Democracy in Motion

Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement

Edited by Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger

Consolidates theory, research, and practice from around the world and in more than a dozen academic fields;
The product of a unique (and deliberative) collaboration of over 60 leading practitioners and academics across the globe to tackle the "big questions" of deliberative civic engagement;
Organized in a series of chapters that explore the big questions about pblic deliberation, assessing what we know, how we know it, and what remains to be understood;
Written for a wide variety of audiences in all parts of the world, from academics, scholars, and students across many fields, to activists and civic leaders, to government and public officials, and to concerned citizens.

Democracy in Motion

Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement

Edited by Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger

Description

Although the field of deliberative civic engagement is growing rapidly around the world, our knowledge and understanding of its practice and impacts remain highly fragmented. Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood. More than a simple summary of research, the book is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to public officials, activists, and average citizens who are seeking to utilize deliberative civic engagement in their communities. The book significantly enhances current scholarship, serving as a guide to existing research and identifying useful future research. It also has promise for enhancing practice, for example by helping practitioners, public officials, and others better think through and articulate issues of design and outcomes, thus enabling them to garner more support for public deliberation activities. In addition, by identifying what remains to be learned about public deliberation, practitioners and public officials may be inspired to connect with scholars to conduct research and evaluations of their efforts.

Democracy in Motion

Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement

Edited by Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger

Acknowledgements
About the Editors
About the Authors
Editorial Assistants

Part I: Overview
1. Introduction to Deliberative Civic Engagement
Tina Nabatchi
2. Mapping Deliberative Civic Engagement: Pictures From a (R)evolution
Matt Leighninger

Part II: Process and Design
3. Who Deliberates? Recruitment and Participation in Deliberative Civic Engagement
David Ryfe and Brittany Stalsburg
4. How People Communicate During Deliberative Events
Laura Black
5. Deliberative Inclusion in Multicultural Societies
Alice Siu and Dragan M. Stanisevski
6. Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence
Todd Davies and Reid Chandler

Part III: Outcomes and Evaluation
7. Does Deliberation Make Better Citizens?
Heather Pincock
8. Deliberation's Contribution to Community Capacity-Building
Bo I. Kinney
9. Assessing the Policy Impacts of Deliberative Civic Engagement
Gregory Barrett, Miriam Wyman, and Vera Schattan P. Coehlo
10. Evaluating Deliberative Public Events and Projects
John Gastil, Katie Knobloch, and Meghan B. Kelly

Part III: Conclusion
11. Listening and Responding to Critics of Deliberative Civic Engagement
Loren Collingwood and Justin Reedy
12. Advancing the Theory and Practice of Deliberative Civic Engagement: A Secular Hymnal
Michael Weiksner, John Gastil, Tina Nabatchi, and Matt Leighninger

References

Democracy in Motion

Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement

Edited by Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger

Author Information

Tina Nabatchi: Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.

John Gastil is Professor of Communication and Political Science, The University of Washington; soon to leave U Washington and become Head of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State. Author of Jury and Democracy (Oxford, 2010).

G. Michael Weiksner: is CEO of SocialFeet.com and a trustee of e-thePeople.org.

Matt Leighninger: Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), Senior Associate for Everyday Democracy

Contributors:

Gregory Barrett is a researcher who has worked on a variety of projects about inequality, social policy, and social accountability. Most recently, he has worked on projects at the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Laura W. Black (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She studies public deliberation, dialogue, and conflict in small groups and is specifically interested in how personal storytelling functions in public forums. Her research of public meetings, juries, and online communities has appeared in Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, Journal of Public Deliberation, Small Group Research, Political Communication, and several edited books.
Reid Chandler is an undergraduate at Stanford University, studying Architectural Design. He is affiliated with the Stanford Symbolic Systems Program.

Vera Schattan P. Coelho has a Ph.D. in social science. She is the Research Director of the Brazilian Centre of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap), an interdisciplinary research centre located in São Paulo, Brazil, where she also serves as the Coordinator of the Citizenship and Development Group. Her interests center on the processes of democratization and development taking place in Brazil and other countries. She has led various comparative studies in the areas of new forms of citizen involvement, deliberation, and consultation to improve social policies and democracy. She is author of numerous articles on health policy, pension reform, and participatory governance, and is editor of Pension Reform in Latin America (FGV, 2003), Participation and Deliberation in Contemporary Brazil (with Marcos Nobre, 34 Letras 2004), Spaces for Change? (with Andrea Cornwall, Zed Books, 2007), and Mobilizing for Democracy (with Bettina von Lieres, Zed Books, 2010).

Loren Collingwood is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Washington. Collingwood's research has appeared in Political Research Quarterly and the Political Encyclopedia of U.S. States and Regions. Collingwood is a fellow at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP), as well as at the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality (WISER).

Todd Davies is the Associate Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He worked as a computer scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International before obtaining a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Stanford in 1995. He is the lead designer of Deme, a social Web content management system, and is the co-editor, with Seeta Pena Gangadharan, of Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice (CSLI Publications/University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Meghan B. Kelly recently earned a Master in Public Administration (MPA) degree, and will soon obtain her Juris Doctor degree, from the University of Washington. Her research interests include civic engagement in immigrant communities and the efficacy of self-help legal orientation programs for detained immigrants facing deportation. Her thesis examined the service delivery model of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that works with noncitizens facing the immigration consequences of criminal activity.

Bo Kinney recently earned Master of Public Administration and Master of Library and Information Science degrees at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. He is a librarian in the Special Collections department at the Seattle Public Library and is the author of "The Internet, Public Libraries, and the Digital Divide," published in the July 2010 issue of Public Library Quarterly and a coauthor of the University of Washington/Gates Foundation/IMLS report, Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries.

Katie Knobloch is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Her research interests include deliberation, civic identity, democratic theory, and civic education. Her current work focuses on evaluating deliberative public events and the impact of deliberative participation on democratic norms.
Heather Pincock is an Assistant Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at Kennesaw State University. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her current research examines the educative effects of deliberation and seeks to bridge the gaps between normative and empirical approaches to the study of deliberative democracy.

Justin Reedy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He studies political communication and group behavior, with a focus on how groups of people make political and civic decisions. His research on political discussion and conversation, media use, and public opinion has appeared in Political Psychology, University of Colorado Law Review, George Washington Law Review, and the Handbook of Internet Politics.

David Michael Ryfe is an Associate Professor in the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada Reno. He has published widely in many areas of political communication, including the practice of deliberative democracy. His current work involves an ethnographic study of newsrooms in major metropolitan American daily newspapers.

Alice Siu is the Associate Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Alice received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with focus in political communication, deliberative democracy and public opinion. She received her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science from Stanford University. Alice's research interests in deliberation include what happens inside deliberation, including examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation. In addition, her work on Deliberative Polling in China has been published in The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China (Palgrave Macmillan), Governance Reform Under Real-Word Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice (World Bank), and Deliberative Democracy in an Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China (British Journal of Political Science).

Brittany Stalsburg is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rutgers University. Her research interests include gender and racial stereotypes, candidate self-presentation, and voter evaluation. Brittany's dissertation examines how being a parent matters differently for men and women political candidates. Her research has won numerous awards including the New York Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (NYAAPOR) Best Paper Award and the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize. In addition to her academic work, she is also a consultant for the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN) in New York City.

Dragan Stanisevski is an assistant professor of public administration and political science at Mississippi State University. His research focuses on issues of multiculturalism and diversity in public administration and public policy, administrative and political theories, theories of democratic governance, and public budgeting and finance. His work has appeared in Administration & Society, Administrative Theory &Praxis, and International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior.

Miriam Wyman is principal of Miriam Wyman & Associates, a Toronto-based consulting firm specializing in the design and implementation of consultative processes. She has had the good fortune to work at local, national, and international levels to promote dialogue and deliberation in practice and in policy. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (www.deliberative-democracy.net), and the Citizens and Governance Programme Team of the Commonwealth Foundation (www.commonwealthfoundation.com), and the Minister's Advisory Committee on Democratic Renewal in the Ontario Office of the Attorney General. She holds a Master's Degree in Environmental Education, with a special interest in women, health and environment.