Category Archives: deliberation

Democracy in schools: Albert Dzur talks with principal Donnan Stoicovy

Albert Dzur is breaking ground in political theory by revealing how professionals who interact with laypeople can create valuable democratic practices. Democratic theory has generally been blind to the positive potential of work sites, and especially public sector sites such as schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. It has also generally overlooked the democratic contributions of professionals who choose to engage citizens. Often, populist democrats want to trim the wings of professionals, seeing them as arrogant. But engaging citizens in complex institutions requires skill, dedication, and a kind of expertise–all marks of professionalism. Democratic professionalism is thus an important aspect of civic renewal. (See also “Albert Dzur and democracy inside institutions” and “Public Work and Democratic Professionalism.“)

In the The Good Society (which is now the journal of civic studies), Albert has posted an interview with one such democratic professional, Donnan Stoicovy, who is the principal of Park Forest Elementary School in Pennsylvania. For my friends who are interested in civic education and school reform more than political theory, this interview offers a nice overview of a school-wide intervention. It is not unique or unprecedented, but it is thoughtful and impressive. In essence, the principal asked her whole student body to participate in the writing of a school constitution as a way of meeting the state’s mandate to produce a “school-wide positive behavior plan.”

In other schools, administrators hold assemblies and hand out rewards to well-behaved individuals. At Park Forest, the assemblies were deliberative events aimed at setting rules and norms. As I have observed in other cases as well, the kids came up with more demanding rules than their teachers would have proposed.

This case exemplifies professionalism in several respects. One that I would highlight is the need to navigate tricky tradeoffs. The kids’ rules included “No Put Downs” but also “Speak what we believe and not be judged for it.” Sometimes what we believe comes across as a put down of someone else, especially when the individuals in question are ten years old. Skillfully navigating those tensions is complex work.

The interview ends with some discussion of expanding the scale of such examples. Stoicovy cites limited time as one obstacle; “and I think the other [need] is opportunity to collaborate with other people across the country—similar people who are thinking about this.”

Dzur asks whether universities could help. Stoicovy replies:

I would want everybody to know about democratic schools. I would want universities to be teaching more about democratic schools, in general. I would like more of the work at universities to be helping open students’ minds to thinking about having a responsive classroom, eliciting student voice and engaging students in their school. Not just “here’s what discipline is.” And oftentimes they don’t even teach that until they end up in school and it is modeled for them by whoever their mentor is. Universities need to go back to essential questions like “What is the purpose of public education?”

Universities could also model a more democratic approach. Some of them are getting better at having more engagement work, but without modeling it is hard to open peoples’ minds.

reflections on AmericaSpeaks on its last day

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I was proud to serve on the board of AmericaSpeaks from June 2006 until today, when the organization had to close its doors–despite valiant efforts. In essence, the people and organizations that really care about nonpartisan, open-ended citizen deliberation don’t have a lot of money to pay for it, and that is a problem that affects more than AmericaSpeaks.

For those who don’t know the organization, AmericaSpeaks invented the 21st Century Town Meeting, a very large, representative gathering of citizens who discuss a public issue at separate tables within a large room while communicating and making collective choices electronically. AmericaSpeaks organized and ran more than 100 of these Town Meetings, in all 50 states. The formats varied. For instance, the 21st Century Town Meetings that strongly informed the rebuilding plan for New Orleans after Katrina were held concurrently in three cities and online, to accommodate people forced to leave the city.

The purpose of the organization was never simply intellectual–to learn about public deliberation. AmericaSpeaks aimed to change America by providing deliberative events frequently and widely. Considering that it was highly active for 19 years, it must be accounted a success, even on those terms. Yet the ultimate failure of the business model raises serious questions about elites’ support for civic engagement in America.

In addition to facing financial obstacles, AmericaSpeaks frequently encountered ideological skepticism. For instance, its national deliberations on “Our Budget/Our Economy” were attacked from the left for identifying the budget deficit as a central problem. But the deliberating citizens chose budget options far to the left of what Congress has seriously entertained. In any case, I was struck that ideological writers on the left missed any merit in the deliberative process itself. They didn’t recognize public discussion as a strategy for strengthening our democracy. Instead, their only question was whether the problem had been framed as they would frame it.

Nevertheless, despite opposition and indifference in some quarters, AmericaSpeaks ran a series of experiments from which much has been learned. Other deliberative processes–e.g., Study Circles and National Issues Forums–may sometimes do more to build local civil society, although AmericaSpeaks’ work in DC strengthened civic capacity there. And certain other processes can, like 21st Century Town Meetings, provide policymakers with excellent public input. (I am thinking of Deliberative Polls and Citizens’ Juries). But AmericaSpeaks was very unusual in its ability to turn public voices into political power. It was hard for policymakers in New Orleans after Katrina or in Manhattan after 9/11 to ignore the results of mass public deliberations. Thus these events were politically potent interventions, even though AmericaSpeaks was neutral about the outcomes.

Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao of the World Bank write about “organic participation” (created by advocates) and “induced participation” (invited and supported by elites). In some ways, the 21st Century Town Meeting is a skillful blend of the two, with AmericaSpeaks playing an essential role in raising resources from various elites to put on events that allow citizens to influence the government.*

AmericaSpeaks leaves an inspiring legacy of examples and knowledge. But on its last day, I am worried that the demand for public deliberation is so weak.

a technique for measuring the quality of deliberation

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(Ann Arbor, MI) I’ve proposed that we can map an individual’s thinking about moral and political issues as a set of beliefs and connections. For instance, if a person says that she favors abortion rights because she is committed to individual freedom, she is linking two nodes in a mental map. Because her overall epistemic framework is a network, it will have formal properties, such as density and centrality.

When two or more individuals interact on moral or political issues (talking and/or working together), their respective network maps will come into contact and change. The community formed by people who so interact can be viewed as a larger network of beliefs and connections that also has formal properties.

Certain network structures are better than others for deliberation and interaction. If you are a good deliberator, you enrich other people’s network maps and learn from theirs; you are not rigid. In the context of a liberal democracy, you must be able to “route around” your own faith commitments. You don’t have to drop them, but you must be able to make an argument that doesn’t depend on them. Likewise, your various ideas should be connected rather than isolated, so that you can give reasons for each of your beliefs.

We should be able to observe a moral network map evolve as one person interacts with others, and we should be able to rate individuals and conversations for moral excellence (by asking independent observers to assess them) and then see whether what we posit as the formal criteria of good moral networks are actually found in the best deliberators.

For example, Bloggingheads TV organized a discussion between columnists Bryce Covert (liberal) and Ramesh Ponnuru (conservative) on the topic of why women are paid less than men and what to do about it. I assert that this is a good discussion because I think it is, but also because in a study led by my colleague Felicia Sullivan, this video and several others were shown to representative samples of Americans. Most viewers liked this particular discussion, and they tended to move toward less ideologically consistent views after they watched it–evidence that it had complicated their opinions.

In the slide show below, I begin to diagram the discussion as two interlocked networks of ideas.

[slideonline id=6828]

I didn’t finish mapping the discussion, but I got far enough to conclude that we should be looking for:

The number of nodes and connections. (A higher number implies a richer discussion.)
The density of connections. People should tie together more, rather than fewer, of their points.
The overlap in the two people’s networks (They need not agree but they should address each others’ views)
Change in their respective networks in response to the other’s.

on snark and smarm

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(on a plane heading to Ann Arbor, MI) Tom Scocca’s article “On Smarm” is getting a lot of attention, including responses by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker and Ryan Kearney in The New Republic.

Scocca argues that “snark” is not our problem. It is an appropriate reaction to “smarm,” which is the serious threat. His original piece is learned and insightful in the tradition of Harry Frankfurt on bullshit or Susan Sontag on camp. I recommend it and will not attempt to summarize it. I do miss two things, however. One is a set of true definitions (with necessary and sufficient conditions), as opposed to clusters of examples. What is snark? What is smarm? The other is evidence of trends over time. Everyone in this debate seems eager to posit that our moment is dominated by snark, smarm, or both. But one can easily think of examples from the distant past. (Juvenal was snarky; Augustus was smarmy.) On what basis do we think that either vice has increased of late?

I would propose that:

Snark (presumably a portmanteau of “snide” plus “remark”) means indirect critique. Instead of rebutting the facts or the logic of an argument, snark casts doubt on the sincerity or competence of the source. It is not a full-blown ad hominem argument but a suggestion that the target is untrustworthy. It is usually humorous, although humor doesn’t seem essential.

Smarm is the evocation of positive, sentimental emotions for the purpose of preempting criticism. For instance, bringing a person with Down’s syndrome onto the stage of the 2000 Republican National Convention was smarmy because it foreclosed criticism of the nominee. The particular form of smarm that concerns Scocca is the evocation of civility or niceness to preempt debate about the dominant person or established rules in a given situation.

Both snark and smarm violate a very high standard of deliberative reason, in which one should respond to any given policy, norm, or proposal by evaluating the evidence, norms, and logic behind it. A critical reaction should explicitly challenge elements of the argument, not the speaker. And the critic should be ready to propose and defend some alternative view.

Snark misses that standard because a snarky comment neither explicitly rebuts the target’s arguments nor offers an alternative position. Smarm misses the standard because it doesn’t offer an argument at all, just a sentiment.

But snark can provoke or advance a deliberative discussion. Typically, a snarky comment provokes a reaction, and that can take the form of an explicit defensive argument that then deserves a reasonable response. Thus snark can be an opening move or invitation to deliberation. Smarm, on the other hand, succeeds if it prevents a group from deliberating.

Further, snark is a tool of the marginal and dispossessed, the peanut gallery, whereas smarm (by my definition) is employed by the person in charge, whether that is the President of the United States or just a dad in the front seat of his SUV. I am therefore with Scocca that smarm is the more serious problem, and snark can be justified as a response to it. If smarm casts a feel-good spell that prevents critical thought, snark can break the spell.

new from Penn State: a study of online deliberation and an award for democratic innovation

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal