The Town Meeting Ideal and Race in America

This essay explores the development of the New England town meeting ideal in connection with matters of race and considers the place of that ideal in post-slavery America. In particular, the essay focuses on how the black abolitionists David Walker and Maria Stewart used the jeremiad to expand the deliberative rhetoric associated with the town meeting, and it considers Albion Tourgée’s efforts to implement the town meeting system in the post-bellum South. The essay further considers the place of the lyceum system and the Chautauqua phenomenon, and it addresses how John Dewey’s efforts to reinvent the town meeting for a much larger and more diverse nation bore fruit in media forums described as town meetings. Eventually, the town meeting was reinvented yet again as a national political venue that could be used to address persistent racial tensions. The essay closes with a discussion of how the American university could help close the gap between the town meeting-style forum as a place for discussion and the historical town meeting’s value as a site of consequential decision-making

Psychological Mechanisms of Deliberative Transformation: The Role of Group Identity

Democratic deliberation has been shown to lead to shifts in people’s preferences for particular issues. The psychological mechanisms that underpin such shifts are not well understood. Against the backdrop of a deliberative forum we examined participants’ preferences for various types of political systems, how these preferences changed as deliberations proceeded and how the final preferences were associated with different levels of inclusiveness of a social identity. The results showed that at the end of the deliberations people’s preferences moved in the direction of satisfaction with the political system, and that this preference was positively associated with identification with the superordinate identification but negatively associated with the subgroup identification. We discuss the implication of these results for the design of deliberative forums as well as the role of social identity in deliberative democracy

Deliberation for Development: Ghana’s First Deliberative Poll

This article poses the problem of public consultation in developing countries and applies a solution in Ghana as a test case. It describes the theoretical rationale for deliberative consultation with random samples, describes specific criteria for success, and then assesses an application under the challenging conditions of a developing country. It builds on notions of “deliberative democracy,” and shows how they can be practically realized in an African context through “Deliberative Polling” (DP). The challenge is that the context is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries in Africa. Rather than consulting just stakeholders, or self-selected populations, or using conventional surveys, DP’s have the advantage of consulting random samples with deliberation in depth in confidential surveys so that the opinion changes can be evaluated at the individual level, free of social pressures for consensus. Is this practical in this context? A DP was conducted in Tamale, Ghana on issues of water, sanitation, hygiene and food security. Criteria for success for DPs that have been applied in highly developed countries are discussed and then applied in Ghana under challenging conditions

Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: Reflections on our Five Years as Editors of the Journal of Public Deliberation

For the last five years, we have had the honor of serving as editors of the Journal of Public Deliberation. This issue marks the end of our editorial tenure, and we take this opportunity to both look back and think ahead. In this brief essay, we reflect on what we’ve seen during our time as editors. We begin by describing three important special issues that reflect the state of our field, then provide some details about how we have facilitated JPD’s growth over the past five years, including publication statistics and article download rates. We conclude by discussing where the journal is now and what we anticipate for its future

Deliberation after Consensus: Introduction to the Symposium

This editorial introduction presents an overview of the themes explored in the symposium on Deliberation after Consensus. For all the talk of its obsolescence and irrelevance, the concept of consensus still remains centrally contested through generations of deliberative democracy scholarship. In face of criticism for being neither empirically feasible nor normatively desirable, some deliberative theorists have moved away from consensus-oriented teleology and argued in favor of other legitimate outcomes of deliberations. Other theorists have resisted this move, claiming that the aim of deliberation implies that consensus should remain as a regulative ideal for deliberative outcomes. Engaging with these debates about the role of consensus in theories of deliberative democracy, this symposium brings together a selection of innovative, original research articles that raise novel questions about the role consensus could and should play in democratic deliberation and in a deliberative democracy. This introduction offers an overview of the debate over consensus drawing on the notion of successive generations of deliberative democracy research. Our aim is to demonstrate that the view of consensus has changed during generations of deliberative scholarships, but also that some scholars still defend the normative importance of the meaning of consensus once developed by the first generation. Consequently, there are tendencies of both change and continuity in the debate over consensus in deliberative theory. We conclude this introduction by providing a brief synopsis of each paper

Review of Deliberation in the Classroom: Fostering Critical Thinking, Community, and Citizenship in Schools by Stacie Molnar-Main (Kettering Foundation Press, 2017)

Review of Deliberation in the Classroom: Fostering Critical Thinking, Community, and Citizenship in Schools by Stacie Molnar-Main (Kettering Foundation Press, 2017)

Integrative Democracy: Mary Parker Follett’s Integration and Deliberative Democracy

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Mary Parker Follett by scholars of management and public administration, but the acute relevance of Follett’s work to deliberative democracy has yet to be fully appreciated. In her 1918 work The New State Follett articulates a normative political theory that I refer to as Integrative democracy, which can be seen as an alternative formulation of deliberative democracy that is based on an activity that Follett refers to as integration rather than deliberation. In this paper I first present two contemporary challenges faced by deliberative democrats: how deliberation itself ought to be defined, and whether or not deliberation produces epistemic benefits in comparison to non-deliberative voting. I then show how Follett’s theory is able to respond to both of these criticisms. Finally, I discuss how Follett’s theory may need to be extended or modified to deal with challenges highlighted by the recent systemic turn in deliberative theory

Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy

Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in New England’s famous town meetings. Town meetings have traditionally been cited as one of the fullest and earliest realizations of the idea of democratic government and of deliberation at work. Nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation. The critical study of how one of the oldest and most inspiring forms of democratic participation has evolved is not only a fascinating endeavor in itself, it is also a unique opportunity to better understand how and to what extent these institutional practices, inspired by ideals of deliberation and participation, can support – or impede – the democratization of today’s societies

Completely Theorized Agreements. A Different Reading of the Consensus Paradox Hypotheses

This article contributes to the debate on the consensus and deliberation. While the relevant literature claims that consensus undermines further deliberation, this article argues that it depends on the aim of the process. In particular, I argue that if the aim of deliberation is understood as reaching a certain epistemic level, reaching consensus does not need to decrease the rationality of the group. In short, such deliberation is a process of debate, reason-giving and listening which aims at establishing a result of certain epistemic value. In order to shed new light on the debates on the consequences of consensus for further deliberation, I introduce a detailed conceptualization of a full agreement. I call it Completely Theorized Agreements. In this article, I argue that reaching consensus in an epistemic setting does not need to have negative consequences. Further, I argue, that the truth-tracking quality of deliberation need not be worse in a group that reached a full consensus as opposed to a partial one

Building a Better Referendum: Linking Mini-Publics and Mass Publics in Popular Votes

Popular votes and mini-publics are both increasingly implemented as elected officials seek to build legitimacy for decisions, although these democratic innovations suffer from their own democratic deficits. Popular votes often do not live up to deliberative ideals while mini-publics may be limited in their capacities for inclusion and decision-making. Pairing these two devices can improve deliberation in referendum campaigns, while tying mini-publics to a clear and inclusive process for decision-making. Empirical studies of this strategy have found both successes and shortcomings. Little attention has been given to the possibility that the success of mini-publics in influencing public opinion is determined, in part, by the underlying design of the popular vote process. I outline how multi-stage popular votes could institutionalize an iterated dialogue between the micro-level mini-public and the mass, voting public to produce distinct democratic benefits. This serves as a model of how a systems approach to democratic theory can guide institutional design to address democratic functions of empowered inclusion, collective agenda and will formation, and collective decision-making