Policy deliberation: confronting subjectivity and emotional expression

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.