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Abstract
This article examines an issue about citizen participation that emerges in the literature on deliberative democracy and deliberative experimentation. Much of the work on deliberative participation has focused on the structures and procedures that lead to the design of effective deliberative fora. As important as this investigation has been, it has largely neglected the socio-cultural and subjective dimensions that under gird policy deliberation, especially the role of emotions. Emotional expression, in fact, has typically been portrayed as a barrier to reasoned judgment. Arguing that the successes of deliberative processes depend on more than democratic-deliberative principles and the structures derived from them, the first half of the article examines the social psychological aspects of deliberative communication, especially the role of social meaning and its implications for the creation and facilitation of deliberative settings. It does this by drawing on experiences and evidence from experiments in deliberative policy inquiry. The second part of the paper then addresses the difficult question of how to deal with the role of emotions in policy deliberation. It concludes by outlining a practical approach for integrating reasoned deliberation and emotional expression based on real-world planning and policy processes.
Notes
1. Lefebvre (Citation1991) has called attention to the importance of analyzing the underlying and implicit assumptions about the social and political relations that organize and constitute spaces for participation. In this view, to speak only of structural arrangements, such as centralization and decentralization, neglects the very different sorts of understandings that can configure the construction of a decentered space. Particularly interesting is the way Lefebvre shows how the traces of the production of a space are etched into that space.
2. Parts of the following discussion are based on earlier works presented in Fischer (Citation2003, Citation2009).
3. Similarly, Polletta (Citation2002), in her work on social movements, shows how more established, enduring participatory organizations discover the need to manage this intersubjective realm. After analyzing participation and deliberation in a number of social movements, she found that formal deliberative rules alone could not explain participatory decisions. Providing ‘insufficient guidance’ to determine who participates and how, formal rules, as she writes, seldom determine ‘what kinds and concerns can be brought up, how they should be framed, what kinds and degree of emotions should be displayed in debates, how breaches in the formal rules should be dealt with, and so on.’ What she found was that both the organizers and participants in such movement organizations tended to informally adopt ‘associative modes’ of interaction that attend to these otherwise intersubjective concerns arising during – or as a result of – deliberative processes. The participatory arrangements that she investigated depended on a sophisticated set of normative understandings that accompanied the formal rules. Serving as a kind of ‘etiquette’ of deliberation, they functioned to routinize communicative interaction, civilize the expression of emotions, and to generate understanding among the participants, the result of which was often to increase trust. Successful participation in civil rights, women's liberation, and pacifist movements, among others, was facilitated by political activists who combined formal rules and ideology with non-institutionalized, nonpolitical models of association. She found that the reliance on such models of social interaction were far more important than instrumental considerations in organizing the deliberations that guided such groups.
4. This neglect has deep roots. Emotion and the kinds of impassioned rhetoric associated with it have long been considered as the enemy of rationality. An issue extending back to Plato, emotion has been defined as the very opposite of reason. Although passionate speech is a basic aspect of the everyday human realities that neo-Kantian social scientists have sought to understand, they have generally attempted to substitute it with their own mode of empirical-analytic reason.
5. From this view, some emotional passions should have no place in public deliberations. Here, for example, she refers to sentiments such as shame and disgust. These should always be avoided. At the same time, emotions such as commiseration and compassion can play essential roles in helping people to understand each other and come to acceptable decisions that assist them move forward. Even measured levels of anger can at times be seen to have useful affects.
6. The hurt feelings that easily result, as Blaug (Citation1999, p. 153) writes, can make ‘deliberative fora … dangerous places’ for some people, ‘and if they become too dangerous, they will, quite rationally, be avoided by participants’.
7. It is an illustration of Throgmorton's (Citation1993) conception of ‘planning as persuasive storytelling’.
8. A few psychologists engaged in the study and practice of conflict mediation have begun to work on techniques for handling the interpersonal, emotional sides of deliberation (Leary Citation2004). Such work presents useful insights and ideas into how we might proceed in developing fora and practices for an empathetic approach. How to build this into the practice of policy development and planning constitutes a formidable intellectual challenge.