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Public Deliberation and Democracy

. . . afterthoughts, from the Kettering Review, Winter 2007

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By David Mathews

What does it take for democracy to work as it should? Or, put another way, what does it take for citizens to make sound decisions that will lead to effective action?

That has been the subject of every issue of the Review. And this issue completes a trilogy published in tribute to the contributions that deliberative forums have made in answering this fundamental question. Many of these forums have used the issue books in the National Issues Forums series, and a host of forum organizers in civic, educational, and other organizations have just celebrated their 25th anniversary. Anniversaries are occasions for reflection and, in that spirit, I want to sum up what seem to me important contributions of deliberative forums, drawing on Review articles that point to the larger significance of what might otherwise appear to be little more than nostalgia for the town meetings of early America.

Forums using the NIF issue books have encouraged reasoned deliberation on polarizing issues, such as abortion and race relations, and they have brought the voice of citizens to bear on critical problems, such as terrorism and the high costs of health care. (John Doble has done a splendid job of capturing the outcomes of these deliberations.)

Yet nothing has been more useful than the insights that have come from public deliberations about democracy itself and about what citizens can do to make the difference they would like to make in our political system—even if they doubt that they can.

Much like Alice in Wonderland, Kettering has followed public deliberation down into a rabbit hole and discovered a political world underneath the major institutions of government. The rabbit hole didn’t take the foundation into a fantasy world; rather we saw how a democracy actually engages its citizens, generates political will, informs judgment, and amasses the powers needed for effective action. We were seeing democracy in its most elemental form.

What the foundation found may not look like politics as most people understand the word, for what we found is rooted in family life and social relations. It is more organic than institutional. We found pathways to public participation that are open, though full of twists and turns, and beyond campaign rallies, voting booths, and council meetings. This public world is very much a political world and is just as Iris Marion Young recently described it in the Review—decentered. It isn’t located in just one set of institutions or confined within the machinery of government.

Democracy at this level is discounted in institutional politics. The reason, as I wrote in an “afterthoughts” last spring, may be that the differences between the two are extreme. In organic democracy, networks are more important than scale; power is relational, not legal; and a shared sense of direction trumps a majority vote. The public is not simply a consensual body; it is a primary source of political energy. That said, the institutions we use in governing ourselves rest on a foundation in this public world: schools, government agencies and their programs, even the media, draw their support from it. As a result, the insights about democracy that have come from forums have migrated into college classrooms, professional associations, and legislative bodies . . . as they should.

Public deliberation taps into a democracy of everyday life—the politics we don’t like to call politics. It opens doors for people who say, I don’t know how to get meaningfully involved, I really don’t. These doors can be opened without pressure from a powerful lobby and without the money for a major campaign contribution. All that’s needed is, first, an opinion about what should be happening around us; and second, a willingness to consider the opinions of others. These two provide the motivation for an exchange of views that leads to the collective decisions that are needed for effective collective actions.

What makes the choices difficult is that the things we citizens hold dear—like our security and freedom—are at stake. We can‘t have everything we want, however, because an action that protects our security might curb our freedom. Consequently, we have to choose. And to choose wisely, we have to face up to the consequences of our preferences; we have to work through the inevitable trade-offs that must be made. Making these choices is hard work; it is a real struggle. Yet making choices with other citizens is the first step toward making a difference.

Forums doing such “choice work” strike participants as unique. Observing an NIF forum, a journalist on a Washington talk show asked what had happened. “I’m not sure,” a participant answered, “but it was the opposite of what happens on your show.” Debates don’t do choice work because choice work isn’t done to determine a winner; it is to solve a problem. Discussions don’t do choice work either, because choice work requires more than sharing opinions. And to do choice work, people have to do more than examine factual information, win approval of their positions, or mediate competing interests.

People do choice work by doing what the ancients called deliberation. That is the kind of talk people use to teach themselves before they act. People have deliberated around the world and throughout human history. (There is even a symbol for deliberation in Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Deliberation goes beyond critical reasoning about what is efficient or technically sound. It has been called moral reasoning because it takes into account what people value. Things that we hold dear are at stake in the choices we make about acting on a societal problem, and they have to be taken into consideration. From the forums we learn that deliberation is basically a weighing of options for acting against what people consider most valuable in the context of a given problem. Deliberations recognize the significant differences that exist about what is most valuable.

To be sure, differences over what is valuable often pit humans against one another. But public deliberations have shown ways that people can disagree without polarizing conflict, for although the things people value are the source of disagreements, they are also shared. In deliberations, citizens confront the most basic of human motives, which psychologists have called the ultimate purposes or ends of life, and the means to attaining those ends. People value them, even as they differ over which is more important in a specific situation.

The insight that citizens value many of the same basic ends and means comes from hearing people describe the concerns they bring to forums. People respond with heartfelt stories that name the difficulty in ways that reflect what is important to them personally. As one story prompts another, citizens realize that they share many of the same concerns. This commonality of “things that we hold dear” may be one of the reasons why Jane Mansbridge found that a common good could be constructed out of related self-interests. What citizens hold most dear does not go out of fashion. Such things are enduring. Safety, for instance, is always valuable; citizens don’t have to be induced to care about their safety. Such bedrocks distinguish deliberation from the ever-changing topics that pass in and out of people’s attention. NIF issue books expose these bedrock concerns, so that people have opportunities to decide, in a given situation, whether their safety (for example) is more or less important than something else.

Rediscovering deliberation may become a point of departure for learning more about the political world and where public deliberation fits within it. Deliberation is but one in a series of public practices that are essential to self rule, and as people come to identify these other practices, they have been able to see the whole of democracy, enabling them to respond to many of the legitimate questions that critics raise about people’s ability to rule themselves wisely.

Critics may admit that people will become passionately involved in political matters out of personal concern, yet insist that citizens’ participation isn’t well informed. Doubts about people’s abilities to recognize what is best for themselves have grown as modern society has become more dependent on expert, professional knowledge. Without denying the importance of specialized information, deliberative forums have demonstrated the importance of another kind of knowledge essential in making sound choices. Cole Campbell calls it public knowledge: it informs public judgment, and it turns hasty reactions into more shared and reflective conclusions, as Dan Yankelovich explained in last fall’s Review.

Public knowledge is socially constructed in deliberative settings. Factual information is necessary though not sufficient to make sound choices about what should be done. There are no experts on what should be, but forum organizers have helped distinguish public knowledge from expert knowledge and have validated its importance. This has been important at a time when the attraction of research-based knowledge threatens to devalue other time-tested ways of knowing and deciding.

Critics persist, however: if people are capable of making sound decisions, they still don’t have the power to act on their decisions. Power, it is assumed, lies in legal authority and wealth. Most citizens have neither; and if deliberations don’t lead anywhere, people say the meetings are educational, not political. They are right. In politics, the question of power is inescapable, and power is the ability to act. So the question of what happens after forums is also inescapable.

With his sense of the importance of place based communities, Dan Kemmis might have predicted that the answer to this question would come from forums on local issues. The answer is, in one word, action: the purpose of deliberating is to make a decision about acting, either directly by citizens themselves or through governments. In communities, deliberative decision making has been used to launch various kinds of civic action that have often also prompted governmental or institutional action. And as citizens have deliberated and acted, they have discovered other types of political power.

Communities have used public deliberations to act on two types of difficulties that require public action. One is the polarization that immobilizes the political system and prevents action as partisan battles end in stalemates. Public deliberations can’t prevent these battles, but they can set in motion counterforces. When citizens rename problems in terms of what they value, they find that people have more than one or two concerns; there are typically several major concerns triggered by an issue, each suggesting a different course of action.

Consequently, deliberations begin with more options on the table than the usual two that set the stage for polarizing debates. The approach to a potentially polarizing problem that emerges from forums tends to be pragmatic. And because the specifics of what people decide may not be as important as changing the spirit in which a problem is addressed, taking a pragmatic approach to a polarizing problem is itself a type of action.

In other situations, citizens have deliberated to make decisions on problems that require a community as a whole to act. Such problems arise from multiple sources and need to be met by an array of responses from different sectors; no one group of people and no one institution can manage “wicked” problems, as they are called.

The purpose of public deliberation, then, is obvious: the community can’t act collectively unless there is a collective decision about how to act. And since a variety of actions are required to deal with problems that have multiple points of origin, deliberations have to provide the shared sense of direction needed for varied efforts to reinforce one another, rather than compete. Deliberation and action are necessarily intertwined. The need for collective action leads to deliberative decision making; the two are as one.

As people have deliberated to act on wicked problems, they have discovered sources of power other than money, position, and legal authority. The relationships that are built by doing choice work carry over into other collective efforts. Participants in deliberations uncover power in the commitments people make to one another to implement what has been decided. Commitments have been the source of covenants going back to the Mayflower Compact; they are key to any collective effort. As citizens have come to realize that they can generate power themselves, they have come to see that democracy operates on multiple generators.

Community forums have shown that, contrary to what some political theorists have argued, public deliberations don’t have to end in consensus in order to generate power. In fact, they seldom do—and that is because deliberations almost always broaden the definition of a problem. When people bring different ways of naming problems to the table, the names themselves suggest multiple options for action, and multiple options require a variety of resources as well as commitments from the people and organizations that control those resources.

No one group of citizens or single institution can adequately respond to a multifaceted problem. So rather than attempting the impossible, deliberations over a period of time have been used to hammer out a general approach to a problem or sense of direction. A shared sense of direction doesn’t require full agreement, yet it makes for a coherent response. In other words, public deliberations help communities bring together a wide array of resources and launch complementary initiatives across a broad front. Kettering has described this multifaceted response as “public acting.”

Public acting, a Harvard study found, isn’t always done by the forum organizers who convene the initial community deliberations; participants in these forums have sometimes regrouped into ad hoc associations and followed up on the forum results. More commonly, decisions have been implemented by forum participants who act through civic organizations that already exist. Forum convenors see their deliberations in the context of the larger civic universe and have built relationships with other local organizations. As a result, deliberation has begun to move from initial forums, which demonstrate the nature of choice work, to all the places where collective decisions are being made, which is where deliberation belongs in democracy.

Thanks to what has been learned from local forums with strong community ties, it has become obvious that deliberation isn’t just a different way of talking about issues. It is at the center of a different way of doing politics—a citizen-based politics. In order to explain what is different about this politics, Kettering borrowed a term from Harry Boyte and Nan Kari, calling all that happens before, during, and after forums “public work.” Public work is work done, as Cole Campbell explains, by, not just for citizens. The objective of this work is to produce public goods—the goods shared by all, such as better education for young people, safer streets, and a beneficial economy. The tasks that make up the work are interrelated; they fit together. For instance, naming problems in terms of what citizens hold dear is integral to deliberating, just as deliberating is an integral part of acting publicly across a broad front.

The tasks in public work are “practices” as distinguished from “techniques.” The ancient Greeks made the same distinction between techniques, which are used for purely instrumental reasons (hammering a nail), and practices that have both a practical benefit and an intrinsic value (playing a piano).

In the practice of deliberation, people do choice work, but deliberation itself has a value apart from just making choices: it builds relationships among citizens that are satisfying. In other words, public deliberation is not another of the numerous techniques that are available to facilitate group processes. Those processes can be useful, but they don’t serve the purpose of public deliberation. Public deliberation is a political act; it forms the polis.

The impact of deliberative forums and the other practices that make up public work may seem less obvious on global or international issues. How can people do anything about problems so complex and distant from their daily lives? Although citizens generally doubt that they have much influence on the “big” issues, participants in deliberations have persisted in looking for connections between what they might do locally and what is happening globally. The assumption that there are problems citizens can’t affect isn’t exclusive to international issues. The assumption is also made in solutions proposed for some of the more important domestic issues, where remedies professionals advocate tend to have little to say about what work citizens can do.

For example, the first options for restoring New Orleans after Katrina dealt largely with flood control measures, such as giant sea walls that only engineers can build, but rebuilding a community isn’t just an engineering challenge. On another issue, combating drug abuse, forum participants insisted on adding preventative actions by families and communities to options that only law enforcement agencies and prisons can do. Omissions of this sort have become obvious in forums when descriptions of the options on the table have failed to include consideration of citizens’ roles.

Americans also have a great deal to say about what representative governments should do. And that raises the question about what the relationship should be between the work of a deliberative citizenry and that of officeholders and the institutions they direct. Responding to that question has led to the most important insight from deliberative forums. It is about the nature of “the public.”

The loss of our collective identity as a public is so widespread that people talk most often about a public when they mean groups formed around a particular identity or interest. That’s fine as far as it goes, but if the collective public that the Constitution says is the sovereign authority for our country doesn’t really exist, then the entire democratic enterprise is in serious trouble. Public deliberation has done immeasurable service in making “We, the People” something other than an abstraction because it reveals a collective citizenry actually going about its work.

The indication that there could be a collective public—and not just “publics”—came from efforts to convey forum outcomes to elected representatives. The forums demonstrated that the citizenry is capable of speaking in a collective voice that is not a monotone, but is nonetheless coherent.

This voice is different from those of interest groups or of constituents and voters, and it is different still from the majoritarian voice in polls. The public voice is highly nuanced, and it is created in deliberations. Early on, forum organizers learned that just reporting the outcomes from their meetings had little effect on representatives. Yet officeholders would listen more attentively when it became clear that people had faced up to the tensions between competing options and could describe how they weighed trade-offs.

When real choice work had gone on, representatives were able to hear what one U.S. senator called “honest conversations.” Officials discovered what public thinking is like, as contrasted with the public opinions that polls attempt to measure. The voice coming from deliberative forums conveys the moral reasoning that goes on when citizens make up their collective mind.

A public voice isn’t a command voice; it doesn’t tell officials what they must do. Yet officeholders can gain a better sense of what people value and how citizens evaluate the effect that various options for action would have on the things that are dear to them. That is only possible when the value dimension of issues, and the tensions among them, have been made clear in public deliberations. Otherwise, there isn’t anything special for officeholders to hear.

The public that is visible in the forums can be seen as a dynamic force rather than as any particular body of people. This force is generated by citizens doing their work, and these dynamics occur in small groups of heterogeneous citizens who join forces to produce public goods. The scholar, Michael Warner, has a similar explanation of a democratic public: a sovereign public can’t be sovereign if it’s created by some other force, he argues, and so the public is created through the act of organizing itself. This organizing goes on in choice work. Like individual athletes who become a baseball team by playing baseball, the team is in the playing. The public is in the work.

In concluding these reflections, I am reminded that public deliberation’s full significance can’t be judged apart from the circumstances facing democracy today. The forums have a great deal to say to what might be called the megachallenges to self-rule. The political climate is changing; authoritarianism is returning; growing corruption violates one of the principles of self-government—the equal application of laws; ethnic and religious conflict abounds. The machinery of modern institutional democracy doesn’t seem able to deal with these challenges.

As Randa Slim, and before her, Lani Guinier, have written for the Review, the mainstay of representative government, voting, isn’t enough. Electoral campaigns can exacerbate conflict by promoting wedge issues that divide and polarize. Seeing these shortcomings, citizens grow cynical and withdraw from the political system to look for security in private enclaves.

Reform initiatives—flying under the banners of public participation, communitarianism, and public engagement—share Dan Kemmis’ conviction that we are at the end of one era and moving toward another. And although they aren’t exactly sure what is wrong, citizens also sense that something fundamental is amiss in our political system. They suspect that they have been sidelined—a suspicion that authors for the Review have said is justified.

The central challenge, therefore, is to put the public back into the public’s business. Obviously, I believe that deliberative forums are providing insights into the kind of public that can govern itself. I am also aware that these aren’t the only notions about what the public is and does; there is no fully comprehensive or “correct” definition of “the public.”

As Vincent Colapietro explained in a recent Review, what citizens should do lives within the question of democracy. Future generations may find that our generation was shortsighted, unrealistic, or just plain wrongheaded about democracy. But they should not find that we didn’t realize how important the role of the public is; or that we didn’t examine the consequences of our implicit assumptions about the citizenry.

Vincent Colapietro hit the mark when he wrote for the Review, “Whatever else the task of being a citizen encompasses, it imposes the need to deliberate about what it means to be a citizen.” But we do not make decisions about our citizenship in the abstract; we decide in the context of major issues of the day. Ultimately, the role of the public will be determined by what citizens expect of themselves. So decisions being made in deliberative forums aren’t just about which civic actions or government policies are best; they are also about what we will do as citizens. And these decisions are going to define the kind of democracy that will characterize this century.

This is why the last 25 years of deliberative forums have been so important; and why they will be critical in the future. It isn’t melodramatic to say that the meaning of democracy hangs in the balance; in fact, it does.

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Public Deliberation and Democracy

. . . afterthoughts, from the Kettering Review, Winter 2007