Public Deliberation, Communication across Difference, and Issues-Based Service Learning

Abstract

Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in deliberative democracy. While many variations have been proposed, deliberative democracy can be understood as a form of democracy in which citizens come together in public forums to deliberate about shared problems as a means of developing mutually acceptable and collectively binding solutions to those problems. Deliberative democrats contrast deliberative democracy with the interest-driven form of democracy that underlies the current practice of United States politics, in which citizens individually and privately formulate their interests and register them through the electoral process. They argue that public policies developed through deliberative forums are better than policies developed through the current practice because the process of public deliberation brings about a transformation of each person’s perspective such that the resulting policies are more public and intelligent. When citizens participate in deliberative forums, they are presented with perspectives of all other participants, and they must present and justify their own positions to those participants. Policies developed through this process are more public than those developed under interestbased politics, for while policy developed through interest-based politics is founded on an aggregation of private interests, policy developed through public deliberation is founded on public justification. In deliberative forums, participants must justify their views by appealing to reasons that are convincing to the other participants if they are to convince them of the validity of their views. Policies generated through deliberative forums are also more public for, as they participate in deliberative forums, citizens learn about and respond to the perspectives of other citizens and the possible effects of particular policies on them. Deliberative democrats argue that policies developed through a deliberative process are also more intelligent than policies developed through the aggregation of interests because in deliberative forums, public policies are formulated after citizens have considered the views of all other citizens, and they must be justified by appealing to reasons that all citizens find convincing or compelling.