Inclusion, Equality, and Discourse Quality in Citizen Deliberations on Broadband

Abstract

Proponents of deliberative democracy have theorized that in order to contribute to improved decisionmaking, citizens should aim for high levels of inclusion, participation equality, and reciprocal, rational reasoning when they convene to discuss policy issues. To measure the extent to which these goals are achieved in actual practice, the authors analyzed transcripts from 13 public forums on the topic of broadband access in rural communities. Demographic attributes of participants were compared with their utterances during deliberation, coded by five quality variables: justification rationality, common good orientation, constructive politics, interactivity, and consideration of trade-offs. Analysis showed that turnout, quantity and quality of discourse varied significantly across different socioeconomic groups. For example, individuals with college education were more likely to provide higher levels of justification, alternative and mediating proposals, and consideration of the common good compared to those without college education. Non-salaried participants expressed the lowest level of justification for their arguments and showed significantly less interactivity with other participants. Addressing these differences requires greater effort by forum organizers to prepare participants through repeated, sequential forum experiences.

Developing and applying a deductive coding framework to assess the goals of Citizen/Community Jury deliberations

“…For example, Anderson and Hansen frame this as “increasing mutual understanding among participants” and “openness towards the argument of others”; and O'Doherty as listening to other jurors and taking their views into consideration. Somewhat more implicitly, Longstaff and Secko emphasize that outputs of the community jury should reflect “a broad view of the situation that addressed all issues considered important by participants,” and Han and Himmelroos also raise the importance of interactivity between participants. We operationalized this as 'Did the jurors engage with each other’s perspectives during the deliberation?…”

“…First, the thoughtful and well‐informed dimension suggests that community jurors will go beyond exposure to new knowledge and its repetition to actively engaging with the new knowledge. Several of the frameworks include this element, highlighting the “understanding and application of information,” that additional (new) information be considered in the community jury process and that jurors carefully weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of proposals being considered . To guide our coding, we operationalized this as, “Does the information provided by the experts enrich the deliberation?”.…”

“…This goal is commonly reflected in the frameworks. For example, De Vries notes the “adoption of societal perspective,” and similarly, Han and Himmelroos emphasize the “common good orientation.” Anderson and Hansen approach the issue from the opposite side, noting the importance of “minimizing the use of arguments referring to narrow self‐interest.” We operationalized this goal by querying: “Does the CJ deliberation reflect a societal (rather than individual) perspective?” Is there evidence in the transcripts that the jurors differentiated between the decision they might make for themselves personally and the decision they would make for the community as a whole.…”

“…We did not restrict the search by language or date (Appendix ). As it was a focussed literature search, we chose to search on the term “quality” rather than the broader terms “evaluation” or “assessment,” as “quality” was the term typically used by researchers known to focus on the assessment of public deliberation exercises …”

“…Some researchers who use deliberative methods have provided tools to assess aspects or elements of the deliberation. This includes, for example, discourse quality of deliberative processes (eg Discourse Quality Index) that analyses the speech (or discourse) of the participants. Others still have suggested frameworks that consider the structure of deliberative events, their process and outcomes .…”