Abstract
The legitimacy of public decision-making in democratic government is often challenged by its lack of capability for representing the public and their true preferences. This paper revisits existing methods of eliciting public opinions through the lens of structured public decision making, and highlights the importance of establishing public value and solid decision analysis before measuring public opinion. While deliberative mini-publics have been used to enable informed and reasoned judgment, they are vague on how opinions can be formed deliberatively and can not work well with highly complex and controversial issues that often have unclear value criteria. Following deliberative systems thinking, we argue for a three-phase process where opinions from the general public are elicited only after public values and solid decision analysis have been established. The working of this approach requires concatenation of three deliberative forums that establish legitimate public values, decision knowledge, and public opinions in synchronization with the three phases of public decision-making. We applied this approach on a real community issue in State College Borough (Pennsylvania), and developed a practical solution, Community OPinion Elicitation (COPE). COPE is a process that sequences two mini-publics (for public value identification and decision analysis) and one mass deliberation (for public opinion elicitation). While we observed positive impacts, it remains challenging to assess the method empirically.
Introduction
A great challenge of local decision-making in a democratic society is to make policy choices by leveraging collective knowledge and wisdom of the public, experts, and authorities [1, 2]. To be legitimate, public administrators and decision makers must incorporate the opinions of all those who have a stake on a public issue. Ideally, public opinion should reflect the common good, and serve as an effective mechanism for checking the actions of the governments [3]. In reality, however, authentic public opinion is hard to come by and rarely functions as expected [4]. Empirical research revealed that ordinary citizens rarely vote based on fully informed preferences [5]. They lack the political knowledge and competence to judge on public affairs [6], are poorly informed [7], and possess unstable attitudes [8]. Social clues and pressure are likely to distort opinion expressions [9]. This has presented serious challenges in measuring and interpreting public opinion data.
Despite the importance of public opinion to the practice of democracy, it is extremely challenging to understand the formation, communication, and measurement of citizens’ attitudes toward public affairs [10]. Existing public opinion research methods generally follow one of the two ways for discovering the public preferences. Mass opinion polling or survey methods have been used to aggregate individual preferences into quantitative surrogates for public opinion [11]. These methods are widely accepted in practice, due to their relative ease of implementation and the readiness of the current political institutions to uptake such forms of opinion. However, deliberative methods (including variants of deliberative polling methods) have recently gained popularity in response to the deliberative turn of democratic theories [12, 13]. Innovations of deliberative mini-publics (such as citizen’s juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, and citizen assemblies) [14, 15] offer new possibilities for transforming individual attitudes into collective judgment, and they are seen as more meaningful ways to institutionalize deliberative democracy.
Unfortunately, deliberative methods are found to be difficult to practice in real life [16]. They face multiple vulnerabilities and critics when being promoted as mechanisms for institutionalizing deliberative democracy [17]. First, the conception of public opinion as an “emergent product” of reasoned discourses in public sphere is hard to work with empirically [18]. Second, deliberative mini-publics place strong emphases on reason-giving, arguments, and justification, but they have little design considerations to achieve inclusiveness, equality, pluralism, scalability, and collective desires [4]. Third, they lack mechanisms to safeguard the public opinion process and outcomes against manipulation and dominance by power and elites, as well as social pressures [19]. Far more research and practices are needed to understand the intricacies of operating and institutionalizing deliberative mechanisms in community, regional, and national scale [20].
Empirical studies of different types of mini-publics revealed that they can play some roles as short episodes in a larger public opinion system, but none of them can meet all the expectations of (often competing) norms of deliberative democracy [10]. The latest idea for advancing deliberative democracy is to sequence multiple mini-publics in such a way that they function together as a deliberative system [21, 22, 23, 24]. This idea is particularly appealing because a systemic view allows more flexible design of institutional processes to approximate the deliberative democracy ideals. With the emergence of online deliberation technologies [25, 26, 27], mass participation of community conversation is now a reality. The design of online deliberation technologies so far has been focused on achieving the properties of idealized public sphere [28]. When incorporated into a deliberative system, it can contribute to the goal of openness and inclusiveness, because of their ability in collecting a breadth of observations, personal stories, experiences, judgment, and perspectives. Many of the mini-publics have parallel implementations online, which makes sequencing of mini-public much easier.
This paper advances the overall agenda of designing deliberative systems for collective decision-making, with a special focus on how such system can be designed to fit the need of public opinion formation in local government context. Local democracy is a subsystem of the broader national system, and they operate in a unique institutional context. Taking a deliberative system perspective, we aim to answer two questions: (1) what kind of deliberative system is needed in addressing the requirements of public opinion formation in local policy making? (2) what are the ways to build and configure such a system through proper sequencing of mini-publics? When formulating our approach, we draw insights from of public decision making and public opinion formation theories, and establish a procedure that sequences two mini-publics followed by a mass online deliberation. This systemic approach is designed to address three challenges of constructing legitimate public opinion: (1) the recognition and identification of public values; (2) the information barrier for forming reasoned and stable opinion; and (3) scaling up mass participation and deliberation. We developed this approach into a practical method, called Community OPinion Elicitation (COPE). COPE consists of three forums, in which political opinions from the general public are elicited (Forum III) only after public values and solid decision analysis have been established (Forums I and II). The COPE method ensures that the public opinion formation process is closely coupled with the public decision-making process. We practiced COPE method as part of public consultation process on real policy issues in State College municipal government, and achieved positive impact on the public opinion uptake from the public to decision-makers. At the same time, we have identified a number of design and implementation issues that require further research and refinement.
Public opinion quality and formation process: A review
We commonly see public opinions expressed and published when policy choices are to be decided, but a public opinion formation process starts much earlier when an issue receives public attention. In order to understand the legitimacy and trustworthiness of collected or published opinions on a public issue, it is more important to understand how that opinions were formed over the course of democratic decision-making (Section 2.1). This helps reveal the vast complexity and vulnerability of existing public opinion elicitation methods (Section 2.2). Finally we highlight the potentials of sequencing mini-publics methods and polling methods to institutionalize a democracy centered on public opinion (Section 2.3).
Public opinion and collective decision-making
A public opinion formation process starts when a group of people (a) are confronted by an issue, (b) are divided in their ideas as to how to address the issue, and (c) engage in discussion over the issue [29]. People often approach an issue initially with strong, emotionally laden feelings, which tend to be unstable and changeable. People may not understand an issue particularly well. They may not have thought through the consequences of different options. People’s views about an issue can develop and change over time, from disconnected, poorly informed reactions to more thoughtful and considered conclusions.
Public opinion research has its original goal of addressing collective decision-making. Rationalist view of public decision making recognizes five stages: (1) identify public values, (2) develop options, (3) estimate the consequences of options, (4) elicit public preferences on the viable options, and (5) the decision itself. Similarly, public opinion formation has been conceptualized as a series of phases leading toward some collective action that unfold over time [30, 31]. Along these lines, Foote and Hart [32] identified five collective phases in the formation of public opinion (see Fig. 1a) : (1) problem phase, (2) proposal phase, (3) policy phase, (4) program phase, and (5) appraisal phase. The relationships between the two processes are clearly seen in Fig. 1.
A comparison of public opinion formation process and collective decision-making process.
Problem phase. When a problem arises, people may not be clear about the exact issue that caused the problem. The goal of the first phase is to understand the problem, recognize the real issue, and establish what are valued by the community. This corresponds to the phase of Identify public values in Fig. 1b nicely. Public value refers to the desirable social outcomes that the political decision on a public issue should attain (e.g. enhancing public safety, improving public transportation), as well as any unintended consequences that should be avoided (e.g. violating privacy, depreciating properties) [33, 34].
Proposal phase. A public issue can usually be addressed by many strategies. It is essential that the decision-making process involves different stakeholder groups to explore all the alternative courses of action (or options). Some of these options might be eliminated if they are perceived as obviously not viable. At the end of this phase, a list of viable options is forwarded for further consideration.
Policy phase. For the identified candidate options, there is a need to understand the consequences of each option and relative advantages and disadvantages of competing options through careful analysis. This involves three subprocesses (corresponding to stages 3–5 in Fig. 1b). First, the merits and weaknesses of a viable option are identified and debated. Second, options are compared on their relative costs and benefits. Finally, a choice on the course of action is made. To do so, the general public develop and express their preference on the viable options based on the information produced in the previous analyses, and build consensus on the most preferred option. The result is submitted to relevant decision-making body in a specific political institution who makes the final decision.
Program phase. The approved course of action is executed.
Appraisal phase. Periodic reevaluations of the effectiveness of the implemented action are undertaken. Even if the decision achieved the intended purposes, people may discover unintended consequences that are not desirable, or that the implemented decision has given rise to unanticipated new problems.
Figure 1 highlights the fact that forming public opinions based on clear problem definition and analysis of policy options against public values is a quite demanding and challenging task. In particular, having a clearly stated set of public values (in stage 1 of Fig. 1b) is crucial for the evaluation of decision options (in stage 3). The outputs of decision analysis in stages 2 and 3 are the common basis to inform public opinions created in stage 4.
This model of collective decision-making is certainly a simplified view of how public opinion could develop. In reality, the process is rather ambiguous, politically-charged, and far less rational than the formal stage-model would imply [35]. It is even more complicated when we consider the range of actors involved in the process. Price and Neijens [4] identified six different groups of actors in a collective decision-making process with varying degree of involvement at different phases: political leaders, technical experts, interest groups, the journalistic community, attentive publics and much larger mass audiences. Initiatives and referendum processes are often flawed when putting into practice. They tend to rush people to express their opinions, but “furnish citizens with insufficient information about policy problems, inadequate choices among policy solutions, flawed criteria for choosing among such solutions, and few opportunities for reflection on those choices prior to decision making” [14].
Knowing the public attitude and preferences on important policy issues is the prerequisite for exercising mass democracy. However, researchers are divided in their conceptual approaches. Those who favor liberal democracy idea see the public as a collection of individuals attempting to maximize their own interests [35]. Public opinion is measured by an aggregation of individual opinion expressions. The resolution of conflicting interests was usually achieved through majority rule. In this light, the formation of public opinion is understood as a process that individuals form judgment based on what they know (or can find) about the issue and policy choices. This concept of public opinion serves as the justification for using surveys and polls to measure public opinion.
Survey and Polling are methods of measuring the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions on a selected sample, and then extrapolating generalities within confidence [11]. This is the most widely used method in current democratic systems. Despite its popularity, survey methods are known to be susceptible to flaws in practice. For complex social issues, survey-based opinion measures were found to be unstable, incomplete, superficial and inconsistent for those who are minimally informed and least concerned [36, 37, 38]. To compensate such shortcomings, later efforts emphasize the coupling of this method with additional ways to inform the public through mass media and expressed opinions of elite members (such as government officials, journalists, domain experts and policy specialists). However, as mass media and social elites gain power, individual opinions are easily influenced by the media and elite [39].
Alternatively, the deliberative form of democracy advocates that public opinions reflect a common good of a community and can transcend individual opinion [12, 40]. Public opinion is not something ready to be “polled”, but emergent products of reasoned arguments and open discussion [41, 18]. In this light, the focus of public opinion research was shifted from collecting personal judgment to the way individuals cooperate with others in order to form common understanding and judgment. This has led to the recent innovations in deliberative mini-publics [14, 15]. Mini-publics are typically made up of ordinary, non-partisan, lay citizens. They are designed to be groups small enough to have genuine deliberation and representative enough to be democratic [19]. They are usually organized for resolving specific issues. Either a random or a stratified sample of the population is selected to achieve a deliberative microcosm of the population. Participants in such small mini-publics cross-examine information, evidences and positions provided by experts and advocates through facilitated discussions.
Deliberative mini-publics have forms including citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, and citizen assemblies [42, 43]. A few of them are described briefly below.
Citizens’ juries [44] brings together a group of randomly chosen citizens to deliberate on a particular issue, such as setting a policy agenda or choosing a particular policy option. Over a number of days, participants are exposed to information about an issue and hear a wide range of views from witnesses who are selected on the basis of their expertise or on the grounds that they represent affected interests. With trained moderators ensuring fair proceedings, the jurors are given the opportunity to cross-examine the collected witnesses and call for additional information and witnesses when needed. Following a process of deliberation amongst themselves, the jurors provide their findings and recommendations in the form of a citizens’ report.
Deliberative opinion poll is a variant of opinion polls incorporating deliberative democracy principles [45]. A deliberative poll elicits public opinion after engaging citizens in deliberative conversations, through which they exchange views with each other and collaboratively develop a better understanding of the issue at hand. Exposure to discussions and reasoned arguments during deliberation improves the confidence in choosing and justifying their choices, hence making public opinions more informed and stable [46, 47].
Consensus conferences [48] typically involve 10 to 25 citizens selected by stratified sampling and the process is divided into two stages. First, the citizens meet to learn about the topic and the process. The second stage of the conference lasts several days. The citizens are briefed by their selected advocates and experts, and then compile a report which outlines their collective findings. Like citizens jury method, consensus conferences also use an external advisory committee that selects the citizen participants, compiles the list of expert candidates from which the citizens choose, develops information package, and selects facilitators. This committee typically consists of scholars, practitioners, issue experts, and even interest group representatives.
Citizens’ assemblies [49] recruit citizen participants randomly from the electoral register; and further down-select randomly from those who express interest in participation. The process progresses in three phases: the learning phase takes six weekends when the participants learn the complexity of different policy options; the consultation phase hosts public hearings for citizens to gather information and expressions from other members of the public; and the deliberative phase allows citizens to discuss the issue and generate a proposal for action. Following the deliberation, a vote among the participants is conducted to decide a final outcome of the assemblies.
The four variations of mini-publics described above are representative of current efforts to produce legitimate public preferences over policy choices. They have been experimented as the most advanced methods for institutionalizing deliberative democracy [19, 17]. Deliberative dialogues play several roles in the process. First, it increases the chances for a community to discover alternative values from different stakeholders [36] and facilitates a collaboratively constructed information base on the issue at hand [50, 51]. Second, it supplements information acquired from authoritative channels by citizens’ personal experience and real life stories. Third, deliberation and sense-making help eliminate unverifiable or false information from further consideration, hence making information base purified and consolidated.
When using these methods to institutionalize public opinion, however, they still fall short on a number of dimensions:
They involve the public very late in the process of the public decision-making [4, 19]. Majority of the public were rarely involved in the early phases of problem definition and solution explorations [52]. When public opinion is needed to making a final decision on a pending issue, citizens are suddenly inundated with enormous amount of information about the policy options, value criteria and analysis of pros and cons, and they are expected to form judgment quickly. This does not work well, since opinion formation and change take time as people slowly take in new evidence and reason about them [53, 54]. Mini-publics have made unrealistic expectations on human information processing capacities [19].
Public values were not clearly identified and explicitly stated. Based on the collective decision-making process in Fig. 1b, identifying public values is the first step towards establishing a shared criteria for evaluation of policy options. However, deliberative mini-publics (as they are practiced now) rarely include explicit processes to recognize, deliberate and build consensus on the most important social outcomes to be achieved. Recognizing public values is the hardest job to do in deliberative settings [55], but it is also the most important step. Until a community has a consensus on the public values to be targeted at, it is unlikely that individuals consider the community’s common goods as their criteria when evaluating policy alternatives.
Overly high expectations of citizens’ competence. Deliberative methods of public opinion formation expect participants to have omnipotent skills to communicate with others, analyze expressed opinions, reason about consequences based on multiple criteria, interpret messy data, as well as summarize findings. These are unrealistic assumptions regarding the capacities and competence of individual citizens [56]. They need to be rational, reflective and evaluative. Empirical research in social psychology revealed that people are likely to generate analyses of problems that are simplistic, unimaginative and distorting in a way that reinforces their personal biases and their community’s cultural definitions and social practices. However, literature suggested that lay citizens are likely to have better competence in two areas of public decision-making: (1) reflecting on public goods and desirable social outcomes, and (2) judging on policy options if all the analytical information is presented properly. This is the justification for our method to focus on citizens’ involvement in phases 1, 3, and 4 of the decision-making process (see Section 4).
Heavy reliance on elite-provided information. All mini-publics engage experts and interest groups as witnesses and information providers in the process, while the citizens may only access information that experts judged as relevant [19]. Although experts are indispensable in providing technical aspects of decision analysis, there is a danger that experts may lose neutrality and provide biased information. Given the popularity of Internet and social media, it is very likely that there are already ongoing conversations about an issue. Institutional design of public opinion system should also consider drawing information from this informal public sphere [57].
Although the legitimacy of mini-publics has been questioned [58, 59, 60], others [21, 24] see the potential of using multiple mini-publics in concatenation to achieve a level of legitimacy higher than any of its components. A systemic approach allows us to analyze the division of labor among parts of a system, each with different deliberative strengths and weaknesses. Each single part may itself have low or even negative deliberative quality with respect to one of several deliberative ideals, but it can still make an important contribution to an overall deliberative system.
The deliberative system thinking has generated much excitement about its potential in making micro-deliberative exercises impactful to broader democratic decisions. Such potential is still waiting to be realized in different political contexts. Gastil and Richards [14] applied the systemic idea and proposed the use of five random assemblies in a sequence to achieve better deliberative quality in referendum-based direct democracy.
Following the systems thinking, we can perceive public opinion formation process as one that lives in a deliberative system. The goal of this system is to promote the formation and expression of legitimate public opinions. This system has multiple episodes of mini-public engagement, each functions as a component of the overall system. As highlighted in Section 2.1, public opinions in the context of democratic decision-making are complex entities in which a wide variety of players, objectives, phases, and outcomes are coordinated to accomplish the work. Given that there are five phases of democratic decision-making (Fig. 1b), five points of opportunities can be identified for involving the public. We envision that a deliberative system for public opinion formation includes five components coupled through their relations to public decision-making:
Public value analyzer. This component is inserted after phase 1 (of Fig. 1b). The goal is to allow a consensus of public values to emerge out of the deliberation and debate around all individual values surfaced in relation to an issue. P-I should be designed to allow a degree of value clash, as well as the capacity to build consensus.
Decision options generator. This component is inserted after phase 2. The goal is to build shared understanding of what options are viable given the range of policy options generated by experts and others. The process can be deliberative, but it does not need a strong consensus building.
Decision options analyzer. The public takes the expert analysis on each of the decision options and conducts comparative analysis of risks and benefits of the competing options through the eyes of the citizens. The public actively debate over a limited number of options and register their opinions as to which they prefer [4]. This process is informed by expert analysis, but enhanced by the perspectives of what are desirable by the public (grounded in the public values derived from P-I). Deliberation here can be quite intense and investigative. This step is likely to observe significant opinion changes towards more stable and considered opinions.
Decision recommendation. This is to measure the broad public sentiment on the preferred choice of action. The process involves mass deliberation to facilitate considered opinions that are fully informed by the knowledge generated from P-I to P-III.
With the above division of the functional components, we need to decide how to operate each component and how to interconnect them in a system. Such design questions have to be answered in a concrete institutional context. Next, we will further this discussion in the context of local governments.
To advance the research agenda in institutionalizing deliberative democracy, the rest of the paper will focus on the local government context where a deliberative approach is most likely to succeed. We propose a vision to assemble a set of deliberative mechanisms into a system that functions as a deliberative system for public opinion formation and elicitation.
In Section 2.3, we have identified four functional components of public opinion system in general. When designing deliberative system for local government, we need to decide on the micro-processes of each functional component and how they relate to each other and to the outer context of the political ecosystem. Before targeting that goal, we shall first pay attention to the unique aspects of the local institutional context, civic context, and cultural context.
Considering the unique context of local communities and local governments, we may infer the following design requirements and constraints.
Shifting the focus of public participation to the task of defining public values. Local citizens typically lack the competence to judge the intricacies of policy, but they are fully capable of and motivated in telling elite decision makers what bothers them, what issues need policy attention, and what social outcomes are desirable. A community may have diverse opinions on an issue, but as long as they share the understanding of the public values, their opinion is considered favorably in the sense of having a degree of collectivity.
Translating expert-provided decision analysis information into citizen-consumable knowledge. This involves bringing deep matters up to surface and allow citizens to use their modes of reasoning to form judgment.
Seamless connection with formal political system. A public opinion system should be fully connected with the political system of the institution it is embedded in. The embedding allows government-related information to flow freely into the process. It should also allow decision-makers to uptake information from the system in order to monitor and respond to new development.
Intake and uptake in public sphere. Public opinion system should be fully connected with the informal public sphere. It can improve the inclusiveness of the overall system, and allow the outcomes to further inform wider deliberation in the broad public.
These requirements serve as the rationale for our proposal of COPE method described next.
Community OPinion Elicitation (COPE) reflects our approach towards developing a deliberative system for public opinion formation and elicitation. The design of COPE generally follows the deliberative thinking to sequence three deliberative forums (public value citizen panel, decision analysis citizen panel, and mass opinion elicitation) that provide coordinated functions along a collective decision-making process (as in Fig. 2). This deliberative system takes input from informal and formal public spheres, expert analysis and guidance, as well as government data repositories. It produces public opinions that assert influence to final decisions within a democratic institution.
The three-forum design of the COPE process (in dashed box) and the function of each forum in the decision-making process.
All three forums are supported by one or more advisory committees, teams of experts, and professional facilitators. As a system, COPE has built-in mechanisms that achieve the four requirements identified in Section 3. For example, Requirement 1 is met by involving the public early in the public value elicitation phase (Forum I). Requirement 2 is met by Forum II that interfaces citizens’ reasoning with expert knowledge. Next, let us take a more detailed look into the three forums, and their specific design challenges.
We start the COPE process with a dedicated forum to identify public values. It is responsible for explicitly stating the set of desirable social outcomes that the community aims to achieve on a given issue. This process resembles a consensus conference method [48] that involves a deliberation among members on a public value panel. In COPE, our concerns on public values are specific to the set of social outcomes that are judged to be desirable by the community [63, 55]. Almost every opinion on an issue carries some degree of private value judgment, but such values are typically privately held and are not stated explicitly. The goal of this forum is to make them explicit, externalized, and articulated. Public values do not always align with private interests. Public values cannot be reduced to aggregating individual values, but they represent “what we care” [55]. Forum I typically proceeds in three steps:
Value collection and elicitation. The citizen panel is presented with an array of expressions of private or group interests collected from the mass media, community forums, records of relevant public meetings and appeals, as well as politicians in the local government. Additionally, members on the panel will also contribute value statements by themselves.
Value analysis. The panel analyze all the value statements to eliminate those irrelevant to the current issue and aggregate similar ones. During panel deliberation, all value expressions are placed directly in comparison and contrasts with each other. Those values that truly represent public interests will emerge through informed and in-depth debate [35, p. 16]. Special care is given to balance majority interests with other important values, intended social outcomes and unintended consequences that may or may not be desirable [64, p. 88].
Value choice. The panel then deliberate to seek an agreement on the choice of value dimensions that are considered truly important. The panel is also asked to assign weights to the final value choices to reflect the priorities in case trade-offs have to be made due to limited resources. This extra step facilitates the comparison of alternative policy options and the identification of their comparative advantage in a later stage.
Inside Forum I, there are a number of design decisions that may present challenges.
How to compose the public value panel? Typically, this panel involves 10 to 15 members which is small enough to have meaningful deliberation. In order to maximize the chance of representing the diverse interests and values in the community, half of these participants are selected by stratified random sampling, and the other half are representatives from diverse community groups (students, business owners, young professionals, etc). It uses an external advisory committee that assists in balancing the representation of the panel members, selecting sources of published value statements and developing information packs.
How to make sure that relevant values are recognized and included in the deliberation? Values is difficult to recognize and rarely stated explicitly [37, 55]. One strategy to get around these difficulties is to create conversational situations that allow people to talk about their feelings and opinions on concrete issues and infer values from their opinionated expressions. Fortunately, local communities are marked by a plethora of private values expressions, especially when a public issue arises and draws the attention of the public.
How to manage and balance confrontation and consensus building during value discussions and debates? Certain issues could be highly controversial and political, which may bring a diverse set of values in direct confrontation. In such cases, some degree of debate and argument is healthy, but too much confrontation may destroy the mutual exchange of perspectives. In the same time, the citizen panel is expected to have strong analytical skills to synthesize expressions from different stakeholder groups, and reach a degree of consensus on what are the true concerns and convincing arguments. Professional facilitation of this deliberation process is crucial for the success.
What should be the basis for constructing agreement and rules for resolving disagreement in judging what values to be included as public value? Disagreement on public values may not be fully resolved through consensus building. Some of the commonly used decision criteria are: (1) concern a significant proportion of citizens, (2) be consistent with the characteristics of the local context in terms of economy, environment, demographics, etc., (3) be consistent with the legislatively mandated goals and objectives of the government, and (4) important to the overall health of the community [65]. Each community should establish its own decision rules for disagreement resolution.
This forum takes an approach that is similar to citizens’ juries [44] to perform a thorough analysis of the policy options and how they may impact the community. This citizen jury typically consists of 12–24 randomly-assembled citizen panelists. Supported by a group of experts and facilitators, the citizen panel conducts full investigation on all the expressions from experts and other stakeholders and present their findings as a citizen-friendly statement, referred to as Citizens Statement. Decision analysis by citizens are value-driven, and should reflect a critical assessment of how decision options enhance, preserve, or damage the public values identified in Forum I. The goal is to produce trustworthy and easily understandable decision knowledge that goes into voter’s guide.
For local policy-making, we have developed a practical process, Community Issue Crystallizer (or CIC in brief), for organizing decision analysis panel activities. It has three subtasks conducted in three consecutive phases:
Nuggets extraction phase is when panelists conduct thorough analysis of all the provided documents and identify pieces of information that contain either facts on the issue or reasons that support a judgment on the issue. We refer to these pieces of information information nuggets. This process resembles a collaborative information foraging task [66], and the goal is to separate all the important and relevant pieces of information from unimportant and irrelevant ones, so as to make further analysis easier.
Claim assembly phase is when the panel composes well-formed statements, or claims, that highlight the positive or negative impacts of the policy proposal, out of the information nuggets extracted in the previous phase.
Crystallization phase is when the citizen panel conducts fact-checking and evaluation on the claims to insure their quality and trustworthiness. These claimed are refined, compacted, and simplified to a set of final statements, referred to as Citizens Statement. By imposing this structured process, the panel can work on clearly specified subgoals one at a time, hence reducing cognitive complexity of the overall task.
In order to reduce the amount of time commitment for participants, CIC experimented the use of a hybrid form (a combination of face-to-face and an online deliberation) to support panel deliberation and analysis. The minimal configuration of this hybrid form is to hold two face-to-face meetings, one at the start of the CIC process, and one at the end of the process. For example, if the forum lasts a total of seven days, the panel will convene on day-1 to receive the document package, and get socialized among panelists. The next five days will be the time that the panelists work together using an online deliberation tool. The panel will meet again on day-7 to finalize the Citizens’ Statements through intensive face-to-face deliberation. This hybrid method only requires two face-to-face meetings which is much smaller a commitment and can be scheduled into citizen’s life more flexibly.
The actual practice of CIC process will have to address several design challenges.
What kind of source information should be used for the panel to analyze? Where does that information come from? Ideally, CIC should be furnished with all the information we can collect that are relevant to the pending issue. In reality, however, it requires a huge effort to identify information sources and even more effort to gather and organize data into an information package for the panelists. In our practice of CIC, we use the expertise of an external advisory committee to identify relevant information sources. In addition to published information sources, critical knowledge about local history and politics may only be available from individuals in the community who have been deeply involved. Therefore, information package to the panelists should also include interviews with experts of the following three types [30, 50]: technical experts conducting neutral analysis, experts who are knowledgeable about positive aspects of the policy proposal, and experts who are knowledgeable about the negative aspects of the policy proposal.
How to guarantee that the final presentation of decision-analysis knowledge is consumable by the broader public in the local community (see Requirement 2 in Section 3)? To inform citizens as they make judgment, Forum II must present decision-analysis knowledge a plain and straightforward manner. Particularly, scientific terminology and statistics should be interpreted and explained in easy-to-understand language. To insure that local culture, demographic characteristics, and citizens’ prior political knowledge are considered when compiling the analysis, it is helpful to use a randomly assembled citizen panel to conduct the decision analysis.
What is the best way to structure and present the findings of the CIC panel? Since findings of CIC are to be provided to the general public as voter’s guide, they must be crystallized into a form that someone fresh to the issue can make sense and form confident opinions with minimum cognitive effort. The ideal quality of the output should be (1) comprehensive and up-to-date, “to the best of everyone’s knowledge”, (2) concise and to-the-point, free of any irrelevant content, (3) convincing and well supported by evidence, and (4) free of unverified assertions or factual errors. Exactly how compact and in what structure the final statements should be communicated is a research question that needs to be explored through empirical studies.
This process is responsible for involving the general public in the community to develop their opinions and preferences on policy choices, informed by the findings from Forums I and II. Citizens’ opinion will serve as an important input for decision-makers. In this forum, all individuals that are potentially impacted by the pending decision, including citizens and members from different stakeholder groups, are invited to participate. Random sampling is not necessary for this step, as everyone in the community is given equal opportunity to express their opinions. This mass opinion elicitation process works roughly in three steps:
Members of the whole community are presented with the statements of public values (created in Forum I) and decision-analysis knowledge (created in Forum II), both written in simple and concise language and conveying accurate and trustworthy knowledge. After a careful reading and full understanding of the statements, citizens are involved in a mass deliberation process where they voice their own opinion and discuss/debate with each other. This process typically involves 2–4 subject matter experts who can be consulted with any questions that may arise during citizen deliberation. Finally, a survey or poll is conducted to elicit citizens’ preferences on the policy options in the form of a vote and a brief description of the reason for their vote. The polling result is summarized and made available to decision makers.
The design and implementation of this forum is faced with several challenges.
How to provide the opportunity for all community members to participate? With the increasing popularity of Internet access, online deliberation has the potential to scale up civic engagement and allow every citizen to share and learn from each other’s opinions and idea [67]. To achieve this goal, however, online deliberation systems must be strategically designed to encourage participants to learn and carefully consider views that are different from theirs, and ideas that challenge their own opinion [68].
How to deliver the products of forums I and II to the general public, so as to allow citizens to take a position on an informed basis? One way to address this issue is to include the decision-analysis statements in Voters’ Guide or Voters’ Pamphlet, which is distributed to the citizens via mail [14]. Alternatively, with the development of online deliberation, products from forums I and II may also be presented electronically and are integrated in the deliberation forum.
As a new proposal for local-level deliberative institution of public opinion formation, COPE method can be appreciated by the ways it improves the legitimacy of the public opinion outcome. When public opinion data is presented to the decision-makers, there are three worries on its legitimacy [35]. Next, we discuss what contribute to these worries and how COPE addresses them in the system level.
Our COPE method achieves inclusiveness in two mechanisms: (1) randomized selection of participants in Forum I and Forum II, and (2) deliberative polling involving the whole community (Forum III). Overlaying these two mechanisms in one system will achieve a level of inclusiveness and representation better than any of the five methods reviewed in Section 2.2. In addition, COPE uses the first two forums (Forum I and Forum II) to simplify significantly the efforts of understanding the issue, the public values, and the decision knowledge before the mass opinion polling. This strategy effectively lowers the bar of participation, and minimizes the chance of being excluded due to lower competence in reasoning and information processing.
Our COPE method overcomes the problems of lack of competence and lack of resource by delegating the tasks of analyzing public values and policy evaluation to the two deliberative citizen panels (Forums I and II). Before the general public are called for opinion surveys, a well prepared and concise Citizens Statement on an issue is made available to everyone. This significantly reduces the complexity of forming judgment because the issue and solutions were thoroughly analyzed by citizens, for their fellow citizens, with false and confusing claims removed, facts checked, and decision analysis knowledge crystallized.
Our COPE method minimizes the possibility of opinion pollution through a number of mechanisms. First, The whole process of COPE and its component processes are all professionally facilitated to put a check on power or elite dominance, and make sure minority opinions are equally considered through facilitated deliberation. Second, it puts citizen panels in charge of investigating the critical facts and claims so that the public do not have to rely on media as their sole information source. Third, using polling method in Forum III to elicit opinions effectively avoids the fear of social pressure and majority dominance.
By sequencing multiple mechanisms in COPE opinion formation process, we reduced the vulnerability of public opinion to the three kinds of dangers mentioned above, and hence achieve better legitimacy of the opinion and policy recommendation.
Institutionalizing public opinion in local governments must also consider if the system is efficient in achieve its goal. We argue that our COPE method has built-in mechanisms to achieve a level of efficiency better than existing mini-public methods. First, COPE takes advantages of recent advances in online deliberation technologies to support the hybrid (online and face-to-face) operations of Forum II, as well as an online deliberative polling in Forum III. These strategies effectively reduced the cost of traveling to face-to-face meetings, the cost of hotels and catering, and the cost of communication among citizens. Second, COPE uses three forums to achieve a “division of labor” among citizens, so that majority of the citizens do not have to repeat the challenging analytic tasks in Forum I and Forum II. It allows those more competent and interested citizens to play the more challenging role of citizen analysts and citizen journalists in Forum I and Forum II.
We have implemented the COPE process in correspondence to the way that public decisions are made in State College Borough government (
In this field experiment, the COPE process is enabled by three coordinated parts: (1) a facilitator’s guide that clearly stated what a facilitator will do at what moments/situations along the whole process; (2) a participant’s guide stating the expectations, tasks, and behavioral norms as the process advances; and (3) an online deliberation tool (GeoDeliberator) which was designed to support citizens’ analytical and collaborative activities in Forum II and Forum III. The community issue under scrutiny is called Collegiate Housing Overlay:
In this section, we will provide details on how we executed COPE process in the field experiment on the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue, with a focus on how we addressed the aforementioned design challenges in Section 4.
Implementing Public Value Elicitation
We implemented the public value elicitation forum with a community value panel on the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue.
Composition of the panel. Although we targeted getting 12–24 members for this panel, we ended with having only 8 participants. We carefully selected the panelists to make sure the panel is able to perform a neutral and unbiased analysis of the values from different stakeholder groups. We invited citizen representatives from the city council, homeowners in the Borough, members of the Downtown Improvement District, and members from the planning committee of the Borough government.
Ensure inclusiveness of public values The panel made three face-to-face meetings, each lasted two hours. A facilitator was in charge of the process and started the forum by a brainstorming session on what the panelists feel about the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue. After the panel deliberated fully on their own interpretations, the facilitator presents the panel with statements of the private interests and concerns collected from local newspapers, and community forums in Facebook. By interpreting the expressed opinions, we were able to infer the range of value dimensions that are considered important to the community.
Building consensus The panel was asked to consider each of the identified value (social outcome) to determine if it is also of the interest of the whole community. For most of the values, panelists did not have much trouble with presenting, discussing, supporting or opposing values. They formed good agreement on which ones should be eliminated because they are very remotely related, or concerns that were not found. A few concerns were combined due to their similarity. Through deliberation, the panel developed a set of statements representing explicit agreement and endorsement on public values.
In the end, the panelists reflected on their experiences of this process and found it to be quite valuable. They were surprised with their low awareness of the different attitudes, beliefs, and values that exist in their local community. Panelists recognized two difficult aspects of this process: (1) intended outcomes are easy to articulate, unintended outcomes are hard to be fully anticipated; (2) deliberation on consequences of implementing an ordinance is highly under-determined due to the uncertainties and contingencies social production.
Implementing Community Issue Crystallizer
Running Community Issue Crystallizer for the collegiate housing overlay ordinance proceeded in the following three stages: a preparation state, an execution stage, and a communication stage.
Preparation stage
It took our team two months to prepare the three sets of conditions to be established for a CIC: i) selection of panelists, ii) selection of subject matter experts (SMEs), and iii) an information package. These preparations are typical in any exercises of mini-publics. However, since CIC is a component of the COPE system, the experimental conditions are a bit different.
Selection of panelists. To ensure a balanced and representative panel composition of the panel, we mailed 300 invitation letters to those were randomly selected from the local tax payer database. We received 35 responses who expressed interest, but only 15 of them made commitment. This is an indicator that participating civic matters is not the high priority for most citizens. Due to the voluntary nature of the final participants, it was not possible to claim representativeness in the random selection sense, but we believe that is the best we can do in a community.
Selection of subject matter experts was by recruiting three persons: (1) SME1, a member of the planning commission in the Borough, serves in the role of a neutral SME which can be consulted for technical knowledge, such as how the land use zoning code are interpreted and enforced in the government; (2) SME2, a member of the downtown business improvement association, serves as the proponent SME who is the most insightful on the the reasons people feel positive about the proposed action; (3) SME3, a member of the highland neighborhood association in the Borough, serves as the opponent SME who is the most insightful on the the reasons people feel negative about the proposed action. An information package was put together that represents all the publicly accessible that are judged to be relevant to the pending issue. The following items were included in the information package on the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue.
Statement on the identified public values (product of Forum I). The draft Collegiate Housing Overlay proposal itself, in full text. Detailed presentation on the proposal, including its intended purpose, specific measures and expected outcomes, prepared by members of the Borough planning committee. Arguments for both supporting and opposing the ordinance proposal, written by subject matter experts. Transcript of the interviews with subject matter experts (proponents, opponents and neutral) in which experts explain their opinion and beliefs in depth. News articles and media reports on the issue in general, collected from local mass media and online social media. Meeting minutes on the issue in general, collected from the planning committee of the Borough.
The online workbench for information nugget extraction. On the left column the panelists find a document viewer, where they can navigate in the document collection and highlight information nuggets using a built-in tool. The right column lists all nuggets extracted to date. When extracting, they can also categorize a nugget with a pre-defined theme to make further analysis easier.
The online workbench in the claim construction phase.
The online workbench in the claim crystallization phase.
With the prepared document set, the citizen panel proceeds to the policy analysis phase. We used the hybrid design as described in Section 4.2, where the panel convenes face-to-face on the first day and the last day, and deliberate online during the days in between. A prototype system, GeoDeliberator, is designed to support the CIC tasks (nugget extraction, claim assembly, and crystallization) by supporting group communication and managing intermediate knowledge artifacts. A detailed agenda of CIC is as follows:
Face-to-face meeting. On the first day, the panel convenes and holds a 3-hour face-to-face meeting. Panelists are asked to introduce themselves to one another. This is followed by a brief introduction to the policy proposal presented by the borough manager and members from the planning committee.
Extract information nuggets. In this phase, the panel starts reading the document collection and focusing on the initial task of information nugget extraction. This is done using the built-in highlight tool on GeoDeliberator (Fig. 3). The system also allows panelists to ask questions to the experts to seek further information. Given the massive quantity of documents and the difficulty of making judgment on the importance and relevance of information, we allocated 3 days for this step.
Assemble claims. The goal of this phase is to compose well-formed statements, or claims, that highlight the positive or negative impacts of the proposed policy on the community goods (measured by public values). This is an iterative process of making sense of the information nuggets and discover their relationships as analysts try to compose larger chunks of meaning from pieces. For example, one nugget contains an expression of an opinion, but it does not give a good reason for others to appreciate and to be convinced. Chances are that there is another nugget that carries some facts that may serve as evidence. These two nuggets naturally make perfect “building blocks” for making a convincing claim. This step requires quite strong analytical skills and is cognitively challenging. The facilitator occasionally played the role of a reviewer and a coach to remind the panelists about those ill-formed or half-baked claims that await more nuggets. When critical information for making a claim is missing, we observed that panelists went back to the original documents collection and do more nugget extraction. If they still cannot find answers, they will post questions for the subject matter experts.
This process is also fully supported by the GeoDeliberator system (Fig. 4). In Collegiate Housing Overlay, 78 claims are created in this step, in which as many as 22 claims are created by the most active panelist. The system offers the function of per-claim discussion, but only a few panelists took advantage of this feature.
Crystallize claims. In the last phase, panelists consolidate and improve the claims they composed, and compile them into Citizens Statement.
The facilitator kept reminding the panel that their target is to create a concise Citizens Statements that capture their findings into 20 statements, among which, 10 statements are key findings, 5 statements are top reasons for substantiating the proposal, and 5 statements are top reasons for refuting the proposal. The panelists are instructed to think of the final statement as a series of “slots” that hold their finalized claims. Panelists work together to prioritize and merge claims, refine the language of claims, and concatenate the claims in a logical way and make the Citizens Statement coherent and easy-to-understand for the general audience. Panelists are encouraged to use their local language to phrase the Statement. Figure 5 shows the workbench for claim crystallization.
The system provides support for panelists to collaboratively refine claims. They can review others’ claims and express their votes or suggest changes. However, we found that panelists did not make full use of these functions due to its complexity and lack of support for building consensus. Instead, panelists found other offline ways to compensate the system, such as meeting in small groups, calling, or emailing their thoughts to each other. By this stage, it is no longer possible for the panel to work remotely because of the need for intense debate, editing, and collaborative writing. Therefore, the panelists did not try too hard to finalize every statements. Instead, they strive to come close to the well-stated findings, but left remaining uncertainty and disagreement to the final day.
The facilitator guiding the citizen panel through finalizing Citizens Statement in the wrap-up meeting.
Wrap-up: finalize Citizens’ Statement. On the last day face-to-face meeting, the panel met for three hours working intensely as a group to finalize the Citizens Statement. All the candidate statements were printed and hang on the walls of the meeting room. The panel was initially divided into three sub-panels in order to have more focused and deep deliberation on the three sections of the statements: Findings, Pros-, and Cons-. Then, the whole panel came together to discuss what to be with each statement. This process is orchestrated by the facilitator (Fig. 6). As soon as a plan for revising a statement is decided, the actual task of the revision was usually delegated to one panelist, and the panel move on to the next statement. We observed that the dynamics of interaction during revision and rewording is quite fluid, and word choices could make a big difference and were often the focus of debate among panelists. The panel demonstrated strong sensitivity in the way message was encoded in the statement for easy consumption by the public. Special attention was given to the order of statements to ensure readability. By the end of the meeting, all the statements were shaped to their finest possible and explicitly approved by everyone on the panel.
Finalized Citizens Statement was broadly publicized to the community through all the channels we could possibly reach: Centre Daily Times newspaper, StateCollege.Com website, local TV stations, State College Borough website, Facebook pages, as well as emails to neighborhood mailing lists. In the same time, a report of the CIC process and outcome on the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue was sent to all of the council members of the Borough for their awareness. The publicity of the Citizens Statement generated broader interests. Tom Fountaine, the Borough manager, responded to Centre Daily Times “we think it provides additional opportunities for the community, for citizens, to be engaged in the governance of the borough and reaches a broader audience for that conversation”.1
With the above description of how we implemented and used CIC for analyzing Collegiate Housing Overlay, we reflected on the overall CIC process as it happened and made the the following observations:
The hybrid approach of CIC achieves great flexibility while maintaining engagement. Between Day 2 and Day 8, panelists are able to work both synchronously and asynchronously on GeoDeliberator. System logs on panelists’ online activity showed that daily activities exhibit a two-peak pattern, one in the morning (around 9 am, following the facilitator’s email on the task and instructions for the day), the other in the evening (after 7 pm), which is consistent with prior findings in online deliberation [71]. Participating CIC online allows panelists to contribute at their convenience, without severely interfering with their regular work and life.
We observed significant variations on the patterns of collaboration as the CIC panel moved from nugget extraction phase, to claim assembly phase, and to the claim crystallization phase. Nugget extraction task allowed maximum flexibility for the panel to use divide-and-conquer strategy, as long as they are aware of what have been extracted by others. Similarly, a panelist can work on claim assembly task independently, with some degree of awareness on what claims have been constructed by others. When it came to the claim crystallization task, panelists started to struggle with understanding how a claim made by one person is related to another claim by another person, and how claims from different hands group together to answer issue-related questions. Consensus among panelists has to be reached quite often, and such consensus was often the result of extended discussions and debates. The dynamics of these collaborative behavior needs to be better understood and better supported through design of awareness support and coordination mechanisms.
Panelists found that GeoDeliberator was too limited in supporting their needs for deliberation and consensus building in the claim crystallization task. Although we designed various built-in operations that allow users to structure their discussion and reaction in the task (such as “flag as need rewording” and “perform a rewording”), panelists do not find them intuitive and straightforward enough to use. The majority of claim crystallization task is hence left to the wrap-up meeting. In addition to verbal communication, gestures, emotional expression and other nonverbal cues that only exist in a face-to-face environment are equally important in conveying signals of assent or disagreement, which help perform a group task. This observation aligns with existing research in sociology [72, 73], and proves face-to-face meeting to be indispensable in CIC.
Facilitation was necessary both in online and face-to-face meetings, but online facilitation was not adequate. Due to lack of visibility on how the whole panel works at any moment, the facilitator has difficulties in judging when to provide what coaching and herding messages. Lack of better strategy, the facilitator regularly sends out instructions and requests in the morning, and occasionally posts messages in the evening to stir up more activity.
Panelists liked to work in smaller groups even in online deliberation. Some panelists prefer to work closely with 2–3 people for both better deliberation and better emotional support.
We implemented the mass opinion elicitation by conducting a Community Deliberative Poll. To achieve maximum inclusion of all the attentive public, we ran the polling completely in an online environment, and broadly promoted the participation to every residents and stakeholders. In this experiment, participants of the deliberative polling were required to sign in and use real identify to express their opinions. Users were first directed to an Issue Briefing view, where they learn about the pending public issue as well as the policy proposal. Then, they will read the Citizens’ Statements and hear what the CIC citizens panel can tell them about the major proponent statements and opponent statements. For those people who want to investigate further, they can follow the links from those statements to trace back all the way to the source documents where the final statements were built from. As they explore the Citizens Statements, they will be able to see comments or discussion threads that were left there by other citizens. They can participate deliberations on the discussion board and express their opinion and preferences. Figure 7 shows a system screenshot in this phase.
A view of the online forum where citizens participate the community deliberative poll. The left column presents the Citizens Statement as a list of itemized statements, each presented as an answer to a question. Users may leave comments or raise questions on each individual statement. The right column contains a voting module and a discussion board.
By making this deliberative polling openly available to everyone in the community, we expected to attract more people to come and express their opinions. However, our records of participating online polling on the Collegiate Housing Overlay issue showed that only 10 citizens actually left comments and voiced their opinion. There are many potential reasons for this lack of participation. Other than the lack of effective method to get the attention of the broad public, the more fundamental reason is that there is no civic requirement for anyone in the community to act even if they are invited. In our case, we sent the broad invitation to the public through a newspaper article which is broadly read by location residents. Due to the voluntary nature of this polling event, and the lack of attentive and motivated public [74], it is not too surprising to see the low turnout.
Nevertheless, for those who did participate the deliberative polling, we found that they posted very thoughtful comments and asked pertinent questions, indicating that they have fully understood and digested the public value statements and the Citizens Statement. We also noticed that, in their comments, people expressed some degree of uncertainty, skepticism, or disapproval regarding several items in the Citizens Statement and even in the public value statement. For example, one participant voted a firm “no” to the proposal and commented: “I have lived in an apartment building that housed students in the Borough, and I can confidently say it was the worst experience of my life. Clearly the people who wrote this proposal have never lived in or near student housing.” This participant referred to their past experience and reminded the public about the negative outcomes that the ordinance may bring about.
Experimenting our COPE method in the State College Borough allows us to gain insights on both the potentials for institutionalizing mass democracy through public opinion systems, as well as the local and practical factors that play roles in such a process. Overall, we found that there is no lack of public interests and opinions on local policy decisions, but there has been no workable channels for the decision-makers (city council in particular) to uptake such opinions. Mass democracy has not been the culture in our local community and participation has been damaged over many years. Recognizing such democracy deficit, our experiment received significant media attention.
After the whole experiment was completed, we compiled the result of the polling and survey comments and shared a report with all the council members and the city mayor. After two weeks, we interviewed eight panelists for the purpose of knowing their perception of both the process and the outcomes of our COPE practices. Council members indicated that they placed more trust on the COPE opinion report over other sources of public opinions they normally use. It was the first time that such a concise and usable public opinion report was included in the council meeting information package before the council met.
Another commonly claimed benefit of deliberative opinion formation is the improvement of community efficacy and citizens competence [75]. To understand this aspect, we also interviewed six CIC panel members who reported significant enhancement of their deliberative skills and information analysis skills. They valued their experiences as citizen panelists and were proud of the ability to bring complex public matters into public transparency. We found that citizens have great (but unexplored) capacity to work together in addressing their shared problems, evidenced by the how the participants of Forum I (value panel) and Forum II (CIC panel) worked diligently for days and took ownership on public issues.
In our community use of COPE method, we faced significant challenges in both getting people to participate and retaining their interests in staying in the process. Our interview with citizen panelists revealed that people are not automatically interested and committed to participating politics, which confirmed the hypothesis previously made by Forest [74]. We also found that different issues attracted very different group of citizens. This can be partially explained by the findings of Wildavsky [76] who concluded that there are very few, if any, individuals in any community who are interested in all decisions and who are powerful enough to serve in all cases. Public engagement has to be made attractive and worthwhile to successfully compete with other important human activities.
Conclusion
The central challenge of advancing participatory democracy is the difficulty in knowing what the public truly want. There is real danger of using public opinion data for policy decisions if the expressed opinion in the data are in fact non-opinions or pseudo-opinions with little representation of the public. Existing methods of public opinion elicitation have not found their applications in real government institutions because they failed to address the complexity of public opinion formation on sophisticated policy issues. This paper followed a deliberative system thinking of institutionalizing public opinion process, and proposed an integrated framework, Community OPinion Elicitation (COPE), as a preliminary attempt to institutionalize public opinion development in local governments. The COPE method is designed to work specially in the local communities where the political ecosystem is less likely to be organized by party lines and more like to take collective actions. COPE method serves as a democracy “engine” within a local government context that takes in the ad hoc expression of concerns, solutions, and expert analysis into informed and well-reasoned judgment of the broad public. The legitimacy of the resulted opinion is warranted by institutional design of COPE system: (1) it involves two separate mini-publics in the early stages of democratic decision-making to ensure that the broader public has access to compact, accurate and well-organized information before developing their opinion; (2) it transforms elite opinions and information into citizen-friendly representation through a careful analysis performed by fellow citizens; (3) it allows the general public to develop political preferences on an informed basis, supported by an articulation of public values and decision-analysis knowledge; (4) it scales up to community-wide participation by offering all community members a balanced and non-bipartisan decision analysis which ensure full considerations valid perspectives to protect community goods.
The formation of well-reasoned and collective public opinions using COPE requires coordinated and structured participation and a variety of literary, analytic, and deliberative competencies. One advantage of COPE method is that citizens may have flexible entry and exit along the process, and can contribute with their best talent. It does not require everyone to have all the skills and resources to participate the whole process, but the system can synthesize their complementary skills and enable shared benefits of their overall efficacy. For example, those who have been very attentive to local affairs and lived in the community for quite a long period may be most knowledgeable about community history, culture, life styles, and beliefs, and they may be the best contributors to the articulation of public values. Those citizens who have strong analytical reasoning and information seeking skills will be most valued as participants of the CIC panel. This is a different and more practical sense of democratic inclusion.
The COPE method is still under development and further refinement. One of the problem of the current design is its linear concatenation of disjoint functional modules, which is not robust in correcting any imperfections in the upper stream processes. Through our experiment with real community issues in State College Borough, we have gained insight on how the performance of one module affects the working of another module, and how participants discover and address problems along the process. These observations seem to suggest that there needs to be some degree of redundancies and reciprocity between Forum I and Forum II in order to ensuring robustness in public value identification and decision analysis. We demonstrated that COPE can be implemented in a hybrid (face-to-face and online deliberation) environment, but more research is needed to explore a variety of ways for coupling this two mode of deliberation in public opinion formation.
We plan to continue refining COPE through more design and experiments in real applications. As this is matured over time, we anticipate gradual adoption of our method in our local community as a formal method of participation. This work also carries theoretical significance since it represents a concrete practice of the third generation deliberative democracy theory [21, 24]. That theory argued for better legitimacy of opinion outcome of a deliberative system, but it is still not clear how we can prove this empirically. COPE provides a platform for us to examine hypotheses and refine the constructs of deliberative democracy. Perhaps the most promising aspect of the COPE method is its well specified processes that can potentially be implemented in online environment. As digital democracy technology continues to unify many public engagement venues and methods, public opinions will be increasingly produced, expressed, and institutionalized, forming a massive “democracy machine” with feedback loop between government policy-making and public input [77]. This vision highlighted the central need to develop a public opinion crystallizer as part of the central processor (or engine) of an institutionalized democracy machine. Our work on COPE is the first step towards answering how the engine of such a democracy machine should be built.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation under award IIS-1211059. The work of the first author is also partially supported by a grant from the Chinese Natural Science Foundation under award 71373108.