a Kettering methodology. It isn’t even a uniquely American practice. Some variation of the word deliberation can be found in nearly every ancient language.
Public deliberation is a natural act.
Research shows that the public’s attitudes are consistent, rational, and stable. The public’s views are consistent in that the policies they favor do, over the long term, correspond to what people consider valuable. Public attitudes are rational in that there are clear reasons for them; for example, people favor more spending on employment when unemployment is high. And public preferences are stable in that they change incrementally in understandable responses to real changes in circumstances.
Despite being an ancient and natural practice, public deliberation tends to be overshadowed today by hype and spin. Modern techniques of communication and persuasion are more dramatic and telegenic than the careful, back-and-forth weighing of options. And it is easy to lose sight of the qualities that distinguish deliberation from other forms of political speech—qualities that give deliberation the power to teach citizens before they act.
Furthermore, even though the United States has been committed to self-government for more than 200 years, many of our Founders preferred a republic to a democracy, and their doubts about whether common folk have the intelligence and responsibility to govern themselves have remained.
Today, these doubts follow much the same line of reasoning that Walter Lippmann used when he called the notion of a public that could rule itself a political fantasy. Uncertainty about the citizenry runs deepest when the people in question are poor, uneducated, or foreign-born.
The challenge today isn’t to introduce deliberation as though it were a novel technique to be brought up to scale through some sort of clubs but rather, as Amy Gutmann wisely advised, to practice deliberation wherever collective decisions are made. Forums like those based on
National Issues Forums books
model deliberation and contribute to a better understanding of the hard work involved in making difficult decisions.
Public Thinking
The best way to understand deliberation is not to treat it as a stand-alone methodology but to locate it within the larger context of deliberative democracy and other public practices.
Of all these practices, naming problems to capture the basic concerns of people and then framing issues in ways that promote choice work have gotten a great deal of attention at Kettering because these activities are typically carried on in ways that exclude citizens.
Professionals name problems but, as would be expected, they use the technical terminology of their field, and they frame issues in ways suitable for expert decision making. The same is true of public administrators and elected officials. The nature of their work requires them to use different terminology and frameworks.
Unfortunately, those terms and frameworks are imposed on citizens, and they are put off because nothing resonates with their experiences or concerns and nothing suggests what they might do with other citizens.
When issues have been named and framed in ways that prompt public deliberation, the choice work involved can stimulate a particular kind of reasoning that could be called “public thinking.”