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Three Models of Democratic Deliberation

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2004
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Three Models of Democratic Deliberation McAfee, Noëlle, 1960- The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number 1, 2004, pp. 44-59 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jsp.2004.0007 For additional information about this article Access Provided by Emory University Libraries at 09/14/12 2:56AM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsp/summary/v018/18.1mcafee.html
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2004. Copyright ' 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 44 Three Models of Democratic Deliberation 1 NOËLLE MCAFEE University of Massachusetts Lowell 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s political philosophy and Jürgen Habermass 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 com- posed 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 pub- lic 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 delib- erative polls, the method developed by James Fishkin (1991; 1995). 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 meth- ods 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 ap- proaches 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 Univer- sity 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. 2 Fishkin be- came allied with NIF and the Kettering Foundation because of their shared in- P S J
Three Models of Democratic Deliberation McAfee, Noëlle, 1960- The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number 1, 2004, pp. 44-59 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jsp.2004.0007 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsp/summary/v018/18.1mcafee.html Access Provided by Emory University Libraries at 09/14/12 2:56AM GMT JSP Three Models of Democratic Deliberation1 NOËLLE MCAFEE University of Massachusetts Lowell 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’s political philosophy and Jürgen Habermas’s 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 (1991; 1995). 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.2 Fishkin became allied with NIF and the Kettering Foundation because of their shared inJournal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 44 THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 45 terests 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’s work and by Habermas’s 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.3 From the point of view of classical economics, human beings are homo economicus, 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, individuals’ 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 46 NOËLLE MCAFEE 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 (Elster and Hylland 1986, 2). 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.4 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 (Smith 1997). 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 (Elster 1998, 1). Fishkin and his colleagues argue that deliberation can help people develop opinions that are more informed, reflective, and considered (Luskin et al. 2002). 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’ THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 47 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 selfregarding. In short, these deliberative theorists think that people can transform their preferences for the better during deliberative, informative discussions with others, making them more reflective, informed, and cognizant of the concerns of others in the community.5 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 (Miller 1992). 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. (Dryzek 2000, 55) Through deliberation, participants turn their unreflective preferences into what Fishkin calls “considered judgments” (Luskin et al. 2002), 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. (Dryzek 2000, 55) 48 NOËLLE MCAFEE 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-product of a deliberative poll is not any kind of collective judgment about the nature of the problem and what ought to be done. Moderators are specifically instructed to avoid questions that might, to some, seem at all coercive, such as, “What do you think we [meaning the political community] should do?” or “Is there any common ground for action on this problem?” 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 participant’s preferences.6 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 (Elster 1998, 15; Sunstein 2003). They think this phenomenon would result in a kind of “false consciousness” where participants are not fully aware of their own, true self-interests and THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 49 opinions. For them, democracy means rule by fully informed individuals. Autonomy equals not being unduly influenced by anyone else. The social scientists’ approach to deliberative theory goes a long way toward turning homo economicus into an other-regarding democratic citizen. But at the end of their deliberations, there is no discernible public transformation. Each individual might transform his or her individual views, in light of more information and exposure to others’ views; but there’s no expectation that the result might be public views; they will just be more rational and considered views. At the end of the deliberations, individuals’ views still have to be transformed into some kind of social ordering. If everyone were to agree on the nature of a problem and what policy is best, there would be no difficulty. But most anyone steeped in the facts of public life, Elster included, thinks this is unlikely (only the normatively-oriented, whom I turn to in the next section, think this is a possibility). Given the fact of disagreement, some way needs to be found to make collective decisions. If the way is through voting, then the preference-based theorists have come full circle to the problem of articulating “the will of the people” out of a set of individual preferences. Bound to individualism, preference-based thinkers still face the challenge of social ordering. The Rational Proceduralist Model The second model I want to lay out here comes from a different direction, not the supposedly empirical and normatively-agnostic orientation of the social scientist, but the normatively-steeped orientation of the philosopher.7 The second model sets a very high bar on what kinds of reasons deliberators should offer and accept: participants should deliberate upon the basis of reasons that are rational and acceptable to all. This view specifies what can count as a good reason and what kind of procedures should be in place to ensure a good outcome. Accordingly, I call this view the rational proceduralist model of deliberation. In this second model, citizens are guided by a will to come up with universalizable norms—or at least norms that are acceptable to all those affected by any given policy. This view can be traced back to both the social contract tradition of consent theory and to the Kantian normative claim that we, as rational individuals, can act morally by only acting on the basis of maxims (or policies) that can be rationally universalized, i.e., applied to all equally and without contradiction. Here we have an explicitly philosophical conception of autonomy: autonomy means acting and choosing on the basis of universalizable norms; true self-rule is to live by rules that hold for all, not just for oneself. Rational deliberators offer arguments concerning justice and the public good. In this view, motivations of self-interest stand in the way of developing legitimate 50 NOËLLE MCAFEE public policies, for these policies should be good for all. This theory encourages deliberators to adopt an impartial, objective point of view and to offer reasons (not rhetoric) that all others would find compelling. Otherwise, a policy would not attract general consent—and here I mean consent of all those rational agents affected by a policy. Irrational agents need not be heeded; in fact, according to Gutmann and Thompson (1996), they should not even be in the room.8 Though this view sees deliberators as always already in a community, it does tend to think of deliberators as capable of imagining themselves stripped of their affective and communal associations, roles, and conventions so that they might be able to deliberate objectively and impartially. They need to use their reason so as to imagine how a policy would affect anyone else. They are rational agents. In this model, deliberation is a way in which individuals collectively decide whether a policy is legitimate. A policy or law is just only if (1) all those affected by it have an opportunity to consider, collectively, whether or not the policy or law is just; and if (2) all those affected assent to the policy. Deliberation, then, is the process through which people decide whether a proposal is normatively or ethically right. Participants decide this through the back and forth of argumentation, with everyone having an equal opportunity to put forward his or her own case. Ultimately, the “unforced force of the better argument” will prevail; that is, all the participants should ultimately agree upon which proposal is most rational and right. The rational proceduralist model considers deliberative democracy as a way to create legitimate public policy, that is, policies that all citizens would, under ideal conditions, have authored themselves. Both Habermas and the political philosopher John Rawls contribute to this approach. As Elster writes, “the arguments advanced by Habermas and Rawls do seem to have a common core: political choice, to be legitimate, must be the outcome of deliberation about ends among free, equal, and rational agents” (Elster 1998, 5). It is no wonder then that Habermasians like Seyla Benhabib and Rawlsians like Joshua Cohen arrive at roughly the same philosophical position on deliberation. Whether one adopts the Habermasian regulative ideal of the ideal speech situation or the Rawlsian regulative ideal of the original position, in democratic deliberations all those affected should recognize the outcome as in keeping with what they would have chosen had they had an opportunity to participate. For Habermas, the operative form of reason in this democratic setting is communicative, internal to discursive practices. Though Habermas’s theory of communicative action draws heavily on American pragmatist conceptions of self, truth, and action, ultimately it looks very much like Enlightenment rationality with its claims to universality, impartiality, and, in Benhabib’s hands, reversibility of perspectives (see McAfee 2000, chap. 1). Habermas’s theory of communicative action and allied theories of public reason-giving are put to use in deliberative theory, laying out the limits of the kind of talking (that is, reason- THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 51 ing out loud) that ought to occur in a deliberative forum. For example, Joshua Cohen writes, In an idealized deliberative setting, it will not do simply to advance reasons that one takes to be true or compelling: such considerations may be rejected by others who are themselves reasonable. One must instead find reasons that are compelling to others, acknowledging those others as equals, aware that they have alternative reasonable commitments, and knowing something about the kinds of commitments that they are likely to have. (Cohen 1997b, 414) In this model, partiality is a serious fault. One should be able to see the whole picture, not just one’s own arena. It seems that one need not actually consult others to find out what the world looks like from their perspective; each sovereign citizen should have a mental map of the whole. Accordingly, the ideal deliberator reasons publicly with others—not in order to get more information about how policies would affect others but rather to get their consent. This model holds out hope that decisions can be reached by consensus. If all agree on what policy is best, then there will be no need for social-choice type aggregation, bargaining, or voting. In its search for unanimity, deliberation becomes a contest, a battle of arguments, in which the best argument wins. To be a contender, a policy needs to get universal consent. This kind of deliberation does not try to piece together second-best alternatives into something with which most everyone could live. It looks for policies that are simply the best. As a result of these stakes, it is possible that the participants in such deliberative ventures are more interested in winning a contest than in solving problems. This model seems to lose sight of the reason people enter into public deliberations—because their communities are wracked by problems that politicians cannot seem to solve. In actual community deliberations, participants are not looking for which claim is normatively right but which picture of the problem is most telling and which courses of action have promise. Yet even though universality may be the guiding ideal, most deliberative proceduralists realize that consensus is rarely reached and that some kind of vote will be needed. As a result, this view runs into the very same problems that social choice theory does: finding the best way, short of consensus, to articulate the will of the people (see Dryzek 2000, 38–41). The Integrative Model Anyone familiar with deliberative theory probably recognizes the above two models readily, especially with the little bit of detail that I have provided. The 52 NOËLLE MCAFEE third model I sketch here has not been discussed in the literature, or certainly not to any great extent. It is the model that I came to know firsthand through observing the deliberative forums that are part of the network known as the National Issues Forums, which has developed with some behind-the-scenes help (meaning intellectual but not financial) from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, and Public Agenda in New York City.9 Some of the intellectual founders of this approach include Kettering’s president, David Mathews; the survey researcher Daniel Yankelovich; and the political theorists Benjamin Barber and Harry Boyte. Also instrumental have been the works of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. While NIF now has many sister organizations around the world, I trace the intellectual roots of this model to an American pragmatist tradition that is concerned more with “what works” than “what is true.” This model does have some roots in the civic republican tradition as well, though its normative conceptions are not as strong as those criticized in Habermas (1998, 244–49). For one, this model sees the public as heterogeneous, not the collective actor of a Rousseauian model. This model is empirically observable, but one observes that participants have normative concerns: when people deliberate together about public matters they develop an interest in the public welfare (in solving public problems) that may override their particular preferences. Yet even with all these theoretical resources, NIF is primarily driven by the way people actually deliberate and what their aims and concerns seem to be when they sit down together and try to solve problems that resist solution. These deliberators are motivated by the need to find a way forward on problems that affect them and their communities. Here the reader might recall E.J. Dionne’ s book of a decade ago, aptly titled Why Americans Hate Politics. Its main point is that Americans do not care about ideology, which seems to be the currency of conventional politics; rather they want solutions to problems. This is an insight that has long steered NIF. I spent a few years writing guides for deliberation with David Mathews, guides used by NIF convenors and moderators. We oriented our texts according to a framework we called “choice work.” The aim was for citizens to consider an array of policy options and, on each one, to spell out the costs and consequences of each approach as well as the trade-offs that would need to be made if any one approach were adopted. Only by working through the various choices, grappling with what must be abandoned in order to proceed in a particular direction, only with this kind of struggle do deliberators begin to develop a public judgment as to what policy might be best. Though it often evokes the language of “finding common ground for action,” this approach does not aim for happy consensus. Rather, choice work engages deliberators in the pragmatic task of delineating what courses of action might work given polity members’ many aims and constraints. According to the integrative model, deliberation is a process through which people grapple with the consequences of various public problems and propos- THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 53 als. Participants focus on solving public problems in ways that are consistent with their publicly formed understandings and ends. Instead of narrowly focusing on autonomy, this model sees democratic choice and action as practices that involve people considering how various options would affect their communities. They do not separate political ends from the fact that they are living with other people who are also affected by these policy choices. The public dimension of deliberation is indispensable to the task of fathoming problems and forming a public that can respond. Instead of seeing politics as bargaining about preferences, they see politics as a difficult matter of deciding what kinds of communities they are making for themselves. Instead of merely preferring, deliberators choose. At the outset of this essay, I called this model “quasi-Deweyan.” By this I do not mean that Dewey spawned the integrative model but rather that his observations mesh with it uncannily well. I have recently returned to his book, The Public and Its Problems, and noted how much his observations intersect with the integrative model (McAfee forthcoming). Both Dewey and NIF hold that public communication can be a way in which citizens simultaneously develop an understanding of public problems and of themselves as a public that can and should develop sound and effective public policies. Having defined the public as all “those indirectly and seriously affected for good or evil” by the “human collective action” of some particular group of people (Dewey 1954, 27, 34–35), Dewey understood the centrality of deliberating on public matters, both to define the matters and the public: “An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence” (131). In keeping with Dewey’s insight, actual public deliberations usually spend a great deal of time developing a public picture of what a problem is and how it affects those in the room and others throughout the political community. As deliberators develop a public understanding of the nature and the many aspects of the problem at hand, they also begin to see themselves as a public. This view distinguishes itself by aiming for integration of multiple, heterogeneous views. Unlike the second model, which expects deliberators to act according to the Enlightenment, universalizing ideal, this model accepts and makes use of citizens’ particular perspectives. Because each starts out with a limited picture of how a policy under consideration might affect others, participants deliberate in order to learn. They seek information, not so much about facts but about the consequences of various policies. In this model, citizens’ partial perspectives can be integrated into a viable, sound policy choice, one that is always provisional and subject to change When people come together to deliberate on matters that affect their polities, they seem to transform personal concerns and interests into public ones. To understand this phenomenon, observers and political theorists need to move beyond the tired dichotomy between egoism and altruism. It is not that public 54 NOËLLE MCAFEE deliberations turn participants into altruists. Rather, public deliberations help forge an immediate interest in matters public, conjuring up the history of the term “interest” itself, inter-esse, a way of being between and with others. Participants develop an interest in the welfare of their political communities. Moreover, this model attends to the problem over which both the first and the second models stumble: how to set policy direction when there is not full, or even much, agreement. Participants use their disagreements as productive constraints, helping them identify in which, albeit few, possible directions the polity might move. In the many deliberations that my colleagues at the Kettering Foundation and I have observed, participants leave saying that even when they did not agree with other participants, they did come to see why the others held the views they did. They came to change their views of others’ views. Even in the face of trenchant disagreement, participants would focus on coming up with a direction that would accommodate the plural concerns in the room. Unlike the first model, which leaves the “aggregation” problem to social planners, this integrative model understands that deliberators want to have a hand in shaping policy, indeed that this “shaping” is central to deliberation itself. They do not want to just be preference inputs into some social utility function. They want to help decide what the policy should be in the very process of trying to understand what the problem is, how it affects all those concerned, and what kind of polity they want to forge. Of the three, this view is the least idealistic. It has the most “communal” understanding of human psychology, seeing people and publics as constituted through their common language, customs, norms, relationships, and communities. It does not call on participants to imagine themselves stripped of affective and social associations in order to deliberate well. People do, and should, bring their particular concerns to the table when they deliberate with others. In practice, in this view, moderators try to ensure that all participants have an equal opportunity to speak, that no speakers dominate the deliberations, and that other factors in keeping with Habermasian speech-setting ideals are in place. But moderators also try to elicit stories from deliberators, using prompts such as “tell us how you came to hold the view that you have.” (This prompt usually brings forth a story that helps make sense of why someone would hold a view that others might find objectionable or unreasonable, in the process showing another aspect of an issue that others might not have considered.) This model aims at getting participants to arrive at a choice that takes into consideration other participants’ concerns, aiming for a choice that reflects a considered, public judgment on the issue. Through their deliberations, deliberators come to see possible outlines for public action. And they come to see themselves as part of a public, as public actors with considered judgments and purposes who can help shape public policy. In this view, the goal is not rationality per se but the possibility of understanding the public dimensions of problems and identifying what, if any, sound and sustainable directions there are in which THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 55 the public might move. At the very least, it sets the boundaries of what Daniel Yankelovich calls public permission. Theories in Practice These three definitions certainly do not exhaust the alternatives, but they do capture what seem to be the three most prevalent views. All three views have their virtues. But unless the different emphases between these views are made clear—and unless their tensions are addressed—then deliberative practice can falter. With this in mind, I close with some thoughts on how these themes manifested themselves in the National Issues Convention, sometimes undercutting the potential of the event. I do think that deliberative polling and its National Issues Conventions are tremendously valuable political events. I simply want to show why its proponents should move closer to an integrative model. The role of experts: Drawing primarily on the preference-based model of social choice, Fishkin and his colleagues take one of the central tasks of deliberation to be a matter of informing participants’ discretion, giving them the means and the opportunity to develop opinions “worth” listening to. As Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell write, “[t]he scientific value of the Deliberative Poll is that it provides a way of addressing the effects of information (and thought and involvement) on policy preferences” (Luskin et al. 2002). To this end, deliberative polling relies heavily on panels of experts and policymakers to answer questions that arise during deliberations. During the last NIC, participants worked through two policy choices and then stopped to select questions for experts. They then went into plenary sessions to listen to how the experts answered their questions. Afterward, they returned to their small groups, deliberated a bit more, and worked on developing more questions for the experts. They ended the afternoon with another plenary session with experts. Before dinner, they met again to come up with questions for policymakers. The Sunday morning session was devoted to policymakers taking citizens’ questions. By the end of the weekend, much more time was taken up with either formulating or asking questions of experts, and listening to experts, than was taken up by deliberating. Observers noted that through the course of the weekend participants took much care in how they worded the questions, more it seemed for the benefit of getting the panelists’ attention than for their own benefit of getting information. Despite the organizers’ intentions, the experts did not seem to be there in service to the deliberators and the participants felt frustrated when, because there was never enough time to address all the questions, their own questions did not get posed. Expertise plays a much smaller role in the NIF or integrative style of deliberation. NIF does use “issue books,” balanced and informative guides to an 56 NOËLLE MCAFEE issue that offer three or four policy choices, discussions of pros and cons, trade offs, and other data. NIF deliberations tend to focus more on how various proposals will affect participants’ and their communities’ ends and purposes. Questions of fact arise far less than do questions of value and consequence. In my observations, deliberations proceed quite differently depending on whether they see expertise in the service of deliberation (as NIF tends to do) or as something to aim for (which deliberative polling inadvertently does). Deliberative polls could improve by lowering the profile of “the experts,” treating them as interested parties (which they usually are) who have some knowledge of how proposed policies fit into the larger political picture. Instead of panels taking up large portions of the program, these parties could be available in the background to answer any questions that spontaneously arise. The meaning of politics: Finally, note that the three models I have described here have radically different conceptions of politics. The first holds that politics is the practice, exogenous to public deliberation, of turning deliberative preferences into public policy. Politics is the province of government. The second and third models expand the arena of politics beyond government to include the deliberations that go on within civil society (see Dryzek 2000). The second hopes that the deliberative public can engage in policy making, to the extent that it is able to reach rational agreement. The third is more forgiving of disagreement, in fact recognizing that politics begins because there is disagreement, and it puts what is obvious first: that people enter into politics to solve problems. Of course, the first two models might want to lay claim to that purpose as well. But they limit public problem solving to, respectively, the use of individual preferences and rationality. In the integrative model, participants are motivated by their sociality to meet with others they may neither like nor understand in order to find solutions to problems that vex what they do care about dearly, the public world that they inhabit, the world they will leave for their children and future generations. They are motivated to fashion a new public world, which is like putting together a puzzle: trying to see what all the pieces are, especially the pieces held by other participants, and then seeing how they might be able to fit them all together, however imperfectly and provisionally. None of the above is meant to suggest that there is anything intrinsically wrong with deliberative polling. To the contrary, I think it is a tremendously important advance in democratic practice. My concern in this paper has been that deliberative polling has been too informed by a preference-based model of democratic deliberation and not informed (nor as a result formed) enough by an integrative model. In its concern to help individuals deliberate and refine their opinions, it has overlooked the public task of politics. Yet while many of the theorists behind the scenes might think they are culling well-formed individual preferences, deliberators in the rooms steadily set about integrating their many perspectives, experiences, and purposes into potential policies that are decidedly public. Each deliberative polling experiment ends with an individual sur- THREE MODELS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION 57 vey of each individual’s views. Participants each retreat to a secluded spot in the room to take the “after” survey, a survey they are to take without consulting anyone else. Afterward, the survey researchers gather and compare the pre- and postdeliberation responses. Then they hold a press conference—and public television airs a program—revealing the extent to which individual opinions changed. The results, it is thought, when aggregated, will point to what public opinion would look like if people were to think about the issues. But back in that same room, at the end of the deliberative poll, just before the surveys are distributed, there is another public voice to be heard. It is the voice of the people comparing notes, trying to piece together all the moving and conflicting and unsettling matters they have deliberated on while they were together; it is the voice of people trying to take account of and integrate their own and their fellow deliberators’ perspectives, concerns, and desires. The question they return to is, on this matter at hand to us now, what shall we do? In these rooms the people know that, in politics, at the end of the day, our task is not to decide what each of us wants, but to decide what we as a polity should do. Notes 1. In keeping with this paper’s spirit, the author is indebted to a great many colleagues for their helpful comments in response to earlier versions of this paper, including Michael Briand, David Crocker, John Dedrick, Stephen Elkin, James Fishkin, Robert Kingston, Peter Levine, David Mathews, Keith Melville, Henry Richardson, and Claire Snyder. 2. Please note that NIF and NIC refer to two different entities: the National Issues Forums (NIF) and the National Issues Convention (NIC). The former is a network of civic organizations in the United States (with sister networks in many countries throughout the world) that periodically hold deliberative forums in their own organizations and communities, using briefing materials produced by the Kettering Foundation and Public Agenda. These “issue books” lay out three or four possible courses of action on a given problem, drawing out the costs and consequences of each approach. For more information, consult their website at http://www.nifi.org/. The National Issues Convention is the name of two deliberative polls conducted by James Fishkin in the United States, the first in 1996 in Austin, Texas, and the second in 2003 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To make matters a bit more confusing, both NIC events employed veteran moderators from the National Issues Forums, though these moderators were explicitly briefed beforehand on the need to moderate according to the precepts of the first model of democratic deliberation, as I am laying it out here. Additionally, both NICs, and many other deliberative polls, have provided issue briefing materials drafted in line with the same principles of the NIF issue books, though the NIC briefing materials avoid any language of working toward common ground. 3. I am a bit suspicious of the claim that social science research is primarily empirical, as opposed to work in the humanities, philosophy included. The social scientist’s focus on the individuals and their preferences, as discussed here, does betray a strong philosophical commitment. 4. A more thorough overview of the social choice project can be found in Elster and Hylland 1986; Arrow 1963; and Dryzek 2000. 5. In a public deliberation, the search to maximize one’s own preference for X may entail offering generally acceptable reasons for others also to prefer X. If preferences are transformed to the point that individual preference disappears—when the deliberator’s focus is on seeking agreement—then we are no longer in the realm of model one but have moved into model two. At a certain point, the line between models one and two has to do with perspective: the first focuses on 58 NOËLLE MCAFEE individual preference, the second with individuals offering reasons they hope would be acceptable to all. 6. Some preference-based theorists have a very narrow view of how preferences are transformed. Adam Przeworski argues that deliberation informs participants about which kind of means will satisfy their given preferences or that their preferences might change to be in keeping with what they really wanted (Przeworski 1998). There is little room in Przeworski’s picture for Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell’s (2002) broader notion that people change their individual preferences to more considered judgments that take into account the needs and concerns of others. 7. See note 3. 8. John Dryzek rebuts this view perfectly (Dryzek 2000, 45–47). Usually in the course of deliberations, participants can unmask bigoted views and show how illegitimate they are. Exogenous constraints are not needed. I have seen this at work in my own observations. 9. Further discussions of NIF can be found in Gastil (2000); Schoem and Hurtado (2001); Sirianni and Friedland (2001); and Yankelovich (1991). Works Cited Arrow, K. J. 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values, 2d.ed. New York: Wiley. Bender, Thomas, and Carl E. Schorske, eds. 1997. American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and Difference. 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