Democratizing Deliberation

A Political Theory Anthology

Derek W. M. Barker, Noelle McAfee, David W. McIvor

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781945577307
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

Democratizing Deliberation brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative democracy. Edited by Kettering Foundation program officer Derek Barker, Noëlle McAfee, associate professor of philosophy at Emory University and associate editor of the Kettering Review, and Kettering Foundation research associate David McIvor, the collection reframes deliberative democracy to be sensitive to the deep conflicts, multiple forms of communication, and aspirations for civic agency that characterize real public deliberation. In so doing, the book addresses many of the most common challenges to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

Democratizing Deliberation includes a foreword by David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, and the following essays:

"Introduction: Democratizing Deliberation, " Derek W.M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, and David W.. McIvor

"Three Models of Democratic Deliberation, " Noëlle McAfee

"Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation, " Bernard Yack

"Difference Democracy: The Consciousness-Raising Group Against the Gentlemen's Club, " John S. Dryzek

"Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System, " Jane Mansbridge

"De-centering Deliberative Democracy, " Iris Marion Young

"Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities, " Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung

"Constructive Politics as Public Work: Organizing the Literature, " Harry C. Boyte

Public Reason and
Beyond: Broadening
Concepts of
Deliberation

Three Models of
Democratic Deliberation¹

by Noëlle McAfee

This paper comes out of my experience working at the intersection of three models of deliberative democracy: (1) the preference-based model held by many deliberative theorists in the social sciences; (2) the rational proceduralist model suggested by John Rawls’ political philosophy and Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics; and (3) what I will call an integrative model that has been overlooked in the literature but can be seen at work in most actual deliberative forums composed of members of a polity deliberating on that polity’s direction. The latter includes the National Issues Forums (NIF), a network of civic organizations that run deliberative forums consonant with a quasi-Deweyan approach to public deliberation. My aim in this paper is to see the extent to which any or all of these models can be mapped onto actual deliberative forums, including deliberative polls, the method developed by James Fishkin.² These three models are not mutually exclusive. A deliberator might see herself engaged in more than one sort at a time (perhaps testing out, as in the second sort, whether a justification for a policy is acceptable to all, while at the same time hoping to find some integration even where participants cannot reach accord, as in model three). Any combination could work, in practice, even though some of the methods may, again in practice, work at cross purposes. For example, focusing largely on the normative aims of the second model might lead one to minimize the empirical facts of people’s actual, strategic aims, of which the third model is highly aware. I want to draw out the theoretical differences between these approaches and show how these differences matter in practice.

My own intersection among these three approaches is rather makeshift: I happened to begin working with Fishkin on a deliberative poll we called the National Issues Convention (NIC) while I was a graduate student at the University of Texas (writing a dissertation, in part, on Jürgen Habermas). I was never Fishkin’s student, rather our collaboration began because of my association with the Kettering Foundation, which is a major force behind the NIF.³ Fishkin became allied with NIF and the Kettering Foundation because of their shared interests in deliberation and because Kettering offered support with finding trained moderators and putting together issue briefing books. All the while, most of the deliberative theory swirling in the air drew on the resurgence of political philosophy brought on both by Rawls’ work and by Habermas’ notion of reasoning, that in moral, ethical, and political discourse participants should try to offer justifications for their favored policies that would be agreeable to all others affected by a policy.

My particular affiliations aside, the intersection of deliberative thought in the interstices of deliberative polling, normative political theory, and actual deliberative practice is a more general phenomenon. All draw on the key term deliberation, and observers expect a commonality because of this shared term. But this intersection is not an altogether seamless one. Many of those who take part in deliberative experiments have rather different ideas of what deliberation means; still, the term often gets used as if everyone agrees, though they do not. The differences are not merely semantic; they are rooted in very different conceptions of politics. Because it operates at the intersection of these differences, deliberative polling, specifically the two National Issues Conventions held in the United States, offers a useful case study of how these approaches converge and diverge. In these pages I describe the three models I see at work and offer some preliminary ideas of how they make their way into deliberative polling. My goal here is not to offer an encyclopedic account of these models but rather enough details to flesh out the key differences in their orientations and goals.

The Preference-Based Model

The first model I consider comes out of the social sciences, primarily via political scientists’ adoption of the language and theoretical structures of economics.⁴ From the point of view of classical economics, human beings are homoeconomicus, beings who see the social world as a market in which they try to maximize their own preferences. Political science takes this notion and makes it democratic by saying that a democracy would be rule by the people in a way that helps them maximize, as much as possible, individual’s preferences. But given that one person’s aims will no doubt conflict with another’s, democracy calls for some way in which to compromise or aggregate preferences while treating every individual as an equal, respecting the preferences of all. Though aggregating, e.g., voting, seems to be a very democratic decision procedure, it has its problems, especially when individuals rankings of options are somehow incoherent (for example, ranking a conservative option first, a liberal one second, and a moderate one third) or when a group of individuals rankings show no clear winner (for example, when one person prefers A to B, another B to C, and a third C to A).

Social choice theorists have tried to solve such problems, attempting to see how social or public policies can be devised that respect and preserve the preference rankings of the individuals within a polity. There are two sides of social choice theory: first, the aspect of individuals ranking their preferences between two or more policy options; second, that of social planners devising ways to meld these numerous, individual rankings into one rank ordering of policy options. Yet social choice theorists have yet to find a nonproblematic way to turn a set of individual preferences into a social preference order.⁵ Most agree that people’s individual, given preferences should be aggregated in some way; but how? What kind of voting system would ensure that the will of the people really does emerge, especially when there is no clear first choice? For example, what happens when the option that got the second amount of votes is nearly everyone’s last choice? Our winner-takes-all system leads to all kinds of counterintuitive inconsistencies and difficulties, and social choice theorists have taken it upon themselves to try to solve these problems, often by mustering intricate formalisms and tackling logical minefields. Yet decades of failure have led to the view that there is no will of the people that can be objectively put forward. Any aggregation scheme introduces its own shape to what this will seems to be. Moreover, no scheme seems to do a good job of illuminating social preference without being vulnerable to individual voters manipulating the system to get their favorite candidate chosen. Perhaps the whole enterprise of trying to develop a public policy that is consistent with individual preferences is doomed, along with democracy in general.⁶

Certainly by the 1970s, this is where the science of politics had led: to the view that democracy is a vain hope, inconsistent and absurd. This was an odd place for a discipline to land, especially one that began in part as an attempt to understand the mostly American democratic project.⁷ Perhaps in response to this pessimism, a more optimistic area of study has emerged in political science departments since about the mid-1980s: deliberative democratic theory. Social scientists who have taken the deliberative turn reject the following views: (1) that individual preferences are fixed prepolitically; (2) that they are primarily self-regarding; (3) that individuals are rational to be ignorant and hence their preferences ill-informed; and (4) that each individual set of preferences will likely remain incoherent. Jon Elster has argued that deliberation is a means for transforming individual preferences.⁸ Fishkin and his colleagues argue that deliberation can help people develop opinions that are more informed, reflective, and considered.⁹ Because their views retain the social science focus on individual opinions and preferences, I call this model the preference-based view. Still, as I am noting, there are key differences between deliberative theories of preference and the old classical economists’ notions. The old view holds that preferences are given in advance of the political process and that each individual’s preferences are primarily self-regarding, that individuals tend to put their own desires before others. Hence politics is an arena for getting what one wanted before entering into the political arena. From a deliberative standpoint, preferences are not fixed in advance; they can be informed with balanced briefing materials and expert knowledge and transformed through deliberations with others, making them other-regarding, not just self-regarding. In short, these deliberative theorists think that people can transform their preferences for the better during deliberative, informative discussions with others, making them more collective, informed, and cognizant of the concerns of others in the community.¹⁰ Such preferences would not be so difficult to aggregate rationally and democratically. Hence democracy becomes a possibility, democracy being a kind of governance in which preferences transformed through deliberation become the basis for public policy.

In this view, though, public policy is not formed in these deliberations. Given that deliberators will rarely unanimously agree on what policy is best, a deliberative polity still needs some kind of external decision-making procedure.¹¹ This might be a direct vote or it might be a matter of transmitting up the political ladder the new, improved set of individual preferences. Unlike conventional democratic politics, where policymakers make policy on the basis of unreflective preferences captured in standard public opinion polls, this model offers policymakers a snapshot of what a deliberative public thinks. That is how John Dryzek characterizes deliberative polling:

From the point of view of deliberative democracy, ordinary opinion polls are pointless because they register only unreflective preferences. The idea of a deliberative poll is to assemble a random sample of members of the public, have them deliberate about the key issues of the election, poll them on their positions on the issue, and publicize the results. The intent here is to model the distribution of opinions that the general public would hold if they were able to engage in genuine deliberation, a far cry indeed from the unreflective preferences which ordinary opinion polls register.¹²

Through deliberation, participants turn their unreflective preferences into what Fishkin calls “considered judgments,”¹³ but ultimately these are still judgments that will be framed as a policy after the deliberations have concluded. As Dryzek notes:

The opinion poll administered at the conclusion of deliberation requires the analyst to summarize and aggregate opinions, so it is not clear how this particular transmission mechanism solves the problems of aggregation as defined by social choice theory except by handing them back to the institutions of government.¹⁴

Without diminishing the importance and usefulness of deliberative polling, I do want to highlight one of its self-imposed limitations (which others might take to be a benefit): it truncates the political task of trying to turn individual views into public judgments. The end result of a deliberative poll is not a public expression about what might be the best course of action. It is a poll, one that shows the distribution of individual opinions. However considered these are, they do not equal an integrated policy. Even aggregating the results does not lead to a coherent, democratic policy, or even the will of the people, as social choice theorists well know. A legislature might take on the political task of trying to integrate the various needs, aims, and constraints into something like a coherent public policy. If it does so on the basis of individuals considered judgments, so much the better. But we should be keenly aware that the political work occurs at this higher level, not at the level where deliberators work on transforming their own preferences. At this level, they stop short of the task of trying to decide what we, as a polity, should do. The preference-based view shows how individual opinions are transformed into superior opinions, but not into public policy.

Why is this? Why do deliberative polls shun any deliberation aimed at developing a public voice on an issue? Like other deliberative theorists, preference-based adherents are committed to democracy. Their commitment is shaped by the views that democracy calls for respecting individual preferences and that anything that exerts any untoward (e.g., coercive) force on individual preferences is undemocratic. Such forces include factions, the tyranny of the majority, social pressure, and the like. Hence there is some tension inherent in an individualist, preference-based model of deliberation, for the more people deliberate in public with others, the more likely they are to be moved by these others in their midst. Therefore, preference-based deliberative theorists try to guard against public pressure on individual deliberations, a real problem in the setting of public deliberation. Their goal is for participants to use deliberative settings to transform their preferences without being unduly swayed by others. In their view, deliberations should be geared toward giving participants full information and a clearer picture of how each option on the table would or would not satisfy each participants preferences.¹⁵ Deliberations should supply expertise and an appreciation of others concerns, not social suasion. These theorists tend to worry that deliberations might lead participants to conform to others’ expectations rather than to refine their own preferences.¹⁶ T...