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Imagine What We Might Do, Collectively

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

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By David Mathews

This may be one of the most significant issues of the Review. It comes at a time when questions about what democracy is are getting serious attention around the world. These questions play through issues like immigration and terrorism. They are discussed in Russia and China. They are implicit in conversations about communities working together when confronted by a Katrina or a plant closing.

Americans sense that something is wrong with our democracy; even though, as Harry Boyte notes, they aren’t exactly sure what the problem is. Noëlle McAfee opens the Review’s discussion of this problem by challenging the assumption that representative government can intuitively grasp the public’s will; she argues that this essential connection is weak. I share her conviction. I would describe the problem as a weak connection between the organic sources of democracy and the institutions of our political system, both governmental and nongovernmental. I suspect the difficulty is not just structural, but that it goes deeper—into the way institutional politics understands organic democracy.

Those of you who enjoy Jürgen Habermas’ work in democratic theory will see some similarity in the organic/institution distinction I am making and his distinction between the public sphere and political systems. This Review is implicitly about the relationship between the two. I’ll try to make the implicit more explicit by drawing on what I have written for past issues.

To begin with, I don’t consider institutional politics “bad.” I have spent my career in institutions of government, education, and research. They are absolutely necessary.

Organic, citizen-based democracy is not an alternative form of politics like direct democracy; it is the foundation for democratic institutions and representative government. These massive structures rest on less visible foundations—the norms, relationships, and practices that are the organic underpinnings of self-rule. Harry Boyte might call these the foundations of public life because they create a democratic ethos, or culture. Americans show that they understand the importance of what is outside institutional politics when they talk about the importance of personal character, of families, and of a sense of shared responsibility for our common well-being. The critical role these play in politics is evident when communities confront problems that are deeply embedded in social structure and culture.

Several of the authors in this issue focus on a key organic practice: collective decision making through deliberation. I will too. Note that “deliberation” has two meanings. One is a way of making decisions by reasoning together; the other is as a political initiative grounded in public deliberation, “deliberative democracy.”

Here is how I understand the connection between deliberation and democracy: Democracy, or self-rule, in its most basic form, operates through the joint efforts that citizens make to solve common problems. These efforts begin when citizens make decisions together about what they are going to do. The most effective means of making these decisions is deliberation because it helps turn initial, individual reactions into more shared and reflective judgments.

Strengthening public deliberation won’t solve all of the problems of institutional politics, yet the problems of the institutional system will only get Band-Aids if we don’t keep the foundations of self-government intact. And that is what encouraging public deliberation can do (although deliberation is only one facet of organic democracy).

One of the first efforts to cultivate more public deliberation began with the introduction of the National Issues Forums (NIF) in 1981. Now celebrating their 25th anniversary, NIF deliberations occur in nonpartisan forums, which are organized, conducted, and funded by a host of civic, educational, and religious organizations throughout the country. The premise behind these deliberative forums is that the public’s ability to choose is essential to our liberty, liberty that Ben Barber argues is also public.

Today, there are a number of deliberative initiatives. But their significance is misunderstood because of the tendency of institutional politics to miss the political significance of what happens in public life. Organic politics is dismissed because it doesn’t look political. Much that goes on is so personal that it seems private and so social that it seems quite nonpolitical.

This misperception occurs despite the relationship between the personal and the political that the women’s movement demonstrated and despite the connection shown between social relationships and political outcomes.

To illustrate the tendency to judge organic politics by institutional standards, take the requirement to get up to scale as it applies to deliberation. In representative governments, school boards, and local civic organizations, majorities must rule. So from an institutional perspective, the size of a political effort is a proper measure of its significance. A party with a handful of members isn’t likely to be taken seriously. Organic politics, however, operates on a small scale or microlevel. The groups that citizens form aren’t large, they tend to be ad hoc, and there may not be a great many of them. Their power lies in the significance of the ideas about politics that they generate, the work they do by collective effort, and the pervasiveness of their associations. Revolution and reform movements, for example, usually begin organically before they become institutional. Organic democracy depends not so much on size as on space or opportunities to draw people together in common enterprises.

Take the case of deliberative forums. No one knows how many civic, educational, and religious organizations are holding them, but there are a good many. A survey of National Issues Forums a few years ago located some 4,000 sponsors. Over 800,000 copies of issue books for these forums have been distributed or sold. That is only a partial measure of participation because the books are often copied or forum participants use “issues in brief.” Democracy’s Challenge, released a few months ago, has already prompted plans to hold deliberations in more than 40 states.

Even more significant, other organizations are now preparing their own issue books for deliberative forums—among them the American Bar Association, the Farm Foundation, and the Southern Growth Policies Board. In addition, a number of communities that began forums using NIF books now regularly frame their own issues. Other deliberative projects have developed since the NIF forums began, but what influence the NIF example has had is impossible to measure. It is somewhat easier to track the influence of the NIF deliberations outside the U.S. Organizations in 32 other countries, from Russia to South Africa, have begun to hold their own national issues forums.

Compared to 25 years ago, all of these initiatives might seem impressive. From an institutional perspective, however, they are of little consequence because they aren’t up to scale in a nation of millions and a world of billions. National Issues Forums certainly have not become as widespread as Wal-Mart. They probably never will. Perhaps they don’t need to.

I believe that the real significance of the NIF and other organized forums is not their number but their influence on our understanding of democracy and their role in reinforcing natural, unstructured deliberation, which promotes a deliberative culture. Public deliberation provides essential political space, suggests new ways of thinking about self-rule, and leads to useful work being done to advance the good of all.

The cultural norm that tells us to seek out others who are needed to solve a problem—and not retreat into a protective enclave—is at the heart of self-rule. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that the impulse of neighbors to seek out neighbors was one of the defining characteristics of American political culture. Today, we hear the same impulse reflected in ordinary, protodeliberative conversations: What happened? What do you think it means? Should we do anything? What would the consequences be if we did? Surely these questions are common in the community problem solving that Ernie Cortes writes about. Certainly they are raised when people talk about national issues like health care and Social Security.

Evidence shows that informal deliberation is a normally occurring phenomenon whose impact is evident in the maturing of public attitudes over time. Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro found a consistency and rationality in response to issues that could only be explained by the existence of a system of informal deliberation. Dan Yankelovich also discovered the influence of public deliberation in changes in the quality of attitudes at the end of certain elections. More recently, Harwood Institute research has shown how this natural deliberation comes about. It begins to take shape over backyard fences, during coffee breaks, and at the grocery store. People begin by talking to those they live and work with, who aren’t necessarily of a like mind. The role of formally organized forums isn’t to introduce deliberation, but rather to distinguish it from other forms of public discourse and encourage it wherever collective decisions are being made.

This cultivation is essential. Although deliberation is an ancient political practice (even described in Egyptian hieroglyphics), it is vulnerable to attack. These days public deliberation is endangered by everything from hyperpartisan political rhetoric to the absence of front porches. Recognition of this threat to the democratic environment is one reason people are trying to strengthen the habit of reasoning together.

Strengthening the culture of deliberation has been the long-term goal of some National Issues Forums. Their objective has been to help communities (and the nation as a whole) move from making hasty responses to hot-button issues such as race and abortion to a habit of cultivating more considered judgment. These are schools, colleges, and libraries that believe the best way to affect the political culture is through the education of young people. I want to be clear: The fact that these institutions use deliberation in educational programs doesn’t mean that deliberation is merely a means of education. Its role is political—to work toward sound judgment on difficult issues. And it is this political but nonpartisan activity that makes students’ experiences in forums valuable. Participating in deliberations on issues students care about, when combined with other instruction, has proven effective in changing young people’s attitudes about the political system. As students report, it changes the way they “think and live.” And that effect carries over to their everyday lives where organic democracy has its roots.

Perhaps the most significant contribution deliberative forums make to civic education is to give people direct experience with the concepts that are at the core of self-government. Recall the point that Ben Barber makes—that the liberty essential to democracy is rooted in public choice, not individual preference. In a nation of shoppers, everyone knows what personal preference is, but collective choice is an abstraction unless it can be experienced. Public deliberation is an experience in public choice and therefore in public liberty.

Besides lack of scale, another reason that public deliberation has been discounted is that it is seen as just talk, divorced from action and lacking in political power. That is a legitimate challenge because the outcomes of forums have to be useful in solving political problems in order to be taken seriously. In fact, it would be silly to spend time deliberating over which course of action to take if no action is to be taken. Yet actions seldom follow directly from decisions. Other things have to happen before and after.

Deliberation doesn’t lead directly to action; first it leads to generating political will, securing commitments, and enlisting the people or organizations that will act. Deliberation paves the way for all that must follow.

That said, case studies have shown how deliberative forums have influenced policies and stimulated civic action. Failed school bond issues have passed; new programs for young people have been initiated; and institutions have amended their policy recommendations, along with the way they engage citizens. In nearly all cases, the forums were in or linked to organizations that could implement what was decided in the deliberations. (To ensure these practical outcomes, some deliberative projects now insist on a commitment to follow-up action before the forums begin.)

In spite of these cases, the perception persists that deliberation is just so much talk without any meaningful impact. And there are reasons why. Forums don’t exercise what institutional politics understand as power or result in what institutions consider action, but what they do provide is political and potent.

The institutional measure of political power is control over someone or something; laws and regulations compel what otherwise would not be done. Don’t steal! Don’t murder! Judged by this standard, public deliberation may not measure up because its outcomes don’t have the force of law. And the action that is set in motion by deliberation isn’t like institutional action, which is necessarily narrowly focused and specific. Build a bridge. Close a school. The power that public deliberation generates is power with, not over. And the action that follows is usually a broad band of complementary efforts, diverse but serving the same objective.

NIF participants seldom reach a unanimous decision in favor of one particular remedy; they are more likely to settle on an approach to a problem that can be served by a number of initiatives. Nonetheless, even though the decisions are not about specific solutions, forum deliberations have affected the decision making on where bridges should be built, voting district boundaries set, and schools located. They have also been used to influence individual behaviors such as when alcohol has been abused on college campuses or breast cancer mortality rates have risen as a result of a failure to get checkups.

Important as these effects are, many forum sponsors have had more in mind than action on one problem or issue. They have wanted to change the way their community goes about its business so that local politics will be more open to the public, more reasonable and fair, and more responsive to problems as citizens see them. These sponsoring organizations have used deliberation to create a new piece of civic architecture, not an auditorium, but a space in which politics could change.

Recall what Lani Guinier wrote about the political space inside a voting booth. No one with her background would say that voting isn’t essential to representative government. Yet her experiences in voter registration led her to conclude that the voting booth doesn’t provide enough space for the public to do all it must. She argues that deliberative practices significantly increase that space, which people can use to do things that they can’t do at the polling booth. For example, deliberative forums allow people to rename problems in their own terms rather than just professional, partisan terms. Citizens can reframe issues to identify more than the usual two opposing options for action. And they can set a course of action that drives complementary civic work. Voting booths provide essential political space, but not for these purposes.

Just as organic politics aims for a kind of action that is different from institutional action, it generates its own distinctive form of power. Certainly there is power in a legislative decree; yet there is also political power in a working political relationship, in the resolution of moral conflict without violence, and in a shared sense of purpose and direction for a community. This kind of power is in short supply these days. In fact, it could be argued that the world suffers less now from a lack of legislation or even from bad legislation than it does from polarized relationships, moral disagreements turned violent, and a lack of a sense of community among unlike others.

What makes public deliberation useful isn’t that it speaks in the language of institutional power—the language of policy making—it is that deliberation introduces another language drawn from other points of reference. While policy properly draws on expertise, deliberation draws on personal experience in family and community life. The public voice that emerges tends to be pragmatic, not dogmatic. This is why public deliberation helps counter (though not prevent) the polarization that increasingly immobilizes institutional politics.

Having to make choices together in deliberations leads to public thinking, which as Habermas pointed out, is not instrumental. Public thinking is moral reasoning; it is about what should be. Deliberation requires people to offer reasons for what they think ought to be, and not just take positions, so inevitable disagreements over what should be are not as prone to end in uncompromising conflict. Precisely because it is different, public thinking is attracting attention from institutional leaders. It provides them information unlike what they get from polls, focus groups, and constituency hearings. Public deliberation doesn’t result in strict instructions for officials, but it does identify what is and isn’t politically permissible—what the citizenry will and won’t accept to solve a problem.

More officeholders will pay attention if they find public deliberations can help them do a better job. Already health departments have organized forums on contentious local issues as a way of countering polarizations. On other issues, specifically high risk/low predictability ones such as the avian flu, the Centers for Disease Control has used deliberation in crafting policies that are politically viable. And the Southern Growth Policies Board uses results from deliberative forums in recommending policies to governors and legislators. No intermediary organizations or mediating institutions have been used to bring the public’s reflective judgments to these institutions. Most have depended on another type of often informal group I would call “formative.” Many of these have evolved into broad, citizen-based associations. Harry Boyte has encountered an increasing number of these groups in his work.

Historically, mediating institutions have been useful in bringing citizens’ concerns to the attention of institutional leaders. The formative organizations I am talking about can move the traffic in the other direction and bring institutional politics closer to organic democracy. For instance, the forum sponsors that work with the Southern Growth Policies Board don’t just bring the results of deliberations to governors and legislation; they build a stronger tie between SGPB and the citizenry that is not organized into interest groups.

What I am proposing here is admittedly tricky. When connections have been made between organic and institutional politics, the tendency has been to “colonize” organic democracy and reshape it in institutional terms. For instance, some NGOs have become more like government bureaucracies and less like formative agencies. What might seem the logical alternative—to make institutions more organic—would, I fear, be counterproductive. For the most part, institutions must behave as they do because of the tasks we assign them. I would suggest another strategy: a better alignment of these two spheres.

Institutions could take into account the distinctive characteristics of organic democracy and go about their work in ways that make it easier for the public to do its work. A good place to start, I have suggested in other Review pieces, would be to recognize the difference between the way citizens name or define issues and the way professionals and politicians name them.

In addition to criticisms of deliberation for lack of scale and political impact, the Review also usefully identifies a third criticism of efforts to cultivate public deliberation. It isn’t based on institutional standards for scale and effectiveness; it comes out of one of deliberation’s own claims, its ability to move the public from hasty reactions to public judgment. After 25 years, why is public judgment still suspect? Why hasn’t the evidence from Page and Shapiro or the various deliberative projects been more persuasive?

I have begun to think that maybe doubts about the public’s ability to make sound decisions can’t be removed and maybe shouldn’t be. I believe that no matter how massive the evidence, nothing will dispel the uncertainty about citizens and their capacity for self-government. The doubt has persisted since Plato. It is convenient to blame elites who have self-interest in perpetuating this doubt; but citizens, themselves, aren’t always sure they can depend on their fellow citizens.

Make no mistake, I am not proposing that the doubts be embraced because they’ve done a great deal of damage. They have certainly contributed to our current dilemma, as Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg describe it in their book Downsizing Democracy. The American political system has sidelined its citizens and privatized its public. If the doubts weren’t so entrenched, projects to get citizens off the sidelines might not have to sail against prevailing winds and we could correct the imbalance in our political system that has not only dislodged citizens but also relegated people to less powerful roles as spectators and consumers.

If the doubts will never go away, the challenge for the next 25 years is to engage them more effectively. Maybe doubt is inherent in democracy. After all, there is something about self-rule that is provisional and antiperfectionist. For democracy to work as it should, perhaps we only have to suspend our doubts. We don’t have to be convinced, just open to the possibilities of what we might do collectively. Surely all the potential in democracy hasn’t been realized yet. At the same time, never fully trusting of our collective selves, we remain properly suspicious of our infallibility. Our common duty is to test possibilities, to experiment and, above all, to learn. That is exactly what the culture of deliberation promotes.

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Imagine What We Might Do, Collectively

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