Democracy Rising is a series of blog posts on deliberative democracy: what it is, why it’s powerful, why the time is right for it, how it works, and how to get it going in your community. The series originates in the United States but will discuss principles and draw upon examples from around the world. Views and opinions expressed in each post are those of the individual contributor(s) only
Part 3—The Good News
Part 2 of this sub-series (The Bad News) ended on a somber note, but that’s not the end of the story. For when we shift our focus from our national political system to local communities, we find some hope. Indeed, I would argue our best long-term hope of improving our national system is for more and more local communities to build up robust and productive deliberative systems, to the point that people see the viability and positive impacts of the deliberative alternative, build up their skills to engage each other, and re-establish their trust in each other and key institutions. Ideally, a new generation of leaders will develop in these deliberative communities and then champion deliberative engagement as they move up to the state and national levels.
A local focus reveals numerous ways to shift away from, or simply avoid, the dysfunction at the national level and work toward building a robust deliberative system. Part 2 reviewed the negative aspects of human nature uncovered by my social psychology research and argued that our dominant political systems overwhelmingly trigger them. But that research also reveals some positive aspects of human nature that, although harder to tap into, provide significant potential for improved engagement. The task, therefore, is to find ways to avoid triggering the bad stuff and get more of the good stuff. The best place to do that is at the local level.
Among the key positive aspects of human nature that can benefit our politics are these:
- We are inherently social and seek purpose and community.
- We are inherently empathetic.
- We are inherently pragmatic and creative.
- We can overcome our bad tendencies and build better habits.
A thoughtfully designed local deliberative system can tap into these features to transform and elevate our conversations. Numerous aspects of local community already either inherently work to do that or have an underlying potential for it.
Perhaps the most important distinction between the national and local levels in the United States is that the two-party system is typically less powerful locally. Many local elections officially do not allow party labels, and while people still may know the affiliations unofficially, the lack of direct party participation does weaken the simplistic narrative. Without the polarization-ready R(epublican) or D(emocrat) signifiers, other narratives have a chance. Whereas at the national level political involvement inherently gets shoehorned into the red (right-leaning) or blue (left-leaning) tribes, at the local level alternative tribes can arise. Rather than tapping directly into the prepackaged need for certainty and a simplistic good-versus-evil narrative, local narratives can form that are more unifying and based on the sense of place. The tribe may be Fort Collins, Colorado, or Dayton, Ohio, or Harris County, Texas, and thus may tap into the positive energy of people being inherently social and wanting community and connection.
Local leaders also tend to be more inherently pragmatic than many of our national leaders. This likely is also connected to the lack of party influence, but primarily it is simply because local leaders have to get things done and so must typically work with a broad coalition of people. The alternative goals that people pursue at the national level—instead of addressing shared problems—are not nearly as powerful at the local level. Local leaders cannot play the political game and get reelected by their bases in the way national leaders often can. While our national elections tend strongly to favor partisans, our local elections can often favor pragmatic, facilitative leaders who know how to bring people together.
A key advantage to the development of a local deliberative system is the simple fact that people interact more face to face and often know each other, or at least engage in multiple ways. When people do not know each other in roles other than as political adversaries, hyperpartisanship can easily take root. Face-to-face interaction also taps into natural human empathy: when people hear each other’s stories and can see facial reactions, it is much more difficult to support simple narratives and assume evil motives. High-quality face-to-face communication—facilitated and designed to address conflict well—can be particularly rehumanizing, and our politics needs several healthy doses of rehumanization.
A rather specific but particularly valuable manifestation of local government is the council/manager form, which is pretty typical for small and medium-sized cities and counties. It was initially developed during the Progressive Era, partly as a response to the too-powerful machine politics that had arisen in many cities. City managers are experts trained to run cities, and the combination of a city manager and a popularly elected city council—which actually has most of the broad decision-making power, with the city manager working with city staff to accomplish what the council asks them to do—provides a potentially strong structure for managing information and negotiating the inherent tension between democracy and expertise. When informed by a wicked-problems mindset and utilized well, I believe the council/manager form of government could be one of the most important factors in developing a robust local deliberative system.[1]
Another attribute of local communities that provides a huge advantage over state or national politics is that the smaller scale allows institutions to function much more productively, especially when a system is in place to build their capacity and support their collaborative efforts. When a community sees itself as a deliberative system, it can better survey and support its current assets, as well as work to develop new organizations to fill necessary gaps. David Mathews, former long-time president of the Kettering Foundation, relies on the metaphor of the “ecology of democracy” to lay out what a robust deliberative system should look like. Although a local government that supports deliberative engagement is certainly essential, it is clearly not sufficient. Addressing wicked problems well requires a broad range of actors across public, private, and nonprofit lines, in addition to the necessary supports and resources for them to work together well.
For communities to thrive, they not only need mediating institutions that bring people together across perspectives and generate bridging social capital; they also need principled impartial resources, or “backbone organizations.”[2] Such organizations provide the logistics and process support to spark and sustain ongoing and productive public conversations. They can also help counter the increasing appearance of bad-faith actors—demagogues and “conflict entrepreneurs”—who take advantage of the weaknesses of human nature by peddling simple (and often bogus) narratives and then profiting from the resulting outrage. Developing and sustaining such organizations locally is possible, and more and more communities are providing workable examples of them.[3]
Two institutions particularly important to a robust deliberative system, especially in terms of information management, are the media and educational institutions. When they also adopt a deliberative mindset and focus on elevating the conversation, they can significantly increase the capacity of a community. Both work not only to educate the community over the long term, potentially cultivating the mindsets and skillsets essential to deliberative engagement.[4] They can also be active participants in and vital supports to ongoing conversations about particular issues. In many ways, both should inherently exhibit principled impartiality. When they engage well, they can add nuance to simple narratives in a positive way, help uncover underlying values across perspectives, highlight key tensions that need to be worked through, assist in managing the role of information, and support the creation and sustaining of ongoing collaborative actions. They can serve as catalysts, hosts, facilitators, analysts, and reporters that elevate and bring attention to good conversations. They can be critical to ensuring that conversations are broad and inclusive, particularly engaging audiences that have not traditionally been involved and heard.[5]
Ultimately, the media and our schools are essential to equipping citizens as deliberative resources. When citizens are ideally developed as collaborative problem solvers (rather than merely advocates, partisans, customers, taxpayers, or voters), the community’s deliberative capacity skyrockets. Collaborative problem solvers are not necessarily neutral or impartial—they can clearly have their own strong values and opinions—but their mindset is to engage others collaboratively, knowing that the best path to supporting their interests is to work together with their neighbors, considering their interests and holding a healthy sense of the common good.
The most exciting aspect of the work to build robust local deliberative systems is that positive feedback loops develop. Particularly in comparison to the negative feedback loop exhibited by our national political system, the long-term implications are immense. While deliberative democracy is an ideal that is exceedingly difficult to reach, it is clear that once a community commits to elevating its conversations, numerous aspects begin to build upon each other. Once a significant cadre of citizens adopts the mindset and begins building the skillsets, transforming conversations and bringing additional residents on board becomes easier and easier. Relationships and trust form across perspectives, closing the gaps that undermine genuine conversations. Capacity is developed for a particular project and then remains for the next project to build upon. With less and less hyperpartisanship and more authentic engagement, the incentives shift. Weak arguments based on simplistic good-versus-evil narratives are dismissed, and nuance is rewarded. Public processes are not dominated by those who already hold strong opinions, as they are now, but rather by people eager to engage others, learn, and co-create collaborative actions to improve their communities. And, most importantly for the health of our communities, rather than tapping into the worst in human nature, we begin to tap into the best.
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[1] An ongoing collaboration among the Kettering Foundation, the International City/County Managers Association, the National Association of Counties, the National Civic League, and the International Association of Public Participation is actively exploring this issue, focusing on equipping city managers with the skills to elevate conversations in their communities.
[2] Principled impartiality is the recognition and ongoing negotiation of the tensions in the facilitation of public engagement among the need for impartiality, the commitment to honoring quality information and arguments, and honoring small-d democratic values. See John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2011), https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact#; also https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/the-case-for-principled-impartiality-in-a-hyper-partisan-world/.
[3] Martín Carcasson, “The Critical Role of Local Centers and Institutes in Advancing Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Public Deliberation 10, no. 1 (2014): 1–4, http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol10/iss1/art11.
[4] Martín Carcasson, “Deliberative Pedagogy as Critical Connective: Building Democratic Mindsets and Skillsets for Addressing Wicked Problems,” in Deliberative Pedagogy and Democratic Engagement, ed. Timothy Shaffer, Nicholas Longo, Idit Manosevitch, and Maxine S. Thomas (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017).
[5] Elsewhere I have argued that our media and educational institutions are struggling in many ways, and that adopting a wicked-problems mindset and serving as deliberative resources could revitalize them in a way that is particularly needed in our hyperpartisan times. See Martín Carcasson, “From Crisis to Opportunity: Rethinking the Civic Role of Universities in the Face of Wicked Problems, Hyper-Partisanship, and Truth Decay,” in Democracy, Civic Engagement and Citizenship in Higher Education (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2019). In 2022, the Center for Public Deliberation launched the Northern Colorado Deliberative Journalism Project to further explore the role of local newsrooms in supporting deliberative efforts. For more information, visit https://cpd.colostate.edu/djp/
