Activists' views of deliberation

Journal of Public Deliberation

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2007, Pages

  Levine, Peter ^b   Nierras, Rose Marie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b NONE

Author keywords

Advocacy; Deliberation; Politics; Protest

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248631672     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC)/LogoLink North-South Meeting (Washington DC, June 2004), 21 participants from seven countries; LogoLink Partners' Meeting (Brighton, Enland, July 2004), 13 participants from seven countries; meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil (October 2004), 14 participants, all Brazilian; DDC Researcher and Practitioner Network Meeting (Washington DC, June 2005), 30 participants from six countries. Some individuals attended more than one of these meetings. Each meeting also had other purposes, but time was set aside for taped, focus-group style discussions of our topic.
2. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1973), translated by Thomas McCarthy in 1976 (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 110 and subsequent works.
3. More than a dozen methods are described in John Gastil and Peter Levine, The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (Jossey-Bass, 2005).
4. Von Lieres participated in a meeting (described below) of deliberation-proponents and in a meeting of democracy advocates.
5. Cf. Iris Marion Young, "Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy," in James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2003), p. 119.
6. Cf. Lynn M. Sanders, "Against Deliberation," Political Theory 25, no. 3 (June 1997), p. 362: "calling for compromise may be perilously close to suppressing the challenging perspectives of marginalized groups." And p. 370: "Deliberation is a request for a certain kind of talk: rational, contained, and oriented toward a shared problem."
7. They are also reader of theoretical works about deliberation; thus it is possible that some of their responses were drawn from the published literature and not from actual discussions with activists.
8. Similarly, Carolyn Hendriks writes that activists and interest groups "choose to support or oppose processes of direct citizen deliberation on the basis of instrumental calculation." Most activists are willing to engage in public deliberation "when it presents an opportunity to improve public relations and promote trust, distribute information and market products, sell and legitimise expertise or advocate for a particular cause." Carolyn M. Hendriks, "When the Forum Meets Interest Politics: Strategic Uses of Public Deliberation," Politics and Society, vol. 34, no. 4 (2006), p. 3.
9. Sanders, p. 361; 373.
10. Young, p. 105.
11. Hendriks (p. 126) quotes an Australian civil servant who worries that a deliberation will provide misleading information. Deliberation is "fabulous to tell you what would happen if you could educate the community and they could react. But it doesn't tell you how the actual public will react to a proposal. "No matter what recommendations come out of the consensus conference process - it's not going to change the public's minds."
12. Cf. Young, p. 118, who argues that "media contribute to naturalizing assumptions and making it difficult for participants in a discussion to speak outside of a certain set of concepts and images."
13. "Insidious prejudices may incline citizens to hear some arguments and not others. Importantly, this prejudice may be unrecognized by those citizens whose views are disregarded as well as by other citizens. ... Prejudice and privilege do not emerge in deliberative settings as bad reasons, and they are not countered by good arguments. They are too sneaky, invisible, and pernicious for a reasonable process." (Sanders, p. 353)
14. Hendriks interviewed corporate employees, government officials, and representatives of "public interest" groups who had faced decisions about whether or not to participate in public deliberations. For the purpose of this paper, the most relevant responses came from the public interest advocates (summarized on p. 254). They tended to see deliberation as an opportunity to advocate for their position, to present their views, to attract members, to "stimulate reform," and to "collect data on citizens' views." They also saw dangers, especially: "cooptation and tokenism," drains on their own time and money, excessively limited agendas, insufficient opportunities for interaction and discussion, and the chance that citizens' recommendations would be ignored.
15. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), pp. 239-240.
16. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," in King, I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, James M. Washington, ed. (New York, 1992), pp. 86-87, 88, 94.
17. Young, pp. 104, 107.
18. Robert B. Talisse, "Deliberativist Responses to Activist Challenges: A Continuation of Young's Dialectic." Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 31, no. 4, p. 428.
19. Fung, "Deliberation Before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World," Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 2005
20. Seminal definitions of deliberation as rational talk include Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), translated by T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, p. 54
21. Joshua Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy," in Hamlin and Pettit, eds., The Good Polity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For a critique, see Iris Marion Young, "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy," in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
22. See the comments of professional facilitators who assessed the quality of actual (taped) deliberations. See Jane Mansbridge, Matthew Amengual, and Janette Hartz-Karp, with Moira Pulitzer Kennedy, "Norms of Deliberation: An Inductive Study," forthcoming in the Journal of Public Deliberation, p. 13