deliberative democracy and tolerance

Last Friday, I heard a colleague present a good paper on tolerance and deliberation. I don’t want to summarize his position here, but I think that mine would be different. I see a tension between public deliberation and tolerance. In a true “deliberative democracy” (which, in practice, we can only approximate), everyone who is potentially affected by an issue discusses it together, without limitations as to topic or outcome, giving reasons and considering underlying values and principles. Deliberation can increase tolerance as people come to understand one another’s perspectives; but that’s hardly guaranteed. Such conversations often reveal profound differences of principle, which are closely connected to identity. Karl Mannheim argued that “political discussion” characteristically turns into a fundamental attack “on the whole life-situation of the opponent.” He exaggerated, but he had a point.

If you want people to get along, to “live and let live,” then you may want to take certain issues off the table. For example, the Constitution bans state-sposored religion. This narrows the range of serious discussion but probably increases tolerance. You may also want to create mechanisms for reaching decisions without direct interaction among people who disagree. Elections and markets provide such impersonal interactions.

Many proponents of deliberative democracy are upset by the profound gap in values between, for example, Greenwich Village and rural Mississippi. They’d like these two “communities” to sit down together and come to understand each other’s values. I also favor diverse and inclusive conversations, but not because I expect them to increase tolerance. I think the best way to help Greenwich Village and rural Mississippi to coexist peacefully is to keep them separate and allow their elected representatives to logroll and compromise their way to a deal. Some federal money can go to arts subsidies, some can go to farm supports, and both sides can purchase goods on the same market. If they don’t deliberate, neither group has to think too hard about the other.

By bringing disagreements to the surface, deliberative democracy threatens tolerance, but it also depends on it. Without a basic willingness to put up with people who disagree, conversations will go badly. Thus, if we are committed to public deliberation (perhaps because we believe it will create better policies and help people to develop and refine their own opinions), then we’re going to have to work hard to keep the peace.

the “democracy advantage”

Just now, I heard my former student Joe Siegle give a sneak preview of a book that he has written with Morton Halperin and Michael Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace. The conventional wisdom among powerful experts holds that democracy arrives only at the end of a process of economic development. First, says Fareed Zakaria, a country must reach a per capita income of $6,000; then it can democratize. Below that level (allegedly), autocratic governments are better than democracies at marshalling resources, working for the long-term, suppressing conflicts, and thereby getting their countries to $6,000 per person.

Siegle et al. find that this is all thoroughly wrong. Among low-income countries over the last 40 years, democracies have grown as fast as autocracies. Most of the successful autocracies have been the “tigers” of East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, and the like). If you exclude them from the sample, low-income democracies perform much better than autocracies. The data would favor democracies even more clearly if we had economic statistics from all the dictatorships. The worst tyrannies are very secretive and don’t release plausible development statistics, but clearly countries like North Korea would pull the autocracies’ average down if they were counted.

One of the reasons for democracies’ strong economic performance is their consistency. Compared to autocracies, they don’t collapse as often, and they don’t collapse as badly. Of the 80 worst cases (losses of GNP within a single year), only five have been democracies.

If one moves beyond GNP per capita or GNP growth, the other human development statistics favor democracies much more. For example, in poor countries, democratic government seems to confer about 9 extra years of life expectancy, compared to autocracies. And citizens of poor democracies are 40% more likely than citizens of poor autocracies to attend secondary school.

what’s going on at the office

(From Greenville, SC): Periodically, I get the urge to download what I’m doing onto my blog. These posts usually lead people to email me with questions or concerns, which is why I allow myself to write them now and then. (I believe that a high proportion of the readers of this blog are somehow professionally associated with one of the organizations that I work for.)

First, we are trying to set up and fund a series of randomized field experiments connected to this year’s election. For each experiment, we must connect a funder, a researcher, and a political group that is doing actual fieldwork–and they must all agree on the details of project. The researcher always takes a list of registered voters (or residents) and randomly selects a subset of them. The political group contacts that subset in a particular way or with a particular message. Finally, the researcher consults voter rolls to see how many of those who were contacted actually voted, compared to those who were not contacted. The difference is a very reliable measure of the effect of the canvassing method. (This [pdf] is an example of a recent experiment.) Experiments conducted since 1998 have revolutionized campaigns by proving that door-to-door and phone canvassing work. Mark Lopez and I are also writing an overview article on the subject.

Several colleagues and I have been running after-school programs at the local high school, most recently with support from the National Geographic Foundation. This fall, our high school students will continue studying geographical factors that increase obesity, and will produce a radio show with their results. For the most part, I have been addressing various bureaucratic obstacles.

I’ve taken over an undergraduate program called Leaders for Tomorrow and have been working with 14 exceptional freshmen to develop a collective project that combines scholarship, leadership, and service. Speaking of scholarship, I have been coaching a strong crop of Rhodes candidates from the University of Maryland.

John Gastil and I are nearing the finish line with an edited book of essays, probably to be called The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty First Century. Meanwhile, Jim Youniss and I are at the first stage of a funded project to explore how changes in the US political system affect young people’s political development.

I’m chairing a subcommittee at the University that is trying to identify all the opportunities that our undergraduates have for civic engagement and leadership on campus.

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium is beginning to plan a second meeting of researchers and practitioners in the field; the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools is preparing materials for its new state teams; and the Alliance for Representative Democracy is planning the second annual Congressional Conference on Civic Education. I’m on the relevant steering or planning committees for each of these projects.

CIRCLE/MTV survey

My organization, CIRCLE, jointly released a poll with MTV yesterday. (That should raise my hipness quotient at least a bit.) It was a survey of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. Some of the highlights:

  • Young people are paying more attention to the campaign, and expressing more interest in voting, than at any comparable time since 1992. (Youth turnout spiked in ’92, so we’re hopeful for ’04.)
  • Kerry leads in this age bracket, although neither candidate is held in very high esteem. Right now, young registered voters would choose Kerry by 46%-40% (with 4% for Nader). They see Bush as a better boss, dad, or person to hang out with; but Kerry is seen as a better teacher. They perceive a closer match between Kerry’s priorities and their own, which is probably why they favor him slightly.
  • As in all previous polls taken over the last two years, young people rate as their top issues the economy and jobs, terrorism, and the war. This is the same set of priorities that we see among older people.

    • Meanwhile, I’m off to Greenville, South Carolina to speak about civic education at the State Bar Association meetings ….

    around, about, and go to

    If you hang around social and political activists nowadays, you’ll hear them say things like, “That organization does work around brownfields regulation,” or “We had a great conversation around making our messaging work more impactful.” If you spend your time with humanities scholars, you’ll hear sentences like, “Nabokov’s later texts are about the primacy of the personal,” or “The discourse of late modernity is about alienation.” And lawyers have always been taught to say, “This testimony goes to my client’s whereabouts on the night of Sept. 20″ or “That point goes to Justice O’Connor’s dictum in City of Richmond v Croson ….”

    These are three ways of connecting bodies of words, on one hand, to particular issues or subjects, on the other, when the speaker is not sure about the nature of the connection. Obviously, it’s better to avoid any of these expressions, which are overly vague. However, we all have our linguistic weaknesses, and I find the differences in dialect interesting.