Rethinking democratic deliberation: The limits and potential of citizen participation

Polity

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 335-360

  Rosenberg, Shawn W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Collaboration; Deliberation; Democracy; Democratic theory; Governance; Political psychology

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547262683     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300073     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. For example, see Seyla Benhabib, "Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 67-95;
2. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002);
3. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966);
4. Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
5. Joshua Cohen, "Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy? in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 95-119;
6. Joshua Cohen, "Deliberation and democratic legitimacy;' in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 67-92;
7. John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics and Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
8. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996);
9. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
10. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
11. Given the consideration of deliberative democracy as a response to citizen indifference and alienation, the focus here is on more participatory rather than elite conceptions of deliberation.
12. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Volumes 1 and 2 (Boston: Beacon, 1984/1987);
13. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms', Benhabib, "Toward a Deliberative Model."
14. I choose to address the Anglo-American approach first because I believe it has had the greatest impact on democratic theory and on the newly emerging empirical research on democratic deliberation. That said, I believe the Habermasian approach to be a very important one and am clearly sympathetic to it. I will consider its strengths and weaknesses in a separate article.
15. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
16. In Cohen's terms: "In such a procedure, participants regard one another as equals; they aim to defend and criticize institutions and programs in terms of considerations that other have reason to accept, given the fact of reasonable pluralism and the assumption that those others are reasonable; and they are prepared to cooperate in accordance with the results of such a discussion, treating those results as authoritative." Cohen, "Procedure," 100.
17. Mark Warren, "Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation" American Political Science Review 86 (1992): 8-23;
18. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement:
19. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond.
20. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement; Cohen, "Deliberation."
21. This emphasis on the educative effects of public participation on a readily educated citizen can be traced back to J. S. Mill's comments.
22. What is still more important is the practical discipline which the character obtains, from the occasional demand made upon the citizens to exercise, for a time and in their turn, some social (public) function.. . . He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in the case of conflicting claims, by other rules than his private partialities; to apply at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good: and he finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply reasons to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest. He is made to feel himself one of the public and whatever is for their benefit to be for his benefit.
23. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Considerations of Representative Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 149-51.
24. Warren, "Democratic Theory"
25. Bohman, Public Deliberation;
26. Jack Knight and James Johnson, "What Sort of Political Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?" in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy.
27. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement.
28. Cohen, "Deliberation."
29. Bohman, Public Deliberation; Knight and Johnson, "What Sort."
30. Whereas there is some disagreement on the degree to which deliberation is linked to concerns with justice and the common good, many would agree with Guttman and Thompson's emphasis on the motivation "to find fair terms of cooperation." (Democracy and Disagreement, 65) or Rawls's stipulation that being reasonable involves "a willingness to propose fair terms of cooperation" (Political Liberalism, 134).
31. The concern with the common good is also evident in Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 27-29 and in Cohen, "Procedure," 105.
32. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement.
33. Cohen, "Procedure;" Cohen, "Deliberation;" Jack Knight, "Constitutionalism and Deliberative Democracy," in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159-69.
34. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 65.
35. Cohen, "Procedure."
36. Harold H. Kelley, "The Processes of Causal Attribution," American Psychologist 28 (1973): 107-28;
37. Shelley E. Taylor and Susan T. Fiske, "Point of View and Perceptions of Causality" Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 32 (1975): 439-45.
38. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Eugene: Oregon Research Institute, 1982).
39. J. Smelsund, "The Concept of Correlation in Adults," Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 4 (1963): 165-73;
40. G. Quattrone and Amos Tversky, "Causal versus Diagnostic Contingencies: On Self-Deception and on the Voter's Illusion," Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 46 (1984): 237-48
41. Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1958).
42. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957);
43. Robert P Abelson, Elliot Aronson, William J. McGuire; Theodore M. Newcomb, M. Rosenberg, and Paul H. Tannebaum, eds., Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook (Chicago: McNally, 1968).
44. Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
45. Susan Jarboe, "Group Communication and Creativity Process," in Handbook of Communication Theory and Research, ed. Lawrence R. Frey (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999);
46. Kathleen M. Propp, "Collective Information Processing in Groups," in Frey, Handbook of Croup Communication Theory and Research.
47. Jean Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);
48. Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (New York: Basic Books, 1958).
49. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962)
50. and Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978);
51. James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
52. Robert L. Selman, The Growth of Interpersonal Understanding: Developmental and Clinical Analyses (New York: Academic Press, 1980);
53. Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
54. Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development: Vol. 1 & 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981/ 1984).
55. Shawn W. Rosenberg, The Not So Common Sense: Differences in the Way People Judge Social and Political life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
56. Shawn W. Rosenberg, "Can Deliberation Work and What is the Best Way to Conduct It?" Paper delivered at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
57. The issue here is not one of the irreconcilability of the substantively different cognitive schemas people may draw upon to interpret political events or each others' suggestions. Rather the focus is on differences in the qualities of the schemas individuals can construct or deploy leading to differences in their ability to comprehend a political event or another person's point of view.
58. For example, see Bohman, "Deliberative Democracy?
59. This is not an essentialist claim. Rather this is to suggest that differences in the structure of the social and communicative context to which individuals are exposed may produce basic differences in how those individuals reason.
60. For an early work on cognitive deficiencies and the inadequacies of deliberative processes, see Janis's work on "groupthink" and his later suggestion of specific ways to improve individual functioning and group performance. See Irving Janis and Leon Mann, Decision-making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977).
61. Unlike the remedial orientation suggested by the social psychological research, the learning sought is more fundamental. The goal here is to foster a change in the quality of a person's thinking such that a whole set of structurally related biases and limitations do not arise. Given this goal, the focus shifts away from short-term pre-deliberative training designed to inoculate against particular deliberative deficiencies and turns toward longer-term educative efforts to structure the deliberative exchanges in which individuals may be involved.
62. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action:
63. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms;
64. Cohen, "Deliberation."
65. Iris M. Young, "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy?' in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 120-37.
66. John Forester, The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999).
67. Bohman, Public Deliberation:
68. Guttmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement;
69. Cohen, "Deliberation."
70. Iris M. Young, "Justice Inclusion and Deliberative Democracy" in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151-58.
71. David G. Myers and H. Lamm, "The Group Polarization Phenomenon," Psychological Bulletin 83 (1976): 602-62.
72. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond.
73. Tali Mendelberg, "The Deliberative Citizen: Theory and Evidence," in Political Decision-Making, Deliberation and Participation, ed. Michael Delli Carpini (San Diego: Elsevier, 2002).
74. Ioanna Dimitracopoulou, Conversational Competence and Social Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
75. See for example, the view of the relationship between personality and social structure developed by Talcott Parsons in Social Structure and Personality (New York: Free Press, 1964),
76. or the view of the relationship between the structure of communication and cognitive structure presented by Habermas in "Moral Development and Ego Identity? in his book Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979).
77. For a more elaborated statement of this view of the social psychology of personal and social development, see Rosenberg, The Not So Common Sense, especially chapter 2.
78. Lawrence J. Walker, "The Development of Moral Reasoning," in Annals of Child Development Volume 5, ed. R. Vasta (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), 53-78;
79. Kegan, In Over Our Heads.
80. Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking.
81. Developmental psychologists following the Vygotskian tradition emphasize this process of internalization of structured ways of reasoning close to, but beyond one's own. See for example, Vygotsky, Mind in Society;
82. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind;
83. Diane M. Hogan and Jonathan Tudge, "Implications of Vygotsky's theory for peer learning," in Cognitive Perspectives on Peer Learning, ed. AM. O'Donnell and A. King (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).
84. Shawn W. Rosenberg, "Types of Deliberation and the Construction of Democratic Citizenship," in Can the People Deliberate? Theory and Research in Democratic Deliberation, ed. Rosenberg (London: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming).
85. A consideration of how to design deliberative institutions so that they foster pedagogical and community building goals is beyond the purview of this paper. It is a question that is just now becoming the focus of empirical research. See, for example, Jurg Steiner, ed., "Special Issue: Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Democracy," Acta Politica 40 (2005): 153-267. There is, however, suggestive research on how social interaction fosters moral development. See, for example,
86. Lawrence Kohlberg, "Revisions in the Theory and Practice of Moral Development," New Directions in Child Development 1 (1978): 83-87;
87. Lawrence J. Walker, P. Gustafson and K. H. Henning, "The Consolidation/Transition Model of Moral Reasoning Development," Developmental Psychology 37 (2001): 187-97;
88. or group creativity (for a review, see Jarboe, "Group Communication").
89. Tali Mendelberg and J. Oleske, "Race and Public Deliberation," Political Communication 17 (2000): 169-91.
90. Myers and Lamm, "The Group Polarization."
91. As a counter to the individualism of deliberative democratic theory, the emphasis here is on the constructive quality of communicative exchange. However, this is tempered by a more social psychological understanding of the dynamics of social interaction. In this view, communicative structures are in part self-constituting, but they are also constituted by the capacities of individuals to engage one another and follow social instructions. Similarly individuals are partly self-constituting and partly constituted by the communicative and interactive settings in which they regularly find themselves. This sets up a tension that fosters both social and psychological development. For a more elaborated statement, see chapter 2 of Rosenberg, The Not So Common Sense.