Does democratic deliberation change minds?

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 279-303

  Mackie, Gerry ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

change in view; coherence; deliberation; democracy; persuasion

Indexed keywords

EID: 38149083775     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06068301     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 22. The example is borrowed from Ted Goertzel, Turncoats and True Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and Disillusionment (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992).
2. Jon Elster, ‘Introduction’, in Rational Choice, edited by Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 1986).
3. P. Thagard, C. Eliasmith, P. Rusnock and C.P. Shelley, ‘Knowledge and Coherence’, in Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality, Vol. 11, edited by R. Elio (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
4. See Wlodek Rabinowicz, ‘Money Pump with Foresight’, URL: http://socpol.anu.edu.au/pdf-files/rabinowicz.pdf (Lund: Department of Philosophy, Lund University, 2002).
5. Gerry Mackie, ‘The Money Pump is Dry’, Social and Political Theory Program Brownbag Seminar, Australian National University, 6 February 2001.
6. See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
7. Geoffrey F. Miller, ‘Protean Primates: The Evolution of Adaptive Unpredictability in Competition and Courtship’, in Machiavellian Intelligence II, edited by Andrew Whiten and Richard W. Byrne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8. Robert B. Cialdini, Melanie R. Trost and Jason T. Newsom, ‘Preference for Consistency: The Development of a Valid Measure and the Discovery of Surprising Behavioral Implications’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 318-28.
9. Wendy Wood, ‘Attitude Change: Persuasion and Social Influence’, Annual Review of Psychology 51 (2000): 539-70.
10. The concept of cognitive consistency peaked with Robert P. Abelson, Elliot Aronson, William J. McGuire, Theodore M. Newcomb, Milton J. Rosenberg, and Percy H. Tannenbaum (eds), Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1968), an 84-chapter anthology.
11. Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), pp. 499-556.
12. James T. Tedeschi, Barry R. Schlenker and Thomas V. Bonoma, ‘Cognitive Dissonance: Private Ratiocination or Public Spectacle?’ American Psychologist 26 (1971): 691.
13. Gerry Mackie, ‘All Men Are Liars: Is Democracy Meaningless?’, in Deliberative Democracy, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 240-62.
15. This paragraph is based in part on Eagly and Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes, pp. 580-9, 668-70.
16. Muzafer Sherif, ‘A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception’, Archives of Psychology 22 (1935).
17. Solomon Asch, ‘Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority’, Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70 (1956); Serge Moscovici, ‘Social Influence and Conformity’, in Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd edn, edited by Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 363; J. Richard Eiser, Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 35-8.
18. Serge Moscovici, Social Influence and Social Change (London: Academic Press, 1976).
19. Moscovici, ‘Social Influence and Conformity’, pp. 386-7; Genevieve Paicheler, The Psychology of Minority Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 129-30.
20. Interpretation and replication of this charming result is a matter of controversy. See, for example, Robin Martin, ‘Majority Influence and Minority Influence: A Replication with an Unambiguous Blue Slide’, European Journal of Social Psychology 25 (1995): 373-81. But the basic results of the minority-influence school (that majority impact is greater on public and on direct private change, and that minority impact is greater on indirect private change and that consistency is important to minority impact) are robust, according to Wendy Wood, Sharon Lundgren, Judith A. Ouellette, Shelly Busceme and Tamela Blackstone, ‘Minority Influence: A Meta-Analytic Review of Social Influence Processes’, Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 323-45.
21. Moscovici, ‘Social Influence and Conformity’, p. 396.
22. Gabriel Mugny and Juan A. Perez, The Social Psychology of Minority Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
23. William J. McGuire, ‘Cognitive Consistency and Attitude Change’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60 (1960): 345-53. McGuire purposely used low academic achieving subjects, among whom he measured a ‘Socratic effect’, absent persuasion, that is, merely eliciting opinions on logically related issues increased consistency among the same opinions when elicited a week later. Ronald C. Dillehay, Chester A. Insko and M. Brewster Smith, ‘Logical Consistency and Attitude Change’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1966): 646-54 replicated McGuire's ‘Cognitive Consistency and Attitude Change’ with high academic achieving subjects, and confirmed all but the Socratic effect: the opinions of the more educated subjects were probably more consistent at the outset.
24. William J. McGuire, ‘Direct and Indirect Persuasive Effects of Dissonance- Producing Messages’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60 (1960): 354-8. See also William J. McGuire, ‘Dynamic Operations of Thought Systems’, American Psychologist 45 (1990): 504-12.
25. Milton J. Rosenberg and Robert P. Abelson, ‘An Analysis of Cognitive Balancing’, in Attitude Organization and Change, edited by Milton J. Rosenberg et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960).
26. Charlan Nemeth, ‘Compromising Public Influence for Private Change’, in Perspectives on Minority Influence, edited by Serge Moscovici, Gabriel Mugny and Eddy Van Avermaet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
27. Bernard Personnaz and Michel Guillon, ‘Conflict and Conversion’, in Perspectives on Minority Influence, edited by Serge Moscovici, Gabriel Mugny and Eddy Van Avermaet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
28. Aside from merely advancing its position, minority dissent also demonstrably stimulates the majority to more accurate and creative thinking. See Charlan Nemeth, ‘The Value of Minority Dissent’, in Minority Influence, edited by Serge Moscovici, Angelica Mucchi-Faina and Anne Maass (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1994).
29. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). See Jon Elster, ‘Arguing and Bargaining in Two Constituent Assemblies’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2 (2000): 345.
30. See for commentary Stephen J. Read and Lynn Carol Miller, ‘Dissonance and Balance in Belief Systems: The Promise of Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes and Connectionist Modeling Approaches’, in Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision Making: Psycho-Logic in Honor of Bob Abelson, edited by Roger C. Schank and Ellen Langer (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), pp. 211-3; Elijah Millgram and Paul Thagard, ‘Deliberative Coherence’, Synthese 108 (1996): 63-88; Thomas R. Shultz and Mark R. Lepper, ‘Cognitive Dissonance Reduction as Constraint Satisfaction’, Psychological Review 103 (1996): 219-40.
31. Shultz and Lepper, ‘Cognitive Dissonance Reduction as Constraint Satisfaction’; Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Millgram and Thagard, ‘Deliberative Coherence’; Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Barbara A. Spellman and Keith J. Holyoak, ‘If Saddam is Hitler, Then Who is George Bush?’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 913-33; Barbara A. Spellman, Jodie B. Ullman and Keith J. Holyoak, ‘A Coherence Model of Cognitive Consistency: Dynamics of Attitude Change During the Persian Gulf War’, Journal of Social Issues 49 (1993): 147-65; Stephen J. Read and Lynn Carol Miller (eds), Connectionist Models of Social Reasoning and Social Behavior (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998). For overviews, see Paul Thagard, Coherence in Thought and Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Read and Miller, ‘Dissonance and Balance in Belief Systems: The Promise of Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes and Connectionist Modeling Approaches’.
32. ‘For classical decision theory, and the microeconomics that is so heavily based on it, preferences are basic and mysterious. In contrast, the theory of deliberative coherence [and its computer implementation] are intended to explain why we have the preferences we do.’ See Paul Thagard and Elijah Millgram, ‘Inference to the Best Plan: A Coherence Theory of Decision’, in Goal-Driven Learning, edited by A. Ram and D.B. Leake (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 450.
33. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
34. Shultz and Lepper, ‘Cognitive Dissonance Reduction as Constraint Satisfaction’. I have renamed the conditions for the sake of clarity.
35. Holyoak and Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, pp. 240-7; Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions, pp. 47-50.
36. Paul Thagard and Karsten Verbeurgt, ‘Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction’, Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 1-24.
37. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
38. Millgram and Thagard, ‘Deliberative Coherence’ and Thagard and Millgram, ‘Inference to the Best Plan: A Coherence Theory of Decision’ sketch a coherence model of individual practical reason. Paul Thagard, ‘Ethical Coherence’, Philosophical Psychology 11 (1999): 405-22 has sketched a model of ethical coherence, which includes consideration of deductive, explanatory, deliberative, and analogical coherences. A model of democratic deliberation remains to be developed.
39. Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions, p. 59. The second square-bracketed phrase in the quote reverses an apparent transposition in the original.
40. Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 169-70.
41. See Brian Leiter, URL: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/on_rhetoric_civ.html.
42. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 17-19. Neither inference to the best explanation nor reflective equilibrium are merely coherentist: the first is founded on empirical observations and the second on considered convictions of justice.
43. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 54-8.
44. Gerald Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 41-3.
45. In a similar spirit, Ian Shapiro complains that political theorists frequently and wrongly think in terms of fruitlessly debated gross concepts, neglecting both the constraining relational nature of political concepts and their further constraint by empirical considerations. See Ian Shapiro, ‘Gross Concepts in Political Argument’, in The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
46. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 50.
47. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.
48. John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
49. John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 124-9.
50. Bernard Manin, ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’, Political Theory 15 (1987): 338-68. Habermas happened on ideas similar to Manin's: ‘Popular Sovereignty as Procedure’ is reprinted as Appendix I of Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, pp. 474-7.
51. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook and Lawrence R. Jacobs, ‘Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement: A Review of the Empirical Literature’, Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 328.
52. Spellman, Ullman and Holyoak, ‘A Coherence Model of Cognitive Consistency: Dynamics of Attitude Change During the Persian Gulf War’.
53. Simone Chambers, ‘Deliberative Democratic Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 307-26.
54. The claim of futility (along with perversity and jeopardy) is a frequent tactic in political discourse, according to Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).