It’s not so unusual to enter a discussion without having a firm view of what should be done (perhaps without even having focused on the agenda), to listen and speak for a while, and finally to reach a collective decision that wasn’t predictable in advance. Before the discussion begins, some of the participants may know what they want, but others are unsure or flexible, and the conversation forms or shifts the consensus.

However, it is not easy to find recordings or transcriptions of such processes. I spent part of the last long weekend reading the minutes of US school boards and city councils, scanning the translated transcripts of 50 village assemblies in southern India, dipping into legislative records from several countries, and even searching for archives of email exchanges within organizations that have come to light due to leaks or lawsuits. I found brief moments in which a few people seemed to be listening to make up their minds, but no sustained examples of that phenomenon.

My belief in the existence of deliberation might seem naive, except that I have experienced it many times–even in the past few months–and nobody seems surprised when it happens. I think we are used to it, but recorded examples are scarce.

Two reasons occur to me, and they may have some significance for political theory.

One is a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for deliberation. Once you record a conversation and make it publicly available for public review, the tenor shifts. Participants know that they are speaking to an audience composed of people who are not part of the conversation, not accountable for the decisions, and not able to reply in time to affect the outcome. Participants begin articulating positions and reasons that strangers can assess later, instead of trying to decide what to do. Thus the presence of an observer shifts the phenomenon, especially if the observer is an anonymous audience in the future.

The other reason involves the typical function of official meetings. As I scan town council minutes, legislative records, and transcripts of Indian village assemblies, I see people talking under tight time pressure in order to convey specific positions. For instance:

[Member of the] Public: You have read that street lights are going to be fixed. When are you going to install?

Male (Officer): We have passed resolution, made a budget and allotted the work. Very soon we will do it. 

Public: We need ration shop at Pappanaickenpatti. There are more than 300 cards in our town. Every time we have to come all the way from our village. By the time we reach the shop, all the items will be sold out. We request you to consider our petition. We are very badly in need of separate ration shop at our village. We are ready to construct a building for this purpose.

Male (Officer): We will discuss with the civil supplies officer and let you know. (source)

Or:

[Board of Trustees] President Raymond remarked she was impressed by the commitment to distance and blended learning by the District through the creation of the Department because it illustrated the learning models were ones the District was interested in fully developing and not just using during the current school year.

Trustee Taylor wondered if the vision was to have a single platform for all distance learning in the District.

Ms. Anderson cautioned it was important the District not make any major shifts at the present time related to the changing of learning platforms since the current model was very fragile. She would like to focus more on developing best practices for the platforms currently being used, due to the current strain teachers and students were under, and then look at creating more of a sustainable model in the future.

(source)

I think these people are doing valid public work. They are putting concerns, questions, directives, and commitments on the record. Before and after these recorded moments, the same individuals may have had many conversations in which they tried to learn about the situation and about other people’s views. The public event may also spur later discussions in their community.

These transcripts do not make me cynical about deliberative democracy. I imagine that the same people listen and learn. But deliberation is very rare during the moments that are captured on the public record.

This is a challenge for me because I am helping to develop methods for modeling deliberative conversations, and I am not finding a lot of material to analyze. I am especially interested in the regular decision-making processes of governments and other organizations. Yes, I also like citizens’ forums or “minipublics”–venues where representative people are convened to discuss public questions. I even co-edited a Handbook about them! But I think they are atypical, which means that evidence derived from them would not generalize well. (Besides, Indian village councils are minipublics, and they sound a lot like US public meetings.)

If you have suggestions for transcripts or videos that I could model, I would be grateful. In any case, I think our theories of democracy should take account of this pattern. Although we imagine that deliberation should occur in legislatures and town meetings, this is unlikely. A public meeting is a moment in a larger stream of discourse. Its function is to memorialize a set of positions and reasons, while the learning and the change take place elsewhere.