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Speaking of Politics Interview

The Politics of Self-Rule: Six Public Practices

From Connections, Winter 2005

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By David Mathews

Beginning this past July and continuing through the next six months, Kettering trustees, program officers, and associates—along with independent researchers—have been carefully reviewing the foundation’s studies of citizens and their role in our democracy. Ten years ago, we concentrated on the way citizens make collective decisions. Now we recognize that decision making is only one element in a series of interrelated activities that begin well before people are ready to decide and continue afterward in collective actions.

Today, the research on citizens deals with everything citizens can do, from naming issues in their terms to learning from their efforts to solve common problems. 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?”

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 I just mentioned. 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. Watch lawyers battle with one another over the name given to a case and you will see what I mean. Whether the name is “murder” or “manslaughter” makes a great difference.

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 trade-offs that have to be made. That is all part of assessing or weighing.

You can hear it going on over any lunch counter or water cooler 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 mutual promises” or “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 wooden matreshka dolls from Russia do. Naming, framing, and deliberating are included when people learn from the commitments they made (or didn’t make) and the actions they took. 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.”

As background for this issue of Connections, I should say a bit about where we are in this work. 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.”

As I explained, 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, and its effect on major issues has been documented in longitudinal studies, such as those cited in Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro’s The Rational Public. Their analysis of responses to thousands of questions on a wide variety of policy issues over 50 years 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.

Why are public policy preferences, over time and on the whole, so consistent, rational, and stable? Page and Shapiro believe that it is because the “cool and deliberate sense of the community” eventually prevails on most issues. They cite issues where public opinion developed independently from government policy and paved the way for a change in that policy.

Why, then, worry about deliberation at all? 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 in modern America 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’ issue books model deliberation and contribute to a better understanding of the hard work involved in making difficult decisions.

The best way to understand deliberation, as I said at the beginning of this article, 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 recently 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.” One of our greatest challenges in the research is to describe the distinctive way citizens go about deciding.

Communicating the results of NIF forums to members of Congress, officials in the executive branch, and the Washington media, gives the foundation an opportunity to contrast the way that citizens form collective opinions with the way officials make up their minds. We have found that public thinking isn’t ideological, but quite pragmatic; it isn’t hegemonic, but sensitive to differences in circumstances. (People may favor doing “x” under one set of circumstances, but adamantly oppose that action if the context is different.) Federal policy, in contrast, has to be uniform; it is necessarily one-size-fits-all.

Without assuming one way of coming to decisions is better than another, the foundation has to do more to explain the unique characteristics of public thinking and avoid giving the impression that its research can show what people really think.

During this six-month review, the foundation has considered the applications of the findings about the work of a democratic citizenry to three critical problems in contemporary America:

The first is the increasing polarization in the political system that is paralyzing legislative bodies. When the differences of opinion characteristic of a democracy harden into ideologically rigid positions, representative assemblies lose their capacity for practical problem solving. Providing more information about how citizens think when they deliberate may help counter the tendency for legislative bodies to be less than deliberative when they are polarized by ideological or partisan pressures.
The second is the persistence of “wicked problems” that frustrate communities because they refuse to go away despite the best efforts of major institutions. The characteristics of these problems were discussed in the April 2004 issue of Connections. What is being called the “achievement gap” in public schooling is an example. This and similar problems might be reframed in terms that reflect the public’s concerns and, once renamed, then reframed around a broader set of options than are now being considered.
And the third is the increasing distance between professional or expert views of the country’s problems and the citizenry’s perception of these problems. Here, too, it might be helpful to expend professional diagnoses to include the ways a deliberative public understands problems.

Other authors will flesh out what we are learning about the possible application of the foundation’s research to these three megaproblems. They will tell you about experiments that are under way to test our findings. For example, state representatives and citizens have collaborated in conducting town meetings on issues similar to those on the agendas of legislatures in order to see what influence public thinking might have on the decision making that goes on in these assemblies. You may recall that Senator Les Ihara of Hawaii wrote about one of the first of these experiments in the July 2003 Connections. Now, the National Conference of State Legislatures is taking up the challenge.

Others in this issue describe the effects of public action or work in solving community problems and the role that deliberation plays in promoting collective action. And still others will say more about closing the distance between professionals and citizens, which, in some fields, has degenerated into name-calling. A corrective effort, called “civic professionalism,” is under way that emphasizes “practical reasoning,” which has some similarities to public thinking.

All in all, we hope this issue will not only show essential connections in democratic politics but also point out connections between your work and the work of the foundation.

Kettering Foundation

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The Politics of Self-Rule: Six Public Practices

From Connections, Winter 2005