Why Inequalities Persist in Public Deliberation: Five Mechanisms of Marginalization

Marginalization Problems

Previous research shows that several types of obstacles make the deliberative ideal difficult to realize (see Curato et al., 2018; Hendriks, 2009). In practice, deliberation often becomes distorted through the exclusion or marginalization of many potential participants. As Mansbridge writes, “Even the language people use as they reason together usually favours one way of seeing things and discourages others. Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover that they are not heard” (Mansbridge, 1990: 143). Such marginalization may be caused by a number of factors. For example, differences in education, information, and opportunities to practice deliberation often result in unequal capacities to participate effectively (Bohman, 2000: Ch. 3). Moreover, unequal resources make it difficult for some people to challenge dominant views. The more resourceful actors may dominate discussions or choose to ignore outcomes of deliberation if their views are challenged. Such inequalities thus easily make deliberation biased in favor of powerful actors (Holdo, 2019).

In addition to such differences in resources, several scholars argue that social norms, including expectations and assumptions about how claims and reasoning should be articulated, often work in favor of dominant actors. Even if participants were equal in terms of capacity to deliberate, and even if each participant agreed to respect other participants and the results of deliberation, the process may still end up favoring certain types of experiences, knowledge, and perspectives over others (Curato et al., 2018; Hayward, 2004; Young, 2002: Ch. 1).

In this article, we focus on how problems of marginalization affect ordinary deliberation as well as discussions of how processes of deliberation proceed, which we call processes of meta-deliberation. Several scholars suggest that meta-deliberation can help address and solve problems of marginalization as participants point them out and debate them (see Bohman, 2000: 65; Fraser, 2003: 44; Holdo, 2019). We contribute to this discussion by analyzing problems or marginalization that affect both deliberation and meta-deliberation.

Deliberation and Meta-Deliberation

We thus use the concept of meta-deliberation to distinguish discussions that specifically address problems of deliberation from discussions about other kinds of problems. For discussions of the latter type, we use the term “deliberation,” or “ordinary deliberation.” For discussions about problems of how such deliberation proceeds, we use the term “meta-deliberation” (see Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011). Meta-deliberation captures what Fraser (2003: 45) refers to in her discussion of “debates about debates.” As she argues, people may often reflectively address aspects of debates within the debates themselves and thereby “invite explicit discussion of the built-in biases of such debates, including biases favoring preservation of status quo social practices over creation of new ones” (Fraser, 2003; 45; see also Bohman, 2000; Fraser, 2009). Similarly, we see meta-deliberation as the type of deliberation in which people address aspects of ordinary deliberation that are normally taken for granted.

Among the relatively small number of works that have used and developed the concept of meta-deliberation, there are some important differences. Thompson (2008) uses the term to suggest that apart from developing and practicing different forms of democratic decision-making, there is also a need to deliberate over their advantages and disadvantages in different contexts. Landwehr (2015) develops this view further, arguing that meta-deliberation is necessary to generate reflective and legitimate decisions about institutional choices and delegation of power. From our perspective, deliberation is not only, and not primarily, an institutional design but also a part of political life that takes place both in specific institutions designed for deliberation and in everyday talk between citizens. We use the term meta-deliberation to refer to discussions about aspects of how deliberation proceeds, although we acknowledge that sometimes such discussions will address institutional choices.

We emphasize two aspects of meta-deliberation (see also, Holdo, 2019). First, meta-deliberation occurs whenever citizens comment on or criticize the way discussions proceed. Meta-deliberation usually takes place as ordinary citizens engage in ordinary discussions, that is, as people deliberate about other concerns and feel compelled to comment on or criticize the way the discourse proceeds—the way, for example, that some people dominate discussions or implicit assumptions that lead the discussions in directions that make it difficult to raise important issues. Meta-deliberation is a continuous process that shifts between active and passive, intense and relaxed, reflective and path-dependent, and inclusive and exclusive. In the case we examine in this article, meta-deliberation was intensified by the occurrence of riots, which made it more urgent to discuss problems of public deliberation.

Second, meta-deliberation is not necessarily more rational or inclusive than ordinary deliberation. The main argument for giving more space to meta-deliberation is that it helps improve ordinary deliberation by addressing its problems, such as inequality, through processes of collective reflection. Meta-deliberation means to point out what is taken for granted, question it, and defend a different view. However, to what extent meta-deliberation becomes reflective, inclusive, and generates improvements in deliberative practices are best seen as empirical variables. As Bohman puts it, deliberative inequalities “present particular difficulties, since the terms of debate about them are formed in the same political process that produced them” (Bohman, 2000: 132). The views and experiences of the most affected are often marginalized also in discussions about marginalization. It is, therefore, possible, and quite likely, that our current understanding of the problem of marginalization is quite limited, or “systematically distorted” (Bohman, 2000: 116). While meta-deliberation may be our best, or perhaps our only, way to critically reflect on, and change, social practices that reproduce biases in public discourse, a major challenge is to understand how such meta-deliberation can avoid the same mechanisms that generate biases in ordinary (non-meta) deliberation.

Five Mechanisms of Marginalization

While deliberative democratic theorists have engaged extensively with problems of marginalization (e.g. Karpowitz et al., 2009; Mansbridge, 1990; see also Holdo, 2019), they have usually done so in general terms and not by exploring specific mechanisms at work in different contexts. By mechanisms of marginalization we mean situation-specific logics of action that has the consequence that some actors are hindered from having an equal chance to have their views and perspectives heard in public discourse (cf. Bengtsson and Hertting, 2014). Below we briefly describe the five mechanisms we identified in this study, which will be further discussed in section three. These are discursive mechanisms, in the sense that each depends on preexisting assumptions that shape deliberative exchanges and the possibilities for people to participate. While there are analytical reasons to separate them, empirically, they may appear along with other mechanisms and be mutually reinforcing as well as appearing individually.

First, people are marginalized in public deliberation when such deliberation is significantly shaped by preexisting narratives that frame and structure the understanding and explanations of phenomena. Views that do not fit dominant narratives become excluded or marginalized. Second, actors within the media and politics may contribute to the reproduction, or reinforcement, of local power structures as they select representatives of “a local perspective.” Without regard for the roles and status of such representatives in the local environment, they may treat local populations as homogeneous with regard to perspective, interest, and experience. This further silences people who are doubly marginalized due to their marginalization both as members of a marginalized group as well as their subordination within that group. Third, influential actors in public discourse may impose conditions for others’ participation by forcing them to distance themselves from a certain group or idea. This happens, for example, when people refuse to consider the views of people who, while not necessarily justifying a certain view or action, declare that they understand the view or action. Fourth, marginalization in public deliberation is also caused by participants’ failure to respond to the content of contributions instead of the social status of the speaker. More or less subtle differences in speech and behavior may influence speakers’ chances of being heard. Fifth, dominant actors may seek to keep certain issues off the agenda of discussion, reasoning that the issues are too complex or too sensitive for some participants to discuss. Thereby, these issues become topics of debate only in forums from which these participants are excluded. While our empirical analysis indicates that these mechanisms appear sometimes in deliberation and sometimes in meta-deliberation, to varying degrees, they are in principle equally relevant for both levels of discussion.

The Case

The Stockholm riots began on the night of 19 May 2013, six days after a 69-year-old man was shot and killed by police in the socio-economically deprived suburb Husby. The riots were a reaction to the killing and the police’s handling of the situation. First the police claimed that the man had been taken to the hospital, which the photo evidence proved untrue (see Holdo and Bengtsson, 2019). When local residents protested outside the police department the day after, the police did not respond. When youths from the neighborhood began destroying cars and vandalizing public and private buildings, the police was seen to respond violently, which fueled further protests and attracted people from other parts of Stockholm (de los Reyes and Hörnqvist, 2016). The subsequent debates came to raise questions about ethnic discrimination, segregation, and economic vulnerability—problems most participants agreed were serious—and why it had been difficult to bring these problems into the public agenda. Local activists, national-level politicians, and the media took the opportunity to talk about why these issues were so rarely discussed, how people from the affected suburbs were excluded, and what particular aspects of discrimination and exclusion were more serious.

Apart from connecting these structural issues to the riots themselves, these discussions centered on the extent and nature of discursive and political marginalization. This is why we interpret parts of these deliberations as being meta-deliberative. In our discussion we show how, based on our interviews, the experiences and perspectives of people that arguably were among the most affected were marginalized, including the experiences and perspectives of local residents, civil society actors, employees at the municipality who worked with social problems in the area, local police, and persons working with various related problems at local youth centers.

Data

We began this study by collecting local experiences of the Stockholm riots of 2013 and the media reporting and the debates that the riots gave rise to, asking broad, open-ended questions. We then structured the stories they told and began cataloging them according to the way they saw the problems with the reports and debates, focusing on the way they diagnosed problems of uptake and inclusion (see Snow et al., 2007). In the second round of interviews, we asked further questions, both open-ended and specifically about obstacles identified in previous interviews. This allowed us to deepen our understanding of several different, but interrelated obstacles, which we present in the form of general mechanisms (Holdo, 2018).

We also included one obstacle that had not been identified by interviewees but had been raised as an issue by a local advocacy group in debates in the media. Our interviewees did not recognize this mechanism as part of their experience, but we chose to include it in our analysis because it was part of other local actors’ experiences as expressed when they participated in media discussions. This mechanism, which we call “discursive distancing,” may, we reasoned, be of relevance to other cases of meta-deliberation, even if it did not capture the experience of our interviewees.

In selecting interviewees, we sought to collect a varied sample of local experiences with regard to the riots and the debates about them. The interviewees are not meant to be representative of local sentiments or perspectives, but they are meant to capture a multitude of the views that exist among the local population. That they are all local and all in some way involved, professionally or as volunteers, in work and activities related to youths and social problems in affected areas made it more likely that they would have views about the substantive issues and experienced difficulties making their views heard in public discourse. We do not claim, however, that these persons, or their views, are the most marginalized of the marginalized, as this would require us to get involved in discussions about the meaning and expression of marginalization that are part of the meta-deliberative discussions that this study is concerned with. We claim instead that this varied group of people have experiences that are highly relevant to scholars’ discussions about role and prospect of meta-deliberation. Our interviewees are local civil society actors, such as organizers of community and educational activities for adults and youths, local police officers, local entrepreneurs, municipal employees, and people working for the municipal housing company. We included people of different ages, different genders, and different ethnicities. In short, we aimed for pluralism with regard to experiences, knowledge, and perspectives, within marginalized residential areas affected by the riots. ²

Our way of selecting interviewees comes with certain limitations as to what conclusions can be drawn based on this material. We do not make any arguments as to the relative significance of specific mechanisms of marginalization. Nor do we make causal claims as to what factors help predict failures of inclusion. Furthermore, we do not argue that certain mechanisms are more relevant in deliberation than meta-deliberation and vice versa. These are questions that must be addressed in further studies that may be more specifically structured for that aim. Moreover, while we followed up on findings from these interviews by asking in subsequent interviews if others shared specific experiences and views, we did not do this to test the validity of particular mechanisms. We did this, rather, to explore whether other interviewees could help deepen our understanding by adding new aspects and ideas.

These limitations are reflected in the conclusions we draw from this study as well as the presentation of our findings, which are meant to illustrate rather than prove the correctness of our interpretations. What we do argue based on these interviews is that in many cases meta-deliberation offers no special tool for remedying problems of marginalization but seems, rather, to be characterized by similar patterns of exclusion and marginalization. Our material points, we argue, to specific mechanisms through which meta-deliberation reproduces such patterns. The point is that meta-deliberation itself does not rectify all problems of marginalization but needs to be examined as a process that makes certain forms of critique possible while repeating other patterns of marginalization. The aim is to thus offer a fruitful starting point for further studies of problems of inclusion in public deliberation.

Interpretive Analysis

The case study employed a methodology that can be broadly characterized as interpretive (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2013; Yanow, 2003). This means that we focus on people’s experiences of encountering problems of uptake in deliberation. These experiences are important, we argue, not only because of their subjective aspects (such as people’s feelings of or about marginalization) but also because they provide us with often neglected firsthand knowledge of marginalization (see Ercan et al., 2017; Holdo, 2018). By linking such knowledge to social science concepts, we aim to highlight its analytical significance and wider relevance. The resulting catalog of mechanisms can be used in further research on meta-deliberation and as tools for reflection on concrete practices of meta-deliberation in which these mechanisms may appear. In order to make our findings useful for analyses of other cases of deliberation, we reconstruct them as general mechanisms. This allows us to make a relational analysis that connects subjective experiences to structural conditions (Emirbayer, 1997; Holdo, 2018). While we do not aim to determine the exact impact of these mechanisms on public deliberation, we do aim to specify them as ideal-types (Bengtsson and Hertting, 2014), which makes them useful analytical tools that can fruitfully be used in further research on problems of discursive marginalization. We relate each mechanism we found in our research to theories of discursive domination. This procedure allows us to draw on works of social theory from other fields of research to inform our analysis of obstacles to free and equal participation.

In the process of identifying and reconstructing the five mechanisms on which we focus in this article, we also tested other ideas about marginalization that were theoretically informed. For example, we included one cause of marginalization that we derived from the literature on civil society, which interviewees did not feel was relevant. During our study, we called this mechanism “privileging consensus-seeking.” By this we meant that civil society actors and other actors may be included in public deliberation on the implicit condition that they are not confrontational (see Foley and Edwards, 1996). In theory, civic associations that are constitutive of civil society are seen as valuable precisely because they do not consolidate around specific political agendas or identities, but rather generate social trust by being inclusive, nonbureaucratic and nonhierarchical (see also Putnam et al., 1994; Skocpol and Fiorina, 1999). In other words, the very reason for why civil society actors are often viewed favorably may, in theory, also constrain their possibilities to have political influence by raising more contentious issues. We included this mechanism in our interviews because it seemed theoretically plausible and interesting. Our results did not confirm its relevance, however. We allowed our interviewees to exclude this mechanism by introducing it as one common problem in public debates that previous research has found important. We asked if they had felt that this had been an obstacle in the discussions about riots or problems of the suburbs. None of the interviewees felt that this captured their experience. Some interviewees suggested that it sounded like a plausible scenario, something that might happen in some cases, but said they had not personally experienced it. This does not necessarily mean that the mechanism is unimportant. There might be context-specific reasons for why it did not resonate with our interviewees’ experiences, although it could be relevant in other cases. For example, riots might generate discussions that are more polarizing than others, which makes it less important for civil society actors to appear as consensus-seeking. We leave it to future research to further test the relevance of this mechanism in practice and emphasize that our list of five mechanisms is preliminary and not meant to be exhaustive.

Below, we describe each of our five mechanisms and link them to theoretical work on discursive domination. These mechanisms are of different types. Some mechanisms make certain arguments or perspectives difficult to raise, while others obstruct certain actors’ participation. They all have in common, however, that they make the meta-deliberation less open to the experiences, knowledge, and views of all citizens.

Imposition of Preexisting Narratives

Our first mechanism of marginalization is imposition of preexisting narratives, or what previous work on discursive power has called interpellation. By this we mean the tendency to reuse certain familiar structures of dramaturgy and narrative. People are marginalized due to this mechanism when their views and perspectives cannot be taken up because they do not fit the frame of the discussion.

The concept of interpellation goes back to Althusser (2001: 118), who used it to describe how “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals . . . or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects.” Thus, by reproducing preconceived narrative structures and giving people roles to play, discourse sustains frames that make it easy for some people’s views and perspectives to be taken up, because they fit these frames, and difficult for others to do so, because their views and perspectives do not fit (Hay, 1995: 203). Interpellation takes place, for example, through choices made by actors in the media who interpret new events with old frames, so that the same basic story can be told again. This may sometimes be done strategically to capture the attention of media consumers or, when used by politicians, to communicate political messages. In everyday social interaction and talk about events or situations, interpellation may often play a subtler, yet equally important, part in the way we understand and articulate what we think has happened. It shapes people’s imagination in ways that make some events possible to report as stories, and it shapes the way such stories are constructed. Ways of seeing that do not fit the narrative structures of such interpellation cannot be included without disturbing and changing such structures.

In the case of the Stockholm riot debate, two narratives were formed immediately that shaped the discussions about the riots and also affected the possibilities of raising problems with the discussions. One story that was repeatedly told was that the media and the political decision-makers had ignored the uncomfortable fact that the suburbs were increasingly taken over by criminal groups, which had an interest in causing trouble and violent confrontations. This idea fitted the story of bad guys and good guys but did not, according to several interviewees, do justice to actual, existing problems. “It was very black and white,” said a person working for a youth center in Husby, who felt in particular that the residents of the suburb were divided into two categories—those who work hard and those who cause trouble. According to this interviewee, the media and other influential actors made it easy for themselves by singling out young men in the area as the bad guys, who had caused the riots. “I would have liked them to say also that what happened before [that is, the way the police handled the situation with the 69 year-old and the reporting of the incident] was also shameful. The police could have said this.” Instead, this narrative made it more difficult to participate for those who felt that the real situation was more complicated.

The second narrative suggested that the riots had been a legitimate protest, an uprising, against social injustice. The problem of marginalization, according to this perspective, was that neoliberal discourse and actors within the political mainstream had disempowered the poor and less resourceful by refusing to discuss the negative consequences of segregation and growing economic gaps, which had left people with no other means of protesting than rioting. This also contributed to the difficulty to voice local experiences in public discourse, because it forced participants to choose sides between the political left and the political right. For example, a local police officer, who criticized the way the police had handled the shooting as well as the riots, said, “To describe the riots, as some did—and it was of course polarized in a left-and-right discourse as usual—to make it into a struggle for justice, this was outrageous in my view.” He had sought to voice this problem with the discourse and how it, in his view, created and upheld a picture of “us vs them,” justice versus oppression that was unhelpful for people working for change. This narrative simplified the real problems and portrayed local residents as unreflective and unconstructive: “People are not that stupid, that they think that now that we burn down all the cars and attack the fire brigade and the police we will see improvements.” In his view, this second narrative was “very offensive” to local people who work peacefully for change. The strength of this narrative made it difficult, however, for a police officer—even one critical of the police’s actions—to raise these concerns, as the narrative had already “recruited” him to play a different role, that of representing a violent and racist police force.

The concept of interpellation draws attention to how these narratives crowd out experiences of marginalization in public discourse that could inform debates about what needs to change to make public deliberation more inclusive. The way that interpellation, especially in the case we examine here, comes to shape exchanges is related to a logic of public debate that has important temporal aspects. Riots become part of a pattern in which events are dramatically reported, stir debates, and become part of the deliberation of political leaders, only to then fade out when influential actors in the media and politics look for newer events that serve their purposes. Those marginalized in public discourse do not have the resources to maintain others’ interests and affect agendas of political debate and decision-making (Boswell, 2016; De los Reyes and Hörnqvist, 2016).

In subsequent interviews, we asked interviewees first an open question about their perceptions of the debates after the riots and difficulties to influence these discussions and then specifically about whether they felt that these narratives had influenced the discussions. We aimed to see if others shared this experience and could help deepen our understanding by describing it. Several of the interviewees described frustration with the lack of willingness, from journalists and politicians, to increase their knowledge of the context. Instead, they chose stories that were familiar and convenient. Some interviewees expressed uncertainty as to whether the reason influential actors did this was due to their own agendas or merely due to laziness or to a feeling of being unsure about how to make the right interpretation and find the right words in a heated, serious discussion. One interviewee felt that they were not interested in nuances that might make the stories too complicated for the typical media formats. Another interviewee said that from her experience more nuanced views could not get the attention of journalists. Many of our interviewees agreed that the two different stories outlined above dominated the debates and that they did not correspond well to their experiences. Some interviewees said that both stories were part of the truth and questioned the choice to pick one of them. “I have not talked to everyone,” said one interviewee, “but none of the people I have talked to claims that [the riots] were a protest. But [those who participated] are very angry at their situation and see the police as a representative for injustice. In that way, it was a protest.”

In the polarized situation after the riots, questioning these narratives—for example, in what sense the riots might have been a protest or to what extent they were planned and organized by criminal networks—risked being interpreted as taking the other side and accepting the competing narrative. Those who refused to accept the first narrative were seen as naïve, at best, or at worst, as being too “politically correct” to address the real problems of criminality. Those who disagreed with the second narrative might instead be accused of being politically naïve, at best, or as part of a neoliberal discourse. In this sense, this mechanism also affected the possibility to address the distorting influence of preexisting narratives by making comments about the way the debates about the riots proceeded, comments, that is, that we would classify as meta-deliberative.

Inclusion of Locally Dominant Actors

Our second mechanism is inclusion of locally dominant actors. By this we mean that the ostensibly well-meaning impulse to include a “local perspective” may reinforce local patterns of domination by turning to relatively resourceful actors within the local context. Hence, an emphasis on the importance of considering “local voices” may downplay and reinforce local power relations (Mohan and Stokke, 2000: 249). In meta-deliberation, such local voices may be invoked, or included, to the effect of undermining dissenting views within the local context. A similar mechanism has been observed by scholars of decentralization, as in the following discussion of local power structures in India:

[I]n situations of sharp local inequalities, decentralization sometimes heightens the concentration of power, and discourages rather than fosters participation among the underprivileged. To illustrate, in some tribal areas where upper-caste landlords and traders dominate village affairs, the devolution of power associated with the panchayati raj amendments has consolidated their hold and reinforced existing biases in the local power structure. (Drèze and Sen, 2002: 15)

Similarly, in public deliberations where influential actors actively seek to include “the marginalized” or “affected communities,” the result is often that actors that dominate local public spheres seize control over what becomes presented as “the local perspective.”

In our initial, more openly structured interviews, several interviewees pointed to the problem that some actors make themselves spokespersons for a whole suburb. “Those who are loudest get to define the situation,” said an employee at the municipal administration who had worked with local associations on social problems. A local civil society activist indicated that this mechanism may be further supported by the presence of the first mechanism we have described. The issue, he said, was partly an ideological one. Some influential civil society actors only recognize the efforts and the views of people who shared the same ideological perspective. People who did not share their perspective often did not feel welcome to participate. This became a greater problem when a certain ideological frame was rewarded by journalists looking for local actors who could confirm their predetermined narratives.

By inclusion of locally dominant actors, we refer, in this context, to the tendency to include one local perspective, while contributing to the further marginalization of other important points of view and experiences. Including a local perspective is often itself seen as a way to broaden discussions and make room for alternative perspectives. In this sense, it may often be motivated by a felt need to give space for marginalized perspective and may thus be an act of meta-deliberation. However, such inclusion may nevertheless reproduce patterns of discursive domination if it is based on assumptions of homogeneity within the group supposed to be included. The assumption of homogeneity may be further supported by dominant local actors that purport to represent all members of a marginalized group. One interviewee stressed the importance of the audience’s responsibility to reflect critically about the interests and specific perspective of the people taken to represent a local perspective. “There are definitely organizations that claim to speak for the whole suburb and this is very problematic. Those who listen should ask themselves what kind of perspective and mandate they have.”

Several interviewees suggested that the local perspective included in the media and political discussions was usually one that was excessively confrontational and that portrayed marginalization issues as part of a battle between the suburb and the rest of society, including the state and the media, and thus supported one of the preexisting narratives outlined above. The “local view” label thus also became a way to legitimize particular opinions and perspectives. “The media,” said one interviewee, “have a couple of spokespersons that they approach for the local perspective and then it is the same picture that is given every time.”

Several interviewees indicated that this problem had two parts. The first part was that some people portray themselves as representatives for a whole group, or a whole suburb. The second part was that journalists and politicians were more comfortable with certain representatives and give them more space. Thus even when the purpose may be to compensate for the domination of nonlocal perspectives in public discourse, the result may be further subordination of perspectives that are marginalized also locally. Interviewees indicated that the problem may be that journalists purposefully select spokespersons that they know will offer a view that does not challenge their own too much, but it may also be an unconscious decision. Thus, the second mechanism of marginalization may be further reinforced by the first.

The inclusion of locally dominant actors and perspectives, our interviewees suggested, affect both deliberation and meta-deliberation. It affects deliberation, in this case about riots, by giving a specific interpretation about what had happened and its causes and portraying it as the local perspective. It affects meta-deliberation, moreover, because the critique of public discourse expressed by the selected spokespersons, too, reproduces the dominance of particular points of view while aiding the suppression of other points of view about the problems of public discourse. Lost in this critique is by necessity any critique of the practice of including locally dominant actors as representatives of “the local point of view.”

Discursive Distancing

Our third mechanism is discursive distancing. By this we mean a kind of “othering,” that is, the tendency to impose a certain rigid distinction between us (or “our kind of people”) and them (“not our kind of people”), or between our acceptable view and their unacceptable view (Spivak, 1985; see also Boréus, 2006: 410). This mechanism makes it harder for people to express certain ideas and perspectives because failure to sufficiently distance oneself from the other side and their point of view is punished. Those who may be forced to pick sides are attacked for having a view associated with other unacceptable views.

Orlando Patterson has addressed the more specific problem of discursive distancing that we identify in the responses of our interviewees. Patterson writes that people on the political right can be “so committed to the principle of personal responsibility that they either deny or are hostile to any explanation of human action in sociological or psychological terms, fearing—incorrectly—that this implies people are not answerable for their actions” (Patterson, 1999). Conversely, he suggests, people on the left often “fall in the opposite trap: an oversocialized view of people, so sensitive to the social forces conditioning us that they are unable or unwilling to hold those who fail responsible for their actions” (Patterson, 1999). Thus, for different reasons, people with different political orientation may see understanding and explaining as taking a political stand and a moral stand toward the people whose actions are being discussed. They consequently insist either that no understanding or explanation should be accepted or that all actions can be explained and understood and therefore have no moral implications. Both types of claim conflate understanding and explaining with justifying (see also Alvarez, 2009).

While both these views, from both left and right, may have been present among the various perspectives in public deliberation and may have affected the inclusion of marginalized perspectives, we did not find support for either of them in our interviews. We include this mechanism, however, because the argument was made by local civil society actors that their view was being attacked precisely because they claimed to understand and to be able to explain the riots while not claiming that they were justified. The local activist group, Megaphone, had repeatedly been accused of fueling the riots through divisive rhetoric. It was when criticizing the terms of this debate that they were criticized for failing to sufficiently distance themselves from those who had participated in the riots.

Thus, this mechanism appeared in this case primarily on the meta-level: when the group sought to comment on the terms of the debate and to defend their right to speak about the problems of the suburb, they were criticized for wanting to justify the riots due to their claim to understand them. The group stated that rioting was not the right means of protest and not their means of protest. This was claimed, however, to be insufficient because the problem, according to the group’s critics, was that the group’s representatives said that they understood the riots. ³ They were repeatedly asked whether they would take back their statement that they “could understand” why people in their suburb were so frustrated that they would burn cars and buildings. Their repeated answer, that the riots could be understood but not justified, was only met with more criticism.

The logic of this type of discursive distancing appears to be that if an action can neither be justified nor understood, it can only be condemned. However, Megaphone wanted to refuse condemnation, as it sought to refocus the debate on the underlying injustices that, according to the group, had caused the riots. Even when the debates did focus on such underlying issues, the attempts to force participants to distance themselves from the rioters functioned as a way to question some participants’ legitimate right to take part in the discussions about the riots, as well as the debates about the debates. Agreeing that rioting was not only inexcusable but also incomprehensible thus appears to have functioned as a rite of passage to the sphere of public reasoning. The consequence of such distancing is that perspectives that may help deepen the understanding of the motivation and situation of those who had participated in the riots are excluded from such discussions. Similarly, actors who might help deepen our understanding of problems of marginalization in public deliberation are excluded from meta-deliberative processes that address this problem.

The experience with this mechanism seemed limited to this particular group. In subsequent interviews, we asked interviewees whether they recognized this tendency from their own experience, but none of the interviewees said that they did. We noticed, however, that when the interviewees spoke more generally about their experiences, some of them mentioned that it is difficult to discuss problems in the area with people not living there partly because when they attempt to explain problems, this was interpreted as attempts to justify unacceptable behavior. While this mechanism was not a widely shared experience, we see it as significant because it was observable in public discourse. Apart from the example of Megaphone, this mechanism was also observable in the Swedish parliament, where a representative of the Liberals said, “I am outraged that the Left express understanding for these events” (Swedish Radio, 2013).

Reliance on Social Markers

Our fourth mechanism is reliance on social markers. This refers to the tendency of participants in public discourse to treat cues about other participants’ social backgrounds—accents, ethnic appearance, gendered features, and so on—to judge the importance of their views and opinions. Sociological research has shown various ways in which people respond to factors that should, from the perspective of deliberative democracy, be irrelevant (Bourdieu, 2013). As this research shows, people’s competence to speak is often judged on the basis of social distinctions rather than content (Hayward, 2004). In the context of the Stockholm riots, some interviewees found that there was a tendency to take certain people more seriously than others, regardless of whether they had something important to say. While the three previous mechanisms account for much of this tendency, there was also a sense that one’s ability to make others listen was affected by one’s accent and ways of articulating ideas, which revealed one’s social status.

Almost all of the interviewees felt that they had observed exclusion based on social markers. Sometimes this had affected them personally and sometimes other people. The importance of how you speak rather than what you say was highlighted by several interviewees. “If you speak like these boys, then it is pointless. Then you will have to rely on others voicing your views” said one social worker. Another interviewee pointed to the differences in how you put forth your arguments and related it to education and culture and argued that this had an impact on your chance of being included and heard. Part of the problem may be that people who grow up in a marginalized area have less education and experience of public deliberation: “Some people have more training in this, you know how to talk, when to talk and to whom you should speak to, how to speak to make people listen.” Part of the problem concerns the disadvantage of having a culturally devalued way of speaking: “We are from different cultures as well, and you talk to each other in different ways and deliver arguments in different ways.”

One interviewee compared herself to a local political figure whose ways of speaking and appearance made her more “fit” for television and public debates:

I’m a bit unsure about this question, but if I think about [the local political figure], for example, she does well in the debates, she speaks great Swedish, she can talk and she was a prominent politician in the area so she was taken seriously, of course. So if I should be there and say . . . I would not be taken as seriously, even though I am the one who lives in the area. She even said that she would not consider putting her kids in [the local public school]. I think this is very wrong. It’s the people from here that elected you –if you don’t put your own kids . . . how can you tell others that they should put their kids there? It was the wrong message, but it was okay and accepted in a way, and if one criticized it one was not taken seriously. (. . .) Some people fit better for the TV format, for debates. (. . . ) It’s not important what you say, really. They just fit better, kind of.

When asked why this local political figure fits better in the TV format, the interviewee responded, “Maybe I can say like this. Someone who doesn’t speak Swedish as well and maybe wears a headscarf and doesn’t have the same possibilities as [her] would not be appear as authoritative, I would guess.”

Our interviewees did not indicate whether this mechanism equally affects discussions about riots and other substantive issues and discussions about how such discussions proceed or if it affects these deliberation differently depending on the level. In general, however, it seems likely that this mechanism affects both ordinary discussions and meta-deliberative discussions. If social markers affect the chances to participate, it also becomes difficult to raise awareness of such problems if you are not already recognized as a person who should be allowed to speak and be heard. Subordinate cultural symbols, in particular, may often impact negatively on one’s chances to voice critique and influence discussions. For example, speaking with an accent or with grammatical mistakes, or wearing a hijab, made it more difficult to participate on equal terms, as indicated by the interviewee above, for people from the areas affected by riots and marginalization problems that often have ethnic minority backgrounds and are part of lower income groups. Conversely, another interviewee stated that “if you are middle class, white and live in the inner-city, then you will find it easier to talk to people like you.” It seems reasonable to expect that the tendency of people influential in public deliberation to let social markers affect their response to different actors also affects possibilities to raise awareness of patterns of marginalization in such deliberation. In other words, there seems to be no particular reason to expect that meta-deliberation is immune to these tendencies. If it is easy to dismiss the views of people belonging to groups that one is accustomed to ignore, then it would seem as easy to dismiss their criticisms of deliberative practices.

Paternalistic Conflict Avoidance

Paternalistic conflict avoidance combines two concepts. Paternalism means taking an individual’s own good as a reason to intervene, or as in this case, as a reason to not allow a person to be exposed to a situation associated with risk (see Dworkin, 1972; Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). The risk, in this case, is heated conflict. Conflict avoidance is a means of avoiding a situation or issue and may include postponing or changing the subject, or, as in this case, not bringing up the subject of contention. Declaring a topic taboo may often be part of such conflict avoidance (Roloff and Ifert, 2000). Conflict avoidance is paternalistic, we reason, when such taboos are declared for the sake of avoiding discussions that another person is seen unable to handle well. For example, people may avoid bringing up politically contentious issues with people they feel are too ignorant or too personally involved to treat the issue reasonably. In this particular context, we see paternalistic conflict avoidance to be expressed by the way issues are avoided in deliberation for the sake of not offending some people or cause uncomfortable responses.

There was a tendency, according to one interviewee, to keep certain questions off the agenda, such as harassment of women in public spaces, due to the perspective that such topics would be explosive in the local context. In particular, cultural and religious minorities would react negatively, and possibly aggressively, if such issues were brought up as topics for deliberation. In other words, this issue, which affects various aspects of social life, also affects the terms of deliberation. Moreover, dealing with such problems may require meta-deliberation, but meta-deliberation is not necessarily more open to discussions about such presumably sensitive issues, that is, it is not necessarily less prone to paternalistic conflict avoidance. If a group is seen incapable of handling an issue, it may also be easier to dismiss the idea of discussing their assumed problem with it in meta-deliberation.

Because this mechanism was identified late in our data collection, we did not have the chance to follow up on this in other interviews. We do not know whether this experience was shared by other interviewees. However, our purpose here is not to weigh mechanisms against each other but to identify mechanisms that could be relevant elsewhere as well. It is important to note that the idea that others are unable to deliberate about a particular topic may be based on mere prejudices and thus be false. Moreover, paternalistic conflict avoidance may thus not be limited to this particular issue. Apart from harassment and violence, there might be other preconceptions about others’ feelings and inabilities to discuss certain issues in a respectful way that marginalizes important experiences and perspectives.