Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative Democracy

Citation

Cited by Lyn Carson [1]:

"it is not enough to vote. A democratically-elected government should confer on its citizens a right to participate in collective decision making. This requires the provision of opportunities to deliberate collectively about the content of political decisions. Because nations have not organised large-scale decision making in quite this way before, innovation is necessary in order to maximise involvement of citizens. This innovation has found expression in a range of interesting collective decision making methods such as citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls and 21st century town meetings."

Definition

Wikipedia Definition

"Deliberative democracy, also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term used by political theorists, e.g., Jon Elster or Jürgen Habermas, to refer to any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional economics-based theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy)

Definition by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium

" Deliberation is an approach to decision-making that involves an informed public, thinking critically together and discussing options from multiple points of view. It encourages enlarged perspectives, opinions, and understandings and can result in better decisions and policies." (http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/)

Explanation

From the DDC, at http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/deliberation/:

"What is "deliberation"?

Deliberation is an approach to decision-making in which citizens consider relevant facts from multiple points of view, converse with one another to think critically about options before them and enlarge their perspectives, opinions, and understandings.

What is "deliberative democracy"?

Deliberative democracy strengthens citizen voices in governance by including people of all races, classes, ages and geographies in deliberations that directly affect public decisions. As a result, citizens influence--and can see the result of their influence on--the policy and resource decisions that impact their daily lives and their future.

Why is deliberation important?

Public deliberation can have many benefits within society. Among the most common claims are that public deliberation results in better policies, superior public education, increased public trust, and reduced conflict when policy moves to implementation.

How does deliberation happen?

There is a growing inventory of methods to bring the public into decision-making processes at all levels around the world--from local goverment to multinational institutions like the World Bank. Working in groups as small as ten or twelve to larger groups of 3,000 or more, deliberative democracy simply requires that representative groups of ordinary citizens have access to balanced and accurate information, sufficient time to explore the intricacies of issues through discussion, and their conculsions are connected to the governing process.

Where has deliberation been used?

Government entities around the world, from municipalities in Brazil to the Danish Parliament, have come to rely upon deliberative bodies to provide policy, budget, and planning advice. Countries whose governments have a track-record of involving their citizens in deliberation include Denmark, the UK, Brazil, Australia and Canada." (http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/deliberation/)

The Evolution of Deliberation

Tom Atlee at:

"The increasing sophistication of dialogue and deliberation methodologies over the past two decades, combined with increasingly sophisticated communication and knowledge-management systems, as well as the spread of holistic philosophies and spiritual practices, suggests that we are rapidly increasing our ability to generate collective intelligence and wisdom through well-designed communications. We now face the task of bringing that capacity into the public trust and into official practice.

To clarify part of that developmental trajectory, we can map a spectrum (below) that reflects the growing empowerment and legitimization of citizen dialogue and deliberation. We can start with a category that embraces all types and qualities of such conversations and public engagements -- the ecosystem, if you will, of democratic discourse within which diverse species of dialogue and deliberation interact and evolve. As the more complex, sophisticated, energy-demanding forms evolve, we find there are fewer of them than of the simpler forms -- just as a forest has more fungi, ants and flowers than it has deer, owls and people. To maximize sustainability and productivity, there need to be rich interconnections between the simpler forms and the more complex forms -- in fact, among all the forms. In this vision of democratic dialogue and deliberation, we find that the most coherent and powerful forms demand a higher level of energy, resources and attention than the simpler forms. So, whereas the simple forms tend to be (at least potentially) cheap, numerous and inclusive of anyone who wants to show up, the more complex forms are more expensive, fewer, and directly involve fewer (and more carefully chosen) people who are given privileged access to a level of information and facilitation help that allows them to generate greater collective intelligence and wisdom.

If we focus merely on mass participation, we cannot afford these more complex and wisdom-generating forums which are too expensive to engage hundreds of thousands of people. However, if we focus only on the complex and potent forms, we get a kind of elite collective intelligence and wisdom which, although still grounded in the citizenry, has not been informed, digested and owned by the broader population, generating a sort of democratic elitism much as has happened with the evolution of representative democracy. To prevent both of these extremes, we need to synergistically weave together simpler, more widely participatory modes with the rarer, more potent and demanding modes of citizen deliberation.

The collective intelligence of the population as a whole needs to be in constant conversation with the wisdom generated by groups of citizens selected to work with especially high quality information and deliberative tools. Thus, the ideal "culture of dialogue" will include forums at all levels of the spectrum outlined below until we reach the most developed stage, where a true cultural shift has happened -- away from fragmented battles, towards collective intelligence and wisdom -- at which point many of these distinctions will become obsolete.

The spectrum below attempts to lay out a progression of forms from the simplest (1) to the more complex and powerful (6), before breaking through to a new culture (7). Note that this spectrum is centered on CITIZEN dialogue and deliberation. Not mentioned, but not excluded, are other forms of dialogue and deliberation, particularly stakeholder dialogues and legislative deliberations. They play significant roles in this vision of a wise democracy, but (from this citizen-centered perspective) the locus of power and collective intelligence is firmly established in the dialogue and deliberation of CITIZENS. Stakeholder dialogues and legislative deliberations serve to augment the collective intelligence generated by citizen discourse."

2. THE SPECTRUM (with examples)

1. Citizen dialogue and deliberation (of any and all kinds) (e.g., conversation cafes)

2. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome (i.e., whole-group statements, actions or outcomes) (e.g., deliberative polling)

3. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making (usually in an advisory role) (e.g., National Issues Forums)

4. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community (e.g., citizen deliberative councils)

5. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community and the whole process is officially institutionalized (e.g., consensus conferences)

6. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community and the whole process is officially institutionalized and empowered such that it drives policy-making (e.g., B.C.'s Citizens Assembly)

7. A democratic political and governance system that is grounded in 1-6 above at least as much -- or more than -- in the competitive lobbying, voting, litigating modes of politics.

In other words, we can have communities filled with study circles, intergroup dialogues, future searches, conversation cafes, world cafes, and all the other amazing processes listed on such sites as the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation wiki (1-6, above). These can generate a powerful background hum of conversations through which people are connecting up, exploring and learning together, and doing good work together. Some of them help public officials take the pulse of the community on important issues, seeing how citizens think about them. Arising from that hum of powerful democratic conversations are some special conversations among people selected from the community to embody the community's diversity, charged with deliberating or reflecting on particularly important community issues and reporting back to the community (4-6, above). These conversations are sometimes given not just an advisory role, but real power to make decisions.The more all these fit together into a coherent whole, the closer we get to a wise democracy."

More Information

The tools for deliberation are summarized in those two documents by the DDC:

Matrix of face to face deliberation methods, at http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/resources/library/f2f_matrix_030304.pdf

Matrix of online methods to enhance public engagement, at http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/resources/library/online_matrix_041004.pdf

French-language article on how the internet may actually be a hindrance to deliberation because of its Plural Monocultures, at http://www.esprit.presse.fr/review/article.php?code=13254

Many papers and articles on the concept and practice of `deliberative democracy', by Lyn Carson at http://www.activedemocracy.net/articles.htm ; and links to organizations here at http://www.activedemocracy.net/links.htm

Key Books to Read

James Fishkin. Democracy and Deliberation. 1991

"James Fishkin's 1991 work, "Democracy and Deliberation" introduced a concrete way to apply the theory of deliberative democracy to real-world decision making, by way of what he calls the Deliberative opinion poll. In the deliberative opinion poll, a statistically representative sample of the nation or a community is gathered to discuss an issue in conditions that further deliberation. The group is then polled, and the results of the poll and the actual deliberation can be used both as a recommending force and in certain circumstances, to replace a vote. Dozens of deliberative opinion polls have been conducted across the United States since his book was published" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy)

Jon Elster, ed. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 282 pages.

Nino, C. S. (1996)The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press

The Deliberative Democracy Handbook [2]