The Emancipatory Effect of Deliberation: Empirical Lessons from Mini-Publics

See, for example, Graham Smith , "Taking Deliberation Seriously: Institutional Design and Green Politics," Environmental Politics 10, no. 3 (2001): 72-93.

Jürgen Habermas , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

André Bächtiger , Simon Niemeyer , Michael Neblo , Marco R. Steenbergen , and Jürg Steiner , "Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Empirical Blind-Spots, and Complementarities," Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2010): 32-63.

The main problem with mini-publics relates to scale, raising questions regarding their legitimacy with the wider public, see John Parkinson, "Legitimacy Problems in Deliberative Democracy," Political Studies 51 (2003): 180-96. The solution that is often suggested to this scale problem is the deployment of online deliberation, which raises questions about the quality of discourse. For a review, see Davy Janssen and Raphaël Kies, "Online Forums and Deliberative Democracy," Acta Politica 40, no. 3 (2005): 317-35.

James F. Bohman , "The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy," Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 4 (1998): 399-423.

Simon John Niemeyer and John S. Dryzek , "The Ends of Deliberation: Metaconsensus and Intersubjective Rationality as Deliberative Ideals," Swiss Political Science Review 13, no. 4 (2007): 497-526.

Steven R. Brown, Political Subjectivity: Applications of Q Methodology in Political Science ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).

Murray J. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinoes Press, 1985).

Simone Chambers , "Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?" Political Theory 20, no. 3 (2009): 323-50. John B. Thompson , The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), Doug Walton , "Revitalizing the Public Sphere: The Current System of Discourse and the Need for the Participative Design of Social Action," Systemic Practice and Action Research 20, no. 5 ( 2007): 369-86.

This involves a different mechanism than the one identified by Knops, although the clarity of language he identifies would certainly contribute to the same mechanism I identify here. Andrew Knops, "Delivering Deliberation’s Emancipatory Potential," Political Theory 34, no. 5 (2006): 594-623.

John S. Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990 ).

Amy Gutmann and Dennis F. Thompson , Democracy and Disagreement ( Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1996).

For example, Adolf G. Gunderson, Environmental Promise of Democratic Deliberation (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Jane J. Mansbridge, "A Deliberative Theory of Interest Representation," in The Politics of Interests: Interest Groups Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992); Michael Saward, "Green Democracy?" in The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory, ed. Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie (London: Routledge, 1993); David Y. Miller, "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice," special issue, Political Studies 40, (1992): 54-67.

Herbert Alexander Simon , Models of Man: Social and Rational ( New York: Wiley, 1957).

Bernard Grofman and Guillermo Owen , eds., Information Pooling and Group DecisionMaking (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986).

James D. Fearon , "Deliberation as Discussion," in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster , Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy (London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Hugh Ward , Aletta Norval , Todd Landman and Jules Pretty , "Open Citizens’ Juries and the Politics of Sustainability," Political Studies 51, no. 2 (2003): 282-99.

John S. Dryzek and Simon John Niemeyer , "Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals," American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 ( 2006): 634-49.

Niemeyer and Dryzek , "The Ends of Deliberation: Metaconsensus and Intersubjective Rationality as Deliberative Ideals."

Simon John Niemeyer, "Deliberation in the Wilderness: Transforming Policy Preferences through Discourse" (PhD diss., The Australian National University, 2002). This ideal is consistent with a broader conception of free agency than implied by citizen sovereignty because it entails not just freedom to choose, but freedom to choose why one chooses across the domain of normative and epistemic claims. See Gary Watson, "Free Agency," The Journal of Philosophy 62, no. 8 (1975): 205-20. See also Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics.

John Zaller , The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 95-96.

Edelman , The Symbolic Uses of Politics, 5-7.

Arguably, the most profound recent example of this kind of politics is the justification for the invasion of Iraq. Here the stated justification-weapons of mass destruction-was invoked because of its evocative symbolic content, which resonated strongly with the constituencies in a number of the countries participating in the invasion (e.g., United States, UK, and Australia). See also David O. Sears, "Symbolic Politics: A Socio-Psychological Theory," in Explorations in Political Psychology, eds. Shanto Iyengar and William James McGuire, Duke Studies in Political Psychology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)

Phillip E. Converse , "Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue," in The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems , ed. Edward R. Tufte ( Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970 ), 168-89.

Jon A. Krosnick , "The Stability of Political Preferences: Comparisons of Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Attitudes," American Journal of Political Science 35, no. 3 (1991): 547-76.

Edelman , The Symbolic Uses of Politics, 6-7.

Doris A. Graber, Verbal Behavior and Politics (Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1976), 289.

Edelman , The Symbolic Uses of Politics, 77.

See Bächtiger et al., "Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, Their Empirical Blind-Spots, and Complementarities."

John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51-54.

Rom Harré and Grant Gillett , The Discursive Mind ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).

John S. Dryzek , The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); John S. Dryzek , "Reconstructive Democratic Theory," American Political Science Review 87, no. 1 (1993): 48-60; John S. Dryzek , "Australian Discourses of Democracy," Australian Journal of Political Science 29 (1994): 221-39; John S. Dryzek and Simon John Niemeyer , "Discursive Representation," American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (2008): 481-94; M. Hajer , The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

Dryzek and Niemeyer , "Discursive Representation," 481.

Harré and Gillett, The Discursive Mind, 25. It should be noted that for Habermas, "discourse" refers to an idealized and undistorted form of communication, whereas here it is an empirically observable phenomenon embodying meaning, the content of which is explored and process of formation compared to these Habermasian ideals.

See Joseph L. Arvai , Robin Gregory , and Timothy L. McDaniels , "Testing a Structured Decision Approach: Value-Focused Thinking for Deliberative Risk Communication," Risk Analysis 21, no. 6 (2001): 1065-76; Ralph L. Keeney , Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Dryzek and Niemeyer , "Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals"; Niemeyer and Dryzek , "The Ends of Deliberation: Metaconsensus and Intersubjective Rationality as Deliberative Ideals."

Niemeyer and Dryzek , "The Ends of Deliberation: Metaconsensus and Intersubjective Rationality as Deliberative Ideals."

For a critique of the assumption that groupthink and polarization are ubiquitous in group deliberation, see Robert S. Baron , "So Right It’s Wrong: Groupthink and the Ubiquitous Nature of Polarized Group Decision Making," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Mark P. Zanna (San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 219-53.

Hugo Mercier and Helene E. Landemore , "Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation," Political Psychology (under review).

It is also one of the few methodologies (particularly among those that are quantitative in nature) that is consistent with discourse theory. Ricardo Blaug , "Between Fear and Disappointment: Critical, Empirical and Political Uses of Habermas," Political Studies 45 (1997): 100-17.

The actual number of statements that could be allocated to each column varies with the studies reported in this article. It should be noted that it is possible to use a simple Likert scale for a Q study. However it is usually preferable to obtain a Q sort. Experience has shown that the quality of the resulting data is much enhanced by the sorting experience. It is an essentially "discursive" encounter, where participants are able reflect on their positions as they weigh up the statements in relation to one another, rather than provide relatively spontaneous responses to individual statements in isolation. Moreover, the resulting data are more strongly intersubjective in the sense that there is a more strongly shared understanding of which statements are more-agreed or less-agreed with, as opposed to using a Likert rating, where one individual’s rating may mean something slightly different than another individual’s rating. For example, some individuals are more likely to express their positions at the extremes of the spectrum compared to others, even if they happen to essentially agree in terms of the relative ordering of statements.

Most commonly used for producing the factors is the Principal Components method, followed by a Varimax rotation, but it is also possible to employ other methods, including the manual rotation of factors according a specific criteria. For example, in the Bloomfield Track case study, manual rotation was used to maximise the relationship between the resulting factors and the positions held by individuals in terms of their expressed preferred options regarding the future of the road. The approach is given detailed treatment in Niemeyer, "Deliberation in the Wilderness: Transforming Policy Preferences through Discourse," chap. 6.

Complete consensus among participant Q sorts would result in a single discourse, as would a strongly bipolar relationship where one group is in complete consensus with the discourse and the other in complete dissensus. More commonly individual responses to the Q sorts tend to cluster around a small number of discourses. The absence of any structure among the Q sorts would fail to produce any meaningful discourse.

See Anna Littleboy, Naomi Boughen, Simon Niemeyer, and Kath Fisher, "Societal Uptake of Alternative Energy Futures: Final Report" (Newcastle, NSW: CSIRO Energy Transformed Research Flagship, 2006); Simon John Niemeyer, "New Mexico ForestERA: Analysis of a Citizen and Stakeholder Deliberations on Forest Restoration Issues in Northern New Mexico" (Canberra: Deliberative Democracy Research Group, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, 2008); Simon John Niemeyer, "Report of the Analysis of the Ubc Biobank Deliberative Process" (Canberra: Deliberative Democracy Research Group, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, 2007); Simon John Niemeyer, Selen Ayirtman, and Janette HartzKarp, "Achieving Success in Large Scale Deliberation: Analysis of the Fremantle Bridge Community Engagement Process," in Micropolitics in Deliberation Reports (Canberra: Deliberative Democracy Research Group, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, 2008); David M. Secko, Nina Preto, Simon Niemeyer and Michael M. Burgess, "Informed Consent in Biobank Research: A Deliberative Approach to the Debate," Social Science and Medicine 68 (2009): 781-89.

Elim Papadakis , "Environmental Policy," in Hawke and Australian Public Policy, ed. Christine Jennet and Randal G. Stewart ( Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), 142.

Examples include issues such as, law-and-order enforcement (by flushing out drug traders, orchard thieves, and illegal migrants) and assisting the defence of Australia from attack by sea.

Ross Fitzgerald , From 1915 to the Early 1980s: A History of Queensland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984), esp. 250.

Even where environmental concerns create significant tension, many have acquiesced to such arguments, or reduced dissonance through a kind of kind of technocentric belief that both environment and community can benefit from the road. Indeed, one of the most creative of the arguments along this vein was that the Bloomfield Track would abate greenhouse gases due to reduced distances traveling to and from the Bloomfield Region to major centers in the South, as argued by the Queensland Minister for the Environment in Parliament QLA, "Queensland Parliamentary Debates," ed. Queensland Legislative Assembly (Brisbane: Government Printers, 1983), 748.

Wilderness Action Group , The Trials of Tribulation (Mossman: Wilderness Action Group, 1983).

Tim Doyle , "Environment and the Media," Social Alternatives 11, no. 1 (1992): 47-54.

Funded by Land and Water Australia. Although the deliberative process was not directly linked to a decision, there is no evidence to suggest that participants took the process any less seriously.

The aggregation method used was Borda count. A number of possible methods can be used to calculate aggregate preference, for example H. Stern, "Probability Models on Rankings and the Electoral Process," in Probability Models and Statistical Analyses for Ranked Data, ed. M. A. Fligner and J. S. Verducci (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 173-95. Moreover, no single method provides the definitive outcome, a conclusion most famously demonstrated by the work of Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1963). Two of the other possible methods that could be used include Condorcet (or consensus), and Hare. All three methods were used, producing slightly different results for predeliberative ranks, but the same result postdeliberation-reflecting an increased level of consensus. For a complete analysis of policy preferences, see Niemeyer, "Deliberation in the Wilderness: Transforming Policy Preferences through Discourse," chap. 7.

It is relatively easy to imagine a scenario in which preferences have changed for reasons that strongly contradict deliberative ideals-bribery, threats, or even the successful manipulation of positions using plebiscitary rhetoric. Moreover, it is entirely possible that at least some individuals may hold well-developed positions prior to deliberation that reflect the ideals that are produced as a result of deliberation.

Robert E. Goodin , "Enfranchising the Earth and Its Alternatives," Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 835-49.

See Tim O’Riordin , Environmentalism ( London: Pion, 1981).

Fitzgerald, From 1915 to the Early 1980s: A History of Queensland; Dean Jaensch , "Electoral Characteristics of Small Northern Towns," in Small Towns in Northern Australia, ed. Peter Loveday and Ann Webb (Darwin : Australian National University, North Australia Research Unit, 1989), 301-24.

Doyle , "Environment and the Media."

Richard E. Petty and J. Cacioppo , Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986).

Arthur Lupia , "Shortcuts Versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behaviour in California Insurance Reform Elections," American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 63-76.

This information had been in the public domain for some years, for example, Anthony M. Ayling and Avril L. Ayling, "The Effect of Sediment Run-Off on the Coral Populations of Fringing Reefs at Cape Tribulation," in A Report to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (Townsville: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 1991) and Anthony M. Ayling and Avril L. Ayling, "Medium-Term Changes in Coral Populations of Fringing Reefs at Cape Tribulation," in A Report to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (Townsville: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 1999), but it is a testament to the power of symbolic arguments that they persist in the face of countervailing evidence. Importantly, the evidence presented did not prove that there was, or ever would be, an adverse impact of the Bloomfield Track on the inshore reefs. It only supported the case that none could be found, such is the nature of scientific research. This point was contested among participants on the final day of the Bloomfield Track deliberative process and has implications for the role of basic scientific literacy in deliberation of evidence, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Climate change is another example where activists have overstated impact in order to elevate their concerns in public debate. See for example, Aynsley J. Kellow, Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007).

Blair T. Johnson and Alice H. Eagly, "Effects of Involvement on Persuasion: A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin 106 (1989): 290-314; Mercier and Landemore, "Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation"; Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, "Involvement and Persuasion: Tradition Versus Integration," Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 3 (1990): 367-74.

The remaining two discourse factor loadings for C and D were both 0.10 before deliberation and 0.18 and 0.04 postdeliberation respectively.

Note that the predeliberative intersubjective consistency was taken prior to deliberation, but after information was sent out to participants. This might suggest that the preinformation intersubjective consistency may have been even lower. However, results from other case studies where a complete longitudinal record is available suggest that improvements in intersubjective consistency occur primarily during interpersonal deliberation and may actually decrease during early stages of mini-public deliberative processes involving information dissemination. Such outcomes contradict the assertion by Goodin and Niemeyer that deliberation begins at the early stages of information acquisition. Certainly a strong impact is made, but it appears that intersubjective synthesis is a result of interpersonal deliberation. See Robert E. Goodin and Simon John Niemeyer, "When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection Versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy," Political Studies 51, no. 4 (2003): 627-49.

Significance of a factor loading is determined by the formula SE=1/√n where n is the number of statements in the Q sort. Here we calculate the standard error based on the number of statements used in the CP study from the original study (36) so that SE=0.167 and the 95 percent confidence interval =SE × 19.6 = 0.32, such that a significant loading is one that is 0.32 or greater.

More detailed arguments, including explanation as to why Fremantle Bridge Deliberative Survey achieved deliberation can be found in Niemeyer, Ayirtman, and HartzKarp, "Achieving Success in Large Scale Deliberation: Analysis of the Fremantle Bridge Community Engagement Process."

Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality.

This is not surprising: citizens tend to vote expressively as citizens in the political sphere, in contrast to "economic voting" as consumers in markets based on narrow self-interests. See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren E. Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Lupia, "Shortcuts Versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behaviour in California Insurance Reform Elections."

Compared with Yvonne Rydin and Mark Pennington , "Discourses of the Prisoners’ Dilemma: The Role of the Local Press in Environmental Policy," Environmental Politics 10, no. 3 (2001): 48-71.

J. Schumpeter , Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, [1943] 1976), 262. See also Philip E. Tetlock , "The Ever-Shifting Psychological Foundations of Democratic Theory: Do Citizens Have the Right Stuff?" Critical Review 12, no. 4 (1998): 545.

Walton , "Revitalizing the Public Sphere: The Current System of Discourse and the Need for the Participative Design of Social Action."

Robert E. Goodin and John S. Dryzek , "Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics," Politics & Society 34 (2006): 219-44.

Mark E. Warren , "Two Trust-Based Uses of Mini-Publics in Democracy," paper presented at the Conference on Democracy and the Deliberative Society , University of York, UK, 2009.

See, for example, Littleboy et al., "Societal Uptake of Alternative Energy Futures: Final Report."

Parkinson, "Legitimacy Problems in Deliberative Democracy."