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Deliberative Culture Leads to Deliberative Politics

. . . afterthoughts, From the Kettering Review, Fall 2006

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By David Mathews

In the Spring 2006 issue of the Review, I made the case that one of public deliberation’s most important contributions to democracy is to reinforce the “organic” or everyday habit of reasoning together among people who are both alike and unlike one another. Our expectation that representative institutions like Congress and local school boards will be deliberative is a fantasy unless deliberative decision making is understood and appreciated in the political culture. My point was that the impact of citizens reasoning together in public spaces, such as those provided by the National Issues Forums (NIF) and similar initiatives, isn’t confined to institutional standards of scale and direct effect on legislation. The kind of democracy that public deliberation promotes is more comprehensive than majoritarian, electoral politics.

Organic, deliberative democracy, I wrote, is not a different kind of democracy, however; it is the foundation for representative democracy.

When I read the articles in this issue of the Review, I was delighted to find that others share a similar understanding of deliberation’s role in democracy. In this piece, however, I want to go on to make the case that a deliberative culture should produce a deliberative politics. Deliberative politics’ ultimate objective is action through the collective efforts of citizens and through representative institutions. But it is a politics that expands on the conventional notions of effective action, and its means are not partisan, winner-takes-all combat. Face-to-face forums are not only opportunities for a different way to talk but also are doorways into citizen-based politics.

The foundation learned about the necessary connection between public deliberation and political action the hard way, not through flashes of insight but through the slow and sometimes painful accumulation of experience. The citizens we met in our research have made it clear that unless deliberation enables them to make a difference in overcoming the problems they face, it will have little claim on their time.

During the first 10 years of doing research to assist sponsors of deliberative forums, we had concentrated on what went on inside the forum and the role of the moderator. We assumed that the audience for forum results were institutional officials like members of Congress. We wanted to show that citizens could move from hasty reactions toward more shared and reflective judgments if presented with a full range of policy options that were fairly presented. No one expected that participants would leave their forums and immediately take some action themselves. The people who attend forums typically act later through their civic organizations.

The first difficulty we encountered was in explaining the difference between what had to happen for there to be genuine deliberation and what happened in a well-moderated discussion that embodied the best group dynamics. Our initial efforts to make that distinction were less than effective; people had the impression that deliberative forums were just informative civil discussions; they might inform individuals, but they weren’t political.

Actually, what we were seeing in the NIF forums was a microcosm of deliberative politics. So we began to emphasize what we were learning about the nature of the political work forum participants were doing when they struggled with tough issues like social security and health care. We borrowed shamelessly, though with due credit, from Dan Yankelovich, who insisted that moving from opinion to judgment was real work, “choice work.” And we revisited the classical literature on moral reasoning and practical wisdom, which we used in breaking choice work down into its political components. We called these “democratic practices” because they opened the door to citizens and enabled them to act. These practices go well beyond decision making and are described in the recent Kettering Foundation Press book Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy.

As you can see in the piece by Dan and his colleagues, they have developed a method for accelerating choice work and have documented its effects both on policymaking and community problem solving. Kettering also shares with officeholders what it is learning about the unique way citizens go about making decisions (public thinking) in collaboration with the producers of the A Public Voice television show.

Although it was not a problem on the A Public Voice program, which features officials in Washington, we ran into difficulty outside the capitol. It was with the way we were defining officeholders, which was as “policymakers.” Most of the early issue books prepared for the National Issues Forums were on federal policies, and the political actors were either members of Congress or the executive branch. We called them the “policymakers”—that is until citizens began to challenge us by saying that in a democracy they thought citizens were the ultimate decision makers. We found that citizens often attach as much importance to being heard by other citizens as they do to being heard by officeholders. And we were brought up short when people complained that our briefing books for citizens on issues like drug abuse didn’t recognize that they, their families, and their civic organizations were critical political actors.

We were pushed to take these complaints more seriously as people began to adapt the NIF forums to deal with local issues. Many sponsors of NIF forums were educational institutions with a mission to inform people’s opinions. But more and more of the sponsors turned to local problems, particularly problems that whole communities had to act on, such as racial conflict. These “wicked problems” don’t have technical solutions, and the changes that communities need to make go beyond those that could be made by policies and ordinances. The public has to act on the problems that take a “whole village” to solve. So deliberation was moving outside forums and affecting the way communities went about their business. As one community leader described the influence of NIF forums, she said, in effect, “We learned that deliberation was more than a different way to talk; it was a different way to do politics.” Interestingly, many of the community organizations that began the policy-oriented forums 25 years ago now use public deliberation in local problem solving. Forums in El Paso, Texas, Birmingham, Alabama, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, have become standard fare when these communities need to engage their citizens.

Having been drawn by communities from deliberative forums to deliberative democracy, the foundation began to look more deeply into what has to happen before, during, and after forums in order to make “democracy work as it should” (a phrase the foundation uses to acknowledge that democracy is a moral ideal and not a claim that Kettering is all wise). One of the first things communities do, as noted in the last Review, is to give a name to a problem. That is a politically potent practice. The names can either strengthen democracy by bringing people in, or it can shut them out. If descriptions of problems reflect people’s experiences and the things they hold dear, they are attracted. If the names chosen are based on technical policy considerations or ideological differences, they tend to repel citizens. So deliberative politics begins with naming problems—and it often ends in renaming them to reflect people’s deeply held concerns.

Other practices in deliberative politics include creating a framework that will be used to make a decision. That is done by laying out a full range of options for citizens to consider, not just the usual bipolar alternatives. Our most important insight about the practices that characterize deliberative democracy has been that they aren’t independent but rather so interrelated that they form a whole, coherent politics. That is what community activists were telling us when they said that their forums introduced them to a different way of doing politics, not just a different way of talking in their meetings.

One example of the interrelation of democratic practices: naming problems in terms that are meaningful to people—that capture what they hold dear—sets the stage for framing issues to promote genuine deliberation. The names people give a problem imply options for acting on it.

The people from the forums were also telling us that politics at its most basic level, which we’ve called “organic,” is deeply personal yet not individualistic. The personal consequences of problems give people the incentive to act on them. And this is one of the points where the current Review and the experiences of the foundation intersect. Vincent Colapietro provides a better understanding of how face-to-face deliberations affect politics when he writes that primary political concerns are so personal that they seem private, not public. He makes the point that self-government begins in self and that the first public voice people hear is the voice of other citizens who share similar hopes and fears.

Deliberation begins with everyday questions that link the personal to the public. They are: What is happening? Does it bother you? Should we do anything? What would the consequences be if we did what you suggest?

Iris Young’s notion of “de-centeredness” is also useful in describing the politics that grow out of deliberation. I regret that I never met her, but she is someone who was very much a part of the Review community, having written several pieces questioning public deliberation. Even though deliberations like the National Issues Forums are centered on a particular time and place, they draw from and then flow back into a deliberative universe that is not centered in any one place or confined to any one time. Rich Harwood’s studies of how people become politically engaged describe a de-centered process. And participants in deliberative forums who meet in specific places (libraries) and for a specific length of time also take their understanding of deliberation into personal conversations, civic gatherings, and even the workplace.

Deliberative forums extend their influence when they are tied directly to institutional politics, as they have been by organizations ranging from the Southern Growth Policies Board to the public health department in Columbus, Ohio. In other words, deliberation serves those who participate and, later on, it also affects town meetings, school board proceedings, and legislative debates. All of this suggests that Young thought deliberation occurs in “multiple forums and sites” and is “embedded in social processes that exceed political regulation.”

While Young sees deliberative democracy as de-centered, she believes it is linked. Recently, we have developed a hypothesis about how the linkage between face-to-face forums and institutional politics may occur. Certainly the linkages are obvious when they are intentional. That’s the case when videotapes of NIF deliberations are shown to federal officials and the Washington media in taping the Public Voice program. And it occurs in the briefings done for various agencies following A Public Voice. But the linkage may also occur in less formal ways through the influence public deliberation seems to have in instilling “rules of the game” for politics.

I should reveal that my colleagues have trouble with my characterizing what we discovered in the forums as “rules of the game.” And I realize that “rules” isn’t exactly the right word, but maybe it will do for now if I say more about what I do and don’t mean. I am certainly not talking about etiquette. Deliberative forums are too zesty to be polite; strong emotions are always part of the mix. Neither do I have in mind formal, written rules like those prescribing acceptable behavior, such as the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” edict enforced in some restaurants. I mean the pragmatic, situational, or work-inspired requirements for getting a job done. If these rules are followed consistently over time, they become norms or operating principles for democracy. Initially, they just inform the ways people interact when they work together.

Anything people do together, whether it’s raising a barn in the old-fashioned way, playing a team sport, or operating a business, generates its own rules. The same is true of the work of deliberating. Having to make difficult decisions without a predetermined outcome being imposed creates incentives to listen, to consider opposing points of view, and to judge fairly. Every task in choice work has implications for the way people deal with one another—if the work is going to get done.

Kettering first became aware of these implicit rules from forums that dealt with highly controversial issues, such as AIDS and abortion. When forums began with an agreement among the participants to work toward making decisions and not just talking about the issue, they were more likely to be deliberative. Securing an agreement on the objectives of a forum (similar to charging a jury) is an effective way to set standards of behavior. If someone tries to derail the deliberations, others will usually step in to bring the conversations back on track.

Those who bring their groups back to problem solving don’t appeal to official rules but to pragmatic, informal ones with comments like, are there other ways to see this issue?

Perhaps the most important “rule” that deliberation promotes is to learn. Collective learning is a political act; it is more than educational in a personal sense—although it is surely that as well. Learning is at the heart of deliberative democracy because it provides no authority for deciding what we should do except our best collective judgment. We have to figure out what should be done by learning from one another and our experiences. If face-to-face deliberation did nothing more for democratic politics than encourage people to experiment and learn, it would have done a great deal.

John Stuhr reminds us of this cardinal rule in an essay that takes us back to John Dewey, whose understanding of democracy was similar to that of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom made experimenting to learn a way of life.

Because deliberation promotes collective learning, forums are ideal laboratories for civic education. No one is better versed in the necessary connection between democracy and learning than Peter Levine, and he insists that deliberation’s power to stimulate learning is as politically significant as whatever its influence may be on voters and policies. Teachers who have used NIF forums are doing studies that show the significant impact forums have—when combined with readings and reflections—on the way students understand democracy and the roles they can play in it. Students learn a new way to do politics by deliberating on tough issues that affect them.

Despite all that can be said about the role of public deliberation in democracy, the most common question that sponsors of forums are asked is still, what do your forums have to do with action, with actually doing something about our problems? The answer depends on what kind of problems people have in mind and what they think is effective in politics. If the problem is to provide low-income housing in San Mateo, Dan Yankelovich and his colleagues have an answer. It is in the power of deliberative dialogue to prevent a potential gridlock on the housing issue. Forum sponsors in El Paso, Birmingham, and Grand Rapids have used deliberation to deal with problems like juvenile violence. Effective action on this issue required involving young people. Forums that included students on what to do about the problem provided the collective decision making needed to prompt collective action, which resulted in new programs for young people. If the problem is less specific, as it is for those who want to change the way a community goes about its political business, there is another answer to the action question. It is in the norms or rules that deliberation promotes. Or if the problem is how to bring a public voice to bear on crucial national issues such as energy, financial stability, and the role of the U.S. in the world, there is an answer in the ability of deliberation to replace hasty reactions with mature public judgment.

No one familiar with deliberative politics suggests it is an instant cure-all. And Dan Yankelovich wisely points out that there are significant countertrends to face, particularly the forces that promote fragmentation, polarizing debate, and sound-bite discourse. The movement to make politics more public by making it more deliberative is, indeed, in it infancy and very vulnerable.

I take comfort in an observation of a veteran of 25 years of public deliberation. Her insight was that what we are attempting is fragile—it can be distorted or derailed. But, she added, it isn’t brittle; it doesn’t break easily.

She’s right, I thought, my mind’s eye flashing back to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for collective deliberation. That the word has been with us so long is some indication that what we are about can be resilient—provided we can keep it nourished.

Kettering Foundation

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Deliberative Culture Leads to Deliberative Politics

. . . afterthoughts, From the Kettering Review, Fall 2006