Several recent trends may appear to be related to the concerns of CEPA: the various proposals related to “Deliberative Democracy,” “Discursive Democracy,” “Deliberative Polling,” and “Deliberation Day,” among others.
Bruce Ackerman, in his recent book The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Harvard University Press), spells out the proposal for a national holiday to be called “Deliberation Day.” The idea for this holiday was introduced earlier in a book Ackerman co-authored with James Fishkin in 2003 called simply Deliberation Day. This D-Day is to be observed in October every four years about two weeks before a presidential election. Citizens all over the country, who wish to participate, will convene in small, local groups (and later in the day in larger settings, such as in a local school or similar meeting place). The purpose of the group meetings is to provide for public education about and discussion of three or four major issues raised by the candidates of the major parties in the election campaign—hence the term, “deliberation.” The two major candidates will select the four topic issues in advance, and representatives of their parties will need to be on hand in the group meetings to take turns providing, in a structured manner, their candidate’s positions on those issues. There will be time for open discussion (deliberation) among the citizen groups, also in some kind of structured format with (it is hoped) impartial moderators.
Over about 15 years Fishkin has experimented with a process similar to Deliberation Day called “Deliberative Polls” or “Deliberative Polling.” This process brings together small groups of local citizens to deliberate about some local or state issue, followed by a poll among the participants regarding preference regarding the issue under discussion. For example, the Journal of Community Practice (article by Francis J. Schwigert) reports on such an event in Minnesota in 2010 concerned with proposals for financing highway upgrading following the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis. In deliberative polling, the issues tend to be of this sort—relatively local and specific.
Clearly, Deliberation Day would be much broader and more complex than the deliberative polling events—by several orders of magnitude, one can argue. The “D-Day” would be national, involving potentially millions of participants, deliberating over several issues with national rather than local impact.
Concepts behind deliberative democracy go back to political and legal philosophies—such as those of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. There is not space here to develop these philosophies except in a very cursory manner. Rawls’ “thought experiment” for ethical organization of a state is based on an “Original Position” and a “Veil of Ignorance.” Under these conditions, participants debate the rules for an ideal state (the original position), but they are all ignorant concerning what their real-life statuses will be in this new state (the veil of ignorance). This is an idealized situation not intended to represent a real-life political discussion. Habermas, on the other hand, has proposed a system of decision-making for real-life issues involving argumentation among equally situated discussants whose goal is to reach agreement in a completely open yet structured way, an agreement mutually acceptable to all parties affected by the final decision. Participants must have completely free and equal access to the means of communicating with all other participants, and must have full knowledge, information, and training in presenting arguments. The closest to a real-life version of this sort of deliberation may have been the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in post-Apartheid South Africa and Rwanda after the 1994 massacres.
The general idea behind deliberative democracy goes back to the direct democracy as practiced in the assemblies of classical Greece over two thousand years ago, specifically the assembly in the city-state of Athens. The current form of this idea is best expressed by political sociologists, Hélène Landemore and Hugo Mercier, in a 2012 publication, who described it this way: “The argumentative theory of reasoning defines reasoning as a specific cognitive mechanism that aims at finding and evaluating reasons, so that individuals can convince other people and evaluate their arguments.” (The journal is Anàlise Social, Vol. 205, pages 910-934). It is believed that in the clash of arguments for and against a position, the truth, or at least the better conclusion, will emerge. This is the position upheld over a century before by John Stuart Mill in his short but famous book, On Liberty.
How would Deliberation Day work in practice? There are many obvious difficulties that would have to be overcome, of course. There is the question of adding another national holiday. In his recent revisions of the proposal, Ackerman has suggested moving the current Presidents’ Day holiday from February to the October date two weeks before the national election, to avoid adding another day for closing schools, banks, and state, federal, and local agencies, as well as businesses. The cost and organizational needs for setting up thousands of local citizen meetings, and finding enough moderators and party representatives for all those meetings represent other obstacles.
Critics of the proposed holiday have raised these kinds of practical questions. One could see, for example, the criticisms raised by Richard Posner, the highly respected judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and Senior Lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School. In the journal, Legal Affairs of January – February 2004, Posner is skeptical about the benefits of Deliberation Day in view of the costs, including the indirect costs of lost productivity over the nation. He is also skeptical about the proponents’ claim that undecided voters would be attracted to the event. Cass Sunstein, who was mentioned in the first CEPA blog, along with two colleagues in an article in the California Law Review in 2007 reported on a study of an effort to run an actual Deliberation Day. Because of geographic factors, participants in the local group meetings in the study tended to be homogenous in their political leanings (conservatives and liberals tend to be respectively concentrated in certain towns and neighborhoods). As a result of the discussions, conservatives became more conservative and liberals became more liberal—a result termed “group polarization,” similar to the well known phenomenon of “Groupthink.” Like-minded participants reinforce each other rather than broaden their perspectives.
CEPA intends to be concerned with public argumentation in all fields of endeavor, not just in politics. The ideas and proposals related to deliberative democracy and Deliberation Day may be germane to our concerns from time to time, however. It is therefore appropriate to have some familiarity with the concept. Readers are encouraged to follow up on the various sources noted in this entry for more information concerning this topic.
For more information on the proposals by Fishkin and Ackerman, check out the website of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, http://cdd.stanford.edu.
William W. Neher
Bill Neher is professor emeritus of communication studies at Butler University, where he taught for 42 years. Over those years he has served as Dean of the University College, Director of the Honors Program, Head of the Department of Communication Studies, the Chair of the faculty governance, and most recently as the first Dean (Interim) for the new College of Communication begun in June 2010. He is the author of several books dealing with organizational and professional communication, ethics, and African studies, plus several public speaking and communication text books.
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