The field of deliberative democracy is flourishing, as anyone who has looked at the NCDD Website (www.thataway.org) knows. Faced with such a wide range of choices, how should some mayor or group of citizens choose between them? Are some of them best for certain purposes? So far as I know, no consensus has arisen over this.

Take, for example, the large town meetings of American Speaks and the Study Circles of the Study Circle Resource Center and compare them to the Deliberative Poll and the Citizens Jury process. If a mayor or governor were to want to use some deliberative method, which should be chosen and why? The first two use volunteers in events lasting no more than a day, with the number of participants ranging from a few hundred to thousands. The latter two rely upon randomly selected participants who meet from one to five days, with the number of participants ranging from 18 to a few hundred. Is there any clarity as to when one is more appropriate than the other?

We deliberative practitioners should not expect it to be easy to agree upon best practice. The debate over the effectiveness of psychotherapy has been going on for many decades and, according to an article in the New York Times (August 9, 2004 Science Times), is more contentious now than ever. This is happening in a field which prides itself on a wide variety of sophisticated research tools. If the value of “talking therapy” is this difficult to resolve, why should it be any easier for objective assessments to be made on the various ways used to help people to deliberate with one another?

The simplest approach to resolving differences would be to bring practitioners of different methods together to see if they can agree on the strengths and weaknesses of their methods and which is best adapted for what purpose. This may work. If so, it would show that we in the deliberative field can manage our differences more effectively than those arguing over different approaches to psychotherapy. But we should not be surprised if something more than a conference of practitioners is needed if significant clarity is to be achieved.

For starters, we should acknowledge what we are up against. The ego involvement of inventive people is well-known. We deliberative practitioners may not be as flamboyant as composers or painters, but we are certainly as ego-involved in our creations. Add to this the effects of cognitive dissonance on those who staff the different processes. It is well known that the harder one works on something, the more convinced one is of the value of the product. Studies in psychology on cognitive dissonance show how blind people can be to the objective value of their work if they have labored long and hard to bring it to fruition. Most humbling, why should we think we are any less prone to the dangers of groupthink than the CIA? The Congressional investigation of intelligence failures pointed out how many intelligence analysts apparently were victims of groupthink, along the lines of what Irving Janis spelled out in his classic work. The more convinced we become of the value of the deliberative field as a whole, the more alert we should become to the need for us to be as disciplined as possible in our claims and open to review by outsiders.

One obvious way for us to submit our work to review by those outside our field is to allow the participants in our methods to evaluate what we do. Every Citizens Jury conducted by the Jefferson Center since 1981 requested the jurors to evaluate the project in which they had participated. But this is not enough. People should be given the chance to compare methods after they have experienced them. For example, one could convene some study circles and a Citizens Jury on the same issue. At the end of each project ask the participants to choose half a dozen representatives to meet and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. This discussion should be facilitated in a neutral way by a couple of people not committed to a single deliberative process. This should provide some interesting insights into the two methods and possibly include suggestions for ways to improve both methods.

A different approach would be to require that proponents of different methods be as disciplined as possible in discussing the pros and cons of their methods. One way to do this that is relatively inexpensive is to use a method called an “extended policy discussion”, the purpose of which is to clarify agreements and disagreements between experts. Take proponents of any two deliberative methods and bring them together with a neutral facilitator and a tape recorder for a series of meetings. The goal would be to get the two to be clear on where they agree and disagree on the strengths and weaknesses of their respective methods. Where they disagree, is there any objective way to resolve the disagreement? Would any further research resolve their disagreements? Might they see some kind of panel that would be a fair way to resolve a question about best use?

Each session of the extended policy discussion lasts about two hours, after which the facilitator uses the recording to summarize the key areas of agreement and disagreement. Often it takes several meetings for experts to be clear about where they agree and disagree. It is not uncommon for experts to change position once they see their stands written up clearly. This is a discipline that many people are reluctant to submit themselves to, since it can force them to acknowledge where their positions are weak. Clever advocates who can maintain a position quite effectively in public debate can find the extended policy discussion unnerving when they discover they cannot use clever tactics and subtle shifts in argument to maintain a position that does not stand up under close scrutiny. The goal of a debate is to win an argument; the goal of an extended policy discussion is to clarify a dispute and point out directions for resolving it.

There is a widespread feeling among deliberative democracy advocates that American democracy is at risk and something significant needs to be done to make it healthy again. Under these circumstances, we must hold ourselves to the highest standards. We should give the American public the opportunity to evaluate different methods in a rigorous way and we should force ourselves to be as clear and disciplined in our discussions as possible. Suggestions on how this could be done beyond the two approaches mentioned above would be welcomed.

Printer Friendly View