Support for increasing the sales tax went up by fourteen points from 37% to 51%. Simi larly, support for increasing the income tax went up by 18 points from 27% to 45%.. .. People were willing to shoulder new burdens they could feel. By contrast, support for cutting the business tax rose by a gigantic 27 points from 40% to 67%.3
Scholars of politics have studied deliberative events as political processes aimed at empowering citizens, a perspective that frames organizational subsidies of public deliberation as civil society sponsorship. Based on multi-method fieldwork, this article investigates deliberation as a strategic tool marketed by an emerging industry of professional consultants to contemporary organizations facing resistance to retrenchment, redevelopment, and reorganization. This field-level organizational perspective reveals that deliberative solutions are sold to public, private, and third-sector managers in terms of their potential to cultivate stakeholder empathy for decision-makers, downsize public expectations for administrative problem-solving, and produce behavioral alignment and positive attitudes toward austerity measures. The simultaneous framing of deliberation as civic renewal and as a preemptive strategy for reducing contention demonstrates how sponsors have leveraged the ambiguities enabled by the reconfiguration of civic activity and authority described in this special issue. As such, we argue that understanding the political implications of the expanding market for sponsored deliberation requires a comparative historical approach to organizational strategy.
This study contests the universalism of public engagement models by comparing reports of informal communication in two state-centered participation processes for regional conservation planning. Through interviews with stakeholders, the author finds that both elites and nonelites deployed informal communication to amplify and to defuse pressure for consensus. Much of the power of informal communication derived from its relation to local knowledge and place-based networking that was irrelevant in principle to formal process activities-and this was welcomed in one community and resisted in another. These differences highlight the overlooked role of regional-scale political cultures in light of the increasing formalization of participatory best practices. The article suggests that the study of democratic engagement can gain by exploring the contextual implementation of abstract deliberative ideals such as inclusion, publicity, and transparency. San Diego's history is littered with the skulls of bureaucratic brain-picking sessions that invited people from the neighborhoods to contribute, then discarded their ideas.-Richard Louv (2005) Do public participation projects improve the decision-making landscape in local communities? Researchers of deliberative democracy and civic engagement might find this question ridiculous. Including stakeholders in planning and increasing their access to local officials is generally un
This article examines the performative work of consultants who facilitate public engagement (PE) processes in organizations. Using multimethod ethnography, I find that PE practitioners reconcile tensions between the logics they promote in two different ways. Viewed from one perspective, PE practitioners are agentive entrepreneurs, adeptly negotiating competing logics to reform organizations; viewed from another, they exert a great deal of energy performing rituals that integrate their challenger identities with their elite status as management consultants. Scholars have argued that such contradictions reveal institutional indeterminacy. I argue that the performance of democratic authenticity in PE is both politicizing and depoliticizing.I have a deep belief in ordinary people's capacity, without advanced training, to actually participate deeply in the questions that most matter to them. (Dialogic method inventor, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Conference, 2006) As the quote above illustrates, untrained citizens are understood to be worthy contributors to public dialogue, but the methodologies designed to elicit their involvement now require professional certification and training courses costing thousands of dollars. Participation, long a tenet of progressive causes and insurgent movements, is now firmly entrenched as a method of decision making in political institutions (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O'Leary 2005) and business organizations (Heckscher 1995). But participation is no longer a do-it-yourself proposition. As demand for more substantive and inclusive public participation processes has grown, administrators have turned to professional consultants skilled in managing public engagement (PE) and dialogue and deliberation (D&D) (Leighninger 2009;Lee 2011). Inasmuch as the democratic ambitions of these enhanced public participation processes would seem to conflict with their top-down administration by private experts, PE professionals embody an extreme case of contradictory demands on organizational actors.PE consultants' efforts to justify their management services as empowering interventions reveal the strategies they use to make sense of their positioning at the intersection of competing institutional logics. Logics, as understood here, are coherent systems of organizing principles that provide vocabularies of motive and guide action within market and state institutions (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). On the one hand, under their profession's logic of democratization, PE facilitators are engaged in explicit attempts to make decision making more participatory, more equitable, more Tensions between democratizing and bureaucratizing logics can be as extraordinary (and as public) as the challenges facing participants trying to enact "leaderlessness" in large, diverse groups in the Occupy Movement (Leach 2013). They can also be as ordinary (and as privately painful) as an awkward moment when disadvantaged youth volunteers being celebrated for participating in an "empowerment project" a...
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