Kettering Foundation
Entire article: WE HAVE TO CHOOSE: DEMOCRACY AND DELIBERATIVE POLITICS
We Have to Choose is a working draft Kettering report designed primarily for civic organizations, centers, and institutes that sponsor deliberative forums and/or prepare people to conduct such forums. This report attempts to help these organizations find a pedagogy or way to explain deliberation, which has to be learned but can’t be taught through instruction alone.
Public deliberation can’t be confined to formally organized forums. And democracy can’t be confined to collective decision making, even if it is done by deliberative means. Kettering has realized that democracy exists at two levels. The more obvious one is at the institutional level, where there are legislatures, executive agencies, and courts.
Underneath, there is an organic foundation of ad hoc associations and civic organizations. At the institutional level, citizens are defined by their relationship to government. They are voters, taxpayers, and school board members. At the organic level, citizens are defined by their relationship to other citizens. They are the people who join with others to create a neighborhood watch, to organize a campaign to protect the environment, or to conduct rescue operations after a hurricane.
The democracy that public deliberation serves is primarily organic, yet it isn’t indifferent or antagonistic to representative government. At the organic level of democracy, collective efforts are made to deal with problems that can’t be solved unless the citizenry acts. This collective action requires a particular kind of decision making because the problems aren’t just technical; they have a normative or moral dimension. Protecting the health of the American people is an example; citizens have an important role to play, and issues like the care of the terminally ill raise all kinds of moral questions.
Such problems grow out of a discrepancy between what is happening and what people want to happen. What makes these problems especially difficult are disagreements about what should be happening. There aren’t any experts who can tell citizens what should be; they have to exercise the best judgment they can. And the best way to make sound judgments is by weighing possible causes of action against the various things people consider valuable or believe should be. That is deliberation in a nutshell.
Although a means of making decisions, public deliberation can’t be isolated from what happens before and after a decision is made. Before citizens will make decisions, they have to see a connection between their concerns and political issues. This begins to happen (or doesn’t begin) with who names the problems and the way they are named or described.
If the name of a problem doesn’t resonate with what people consider valuable, they lose interest. The same happens, or fails to happen, when options are put forth to deal with a problem. Unless all the options are put on the table and each is presented fairly, with both the pros and cons spelled out, people back away, feeling manipulated. And if the options for action don’t include anything for citizens to do, they feel sidelined—they feel that they can’t make any difference.
All of this, including the way citizens implement their decisions and evaluate the results, are deliberative public politics, writ large. Because this kind of politics involves more than decision making, forums can’t be understood without taking into account what happens outside the rooms where they are held. That is true even if the purpose of the forum is purely educational. Forums are a staging area, not the whole stage.
And public deliberation also introduces distinctive values into politics. Deliberation has to be nonpartisan, yet it is not value neutral. It values democracy and assumes that citizens have the capacity for effective collective action. It not only puts a premium on respect for the opinions of others but also on fairness and the good of all.
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