In lieu of a substantive post on this busy day, some links about public deliberation … A new CIRCLE study finds that reorganizing a high school to encourage daily meetings about school policy boosted voluntary service. … The deliberative democracy field responds to the Coffee Party movement. … Detroit has a new plan for school reform that was developed in a highly deliberative way.

One of the highlights of last summer was a fascinating conference called No Better Time, which convened scholars, activists, leaders, and students who are committed to deliberation. Hundreds of people met at the University of New Hampshire for a rich set of discussions and working groups.

The student participants banded together and decided to create a national conference of their own. It’s called Connect the Dots, and it will be held on March 3-6, 2010, Point Clear, Alabama. They are calling it “A national student conference on public dialogue, deliberation, community problem solving and action.” It should be fantastic. Students, faculty, and practitioners should apply to present.

The host of the conference is the David Mathews Center. David is now the president of the Kettering Foundation and was the president of the University of Alabama in the 1970s. The center named for him is located in Tuscaloosa. Its “purpose is to foster infrastructure, habits, and capacities for more effective civic engagement and innovative public decision making.”

Imagine that you are a specialist in climate science. Like 82 percent of your colleagues, you believe that “mean global temperatures [have] risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and … human activity [has] been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.” You worry about the consequences, which may range from acute suffering in the world’s poorest countries and loss of natural species to global catastrophe.

You also know what science is like–it is always uncertain and provisional. Every article has a “limitations” section, every data table has margins of errors and sources of bias, and rarely do two articles precisely agree. Nevertheless, you know that to change the course we’re on will require millions of people to alter their political and consumer preferences. But people are fairly selfish and short-sighted. Besides, we have lots of other things to worry about, from our day-to-day practical struggles to spiritual concerns, plus all the alarms we receive from the mass media: serial killers, terrorist attacks, corrupt politicians, swine flu.

Given all this clutter, you, the climate scientist, decide that you’d better become much more effective at communicating a sense of alarm. You are constrained by ethical limitations (no outright lying, for instance, even to save the planet), but simplification, evasion of complexity, exaggeration of certainty–all that seems necessary.

These are the habits that one can see in the leaked private emails of climate scientists. Their messages include mentions of “tricks” in the presentation of data, data withheld from direct public inspection, and references to skeptics as “idiots.” Reactions to the emails range from George F. Will (the documents “reveal paranoia on the part of scientists … [N]ever in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject”) to Paul Krugman (“all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind”).

In my view, the emails reveal a shift from one kind of communication to another. Borrowing a distinction from the contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, I’d distinguish strategic, instrumental, means/ends communication from deliberation or dialog. When communication is strategic, you know what your goals or ends are, and you use efficient means to convince others. When communication is dialogic or deliberative, you reason with the other party about what the goals and means should be.

The leaked climate emails show scientists becoming strategic rather than dialogic. The reason is clear: modern society is so structured that strategic communication generally beats dialog, at least in the short term. It simply works better.

Yet strategic communication is unethical, insofar as it tries to manipulate the other person’s reasoning capacity. It uses him or her as a means, not an end. It is also self-destructive in the long term. Our views of matters like climate change depend fundamentally on trust. I cannot directly sense changes in the climate, let alone their causes. Neither can scientists–despite their fancy equipment. An account of how and why the climate is changing requires aggregating the research of many scientists and collaborative teams. To use the aggregated information, you must trust all the contributors. Then, to make matters even harder, people like me don’t read any of the scientific literature on climate. We read what we regard as high-quality news coverage of the scientific literature, which means that we must trust some reporters, as well as the scientists they cover. And we must trust the reliability of the relationship between them.

All of this works if we assume that scientific discourse and high-quality journalism are not strategic forms of communication. They are not supposed to pre-judge the outcome and try to convince. Rather, they are supposed to explore the truth in the company of their readers. To the extent that they communicate strategically, they are just interest groups, basically like all the others. They have goals; they may be willing to negotiate; but they cannot persuade on the basis of trust.

This analysis suggests a real dilemma. Dialogic communication won’t change mass opinion, and counting on it may put the earth at risk. But strategic communication is unethical and ultimately self-defeating. It’s the nightmarish side of modernity.

I have enthusiastically summarized a recent NSF-funded experiment in which Members of Congress deliberated with randomly selected citizens about the hot-button issue of immigration. I presented this experiment as “the right way to do a town hall meetings.” I noted, as one of the positive outcomes, that participants increased their favorable views of their elected officials as a result of the online deliberations. (We know that is a real effect because there was a randomly selected control group that didn’t deliberate.)

I should have seen the objection coming. In fact, it came on the floor of the US Senate, presented forcefully by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Texas), and was then picked up by prominent blogs and mass media. One of the study’s authors, David Lazer, has even graphed the way Coburn’s speech diffused across cyberspace:

The critical argument is nicely summarized on the Heritage Foundation’s web site: “This report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether by holding safe townhalls they can completely control. … Congress is actually using your tax dollars to pay social scientists to find ways they can avoid actually talking to their constituents while improving their chances of reelection.” Senator Coburn even used this project as an example of why the NSF should not fund political science at all.

On his blog, Lazer summarizes the various criticisms and responds with commendable civility. For my part, I would say: It was not a good thing in itself that participants became more supportive of Members of Congress. Some Members deserve low support–their reelection rate is, if anything, too high. But it is a good thing that people were able to exchange ideas and values in a civil format with national leaders. This is an educational process for both sides.

I mentioned the fact that politicians’ approval ratings rose because I do not think they will be instinctively enthusiastic about this kind of format. Contrary to the fears of the Heritage Foundation, politicians cannot control a true deliberative forum.* Thus we are not likely to see many online deliberations unless Members of Congress stand to gain somehow from participating. It was helpful to learn that their approval ratings rose, because that might motivate them to do more deliberations.

I can grasp a purist argument that any government is prone to protect its own interests, and therefore we should be vigilant about any effort that uses tax dollars and improves the reputation of incumbents. But if we are concerned about the unfair advantages of incumbents, the obvious issues to address are gerrymandered electoral districts, the huge fundraising imbalance, and free mailings for Members of Congress (the “franking privilege”).

When incumbents choose to do things that citizens actually like–such as deliberating online; or passing good legislation–their approval is likely to rise, but we can hardly complain. In Federalist 27, Hamilton writes, “I believe it may be laid down as a general rule that [citizens’] confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.” If deliberation is a form of “good administration,” it will increase confidence in and obedience to the government. That sounds like a good sign.

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*Heritage is concerned that “off-topic, redundant, unintelligible, or offensive questions were screened.” They’re worried that an angry opponent of federal policy would be blocked. Lazer responds, “As noted in the report, the possibility of screening anything as ‘offensive’ was theoretical. We did not actually exclude any questions for this reason. … That said, it is worth noting that the medium is potentially manipulable, and there is nothing to stop someone who is doing an online townhall from excluding difficult questions. (Of course, all communication media are manipulable in some way, so it is not obvious that this is an advantage or disadvantage of online townhalls.) We had a neutral moderator, and included all questions that time would allow, in the order that were posted. This included some that were pretty hostile to the Member. Our assessment (and recommendation) was that these very confrontations made the events more effective, because they reflected the authenticity of the event. In short, the Members approval ratings increased because they had done the right thing.”