Measuring Participation as Communicative Action: A Case Study of Citizen Involvement in and Assessment of a City's Smoking Cessation Policy-Making Process

Abstract

This article adopts an operational protocol for evaluating participation from Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. The research setting is citizen participation in a city government's policy-making process on smoking in public places. Participation as communicative action is evaluated by the extent to which citizens accept the validity of what policy makers say and by whether citizens feel that they can raise concerns about a proposed policy in unrestricted communication environments. Findings indicate that citizens feel participatory in a decision-making process if they recognize policy makers'validity claims and perceive uncoerced speech conditions. Communicative action variables exercise significant predictability on a dependent variable indicating policy legitimacy.

A Communicative Action Approach to Evaluating Citizen Support for a Government's Smoking Policies

“…A growing number of studies apply the action theory empirically to the study of linguistic interactions in social and political processes (Barry, Stevenson, Britten, Barber, & Bradley, 2001;Leanza, Boivin, & Rosenberg, 2010;Sumner, 2001;Walseth & Schei, 2011;Webler, 1995). The study reported here expands on previous research on communicative action and legitimation in the United States (Chang & Jacobson, 2010a;Jacobson & Jun, 2006), by using it in the hybrid political system of the city-state of Singapore. The democratic legitimacy under consideration is the general acceptability of the government in terms of its exercise of political power to control cigarette use.…”

“…The action theory holds that in any given speech act all validity claims are assumed simultaneously. Nevertheless, some of them may be more thematically important than others in a given setting (Cooke, 1997), and previous research seems to bear this out (Chang & Jacobson, 2010a). This suggests that the most salient validity conditions accounting for citizen approval or disapproval of government action may vary depending on individual contexts.…”

“…This model employing validity claims and speech conditions has been presented elsewhere (Chang & Jacobson, 2010a;Jacobson & Storey, 2004). Briefly, Habermas postulates that four kinds of basic claims are embodied in all speech acts or utterances.…”

“…Previous research suggests that three speech condition indexes can be used to examine rules of democratic discourse in the context of public policymaking: (a) whether citizens believe that they or their surrogates can freely raise for discussion any problematic validity claim with which they may disagree-all proposals and counterproposals can be entertained; (b) whether citizens believe that all citizens have a symmetrical distribution of opportunities to engage in discourse-symmetry; and (c) whether citizens believe that they will receive full and fair responses from the government-fair treatment (Chang & Jacobson, 2010a;Jacobson & Storey, 2004). These indexes reflect the extent to which a communication environment is restriction-free.…”

Relations publiques et gouvernance participative : une vision partagée du « vivre ensemble »?

“…Les conditions permettant une délibération authentique sont parfois abordées : dans une contribution sur les différents designs institutionnels pouvant être mis en place pour favoriser la participation des « mini publics » 6 , Fung (2003) avance ainsi qu'une délibération de qualité se doit d'être à la fois rationnelle et raisonnable, ce qui fait appel au respect, à la réciprocité et à l'équité, de même qu'à l'égalité et au caractère inclusif (voir aussi Fishkin, 2009, et Chang et Jacobson, 2010. Dialogue et délibération ne sauraient toutefois être considérés comme équivalents.…”