Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Henry Griffith

Implementing Deliberative Mechanisms

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By Henry Griffith, DCI Fellow

As part of my work as a DCI Fellow this year, I had to complete a personal deliberation project of my own design and implementation. As a scholar-athlete, I have engaged in several conversations around marijuana policy during my time at Davidson. With the broader landscape around marijuana shifting so much in the United States in recent years, the discussions within Davidson have consequently responded. However, it seemed to me that there was a gap in that conversation for Davidson as a whole. To me, that gap was between the policy conversations occurring within the athletic administration and the beliefs, knowledge, and experiences of scholar-athletes at Davidson. I firmly believe that most members of the Davidson community agree about various points in the conversation around marijuana, and yet, the topic continues to drag with it a burden of potentially unnecessary conflict. In this blog post, I wish to discuss my small implementation of a deliberation between students and administration around a specific Davidson policy to demonstrate how a deliberative mechanism could clarify policies and amplify agreement within the Davidson community.

My project intended to bridge the perceived gap between students and administration by creating the place to hold a constructive, structured, and facilitated conversation around marijuana policy at Davidson. The deliberation was created with the broad intent to answer, “How lenient or strict should Davidson’s marijuana policy be to best foster the growth of scholar-athletes?” To create the space for this conversation, I invited a few administrators from the athletics department, several scholar-athletes, and an administrator from the Dean of Students (their office is involved with the marijuana policy for all of Davidson). While scheduling and organizing this deliberation with many people was quite the challenge, it was quickly clear to me that those who entered the conversation wanted to better understand the current policy and its possible path forward.

Following along with the deliberation guide created for the conversation, the participants quickly engaged with one another and managed to settle into the deliberative space. Perhaps most importantly, it became clear that they understood that getting on the same page about the current policy was a sufficiently successful outcome; they did not need to come away having proposed radical changes to the policies. Rather, it was beneficial simply to create a space for all parties involved to better understand one another’s perspectives. They engaged with one another directly, including by asking clarifying questions and asking to hear more about individuals’ experiences. Deliberation guides can be useful in providing a formal structure for conversations; however, I think that conversations like this which were intentionally trying to bridge a gap are best served by allowing for flexibility in the conversation’s path.

Before the deliberation, I was quite worried about a student vs. administration dynamic. However, deliberation continues to surprise me with its ability to cool off such dynamics and produce unexpected agreements by the end of the conversation. I believe a large source of this surprising agreement comes from engaging with the nuanced areas of the policies. By focusing on specific components of and reasons for Davidson’s policy, students and administrators were able to agree where I believe they didn’t expect it. In the final section of each deliberation, there is a period reserved for reflections on the conversations in which each participant shares some reflection. And in these reflections, several participants noted that they were pleasantly surprised by the group’s areas of agreement.

It is due to the success of this small implementation of a deliberative policy conversation that I seek to argue for a broader use of deliberations in Davidson’s policy decisions. This year, students have seen policy changes such as the “Wellness Wendy” and non-food dining dollars change that created some backlash among the student body. I believe that deliberation could present an intermediary in these kinds of decisions for the future of Davidson. From my perspective, much of students’ frustration was that the policy was changed without consulting students. These situations are those which I believe deliberation could represent a powerful tool for aiding.

It might be somewhat foolish of me to assume that deliberation could help or change all policy choices that presently occur within Davidson. However, I do believe that creating a deliberative mechanism before a policy conversation even begins could be instrumental in helping get students, faculty, and administrators on the same page. These deliberations would not have to be lengthy. But I believe they would present a beneficial environment for members of the Davidson community to engage with one another as equals, per deliberation’s egalitarian agreement.

One of the factors for success in the deliberation around marijuana policy was that it took place shortly before the administration were planning to have a formal discussion on the matter. Thus, the deliberation allowed for the administrators to preemptively test their ideas with students before taking them to the formal conversation. It is this type of mechanism that I believe could be very beneficial for Davidson, not only in hopefully continuing to improve and adapt policies, but also in simply allowing all parties to be heard. Producing equitable, fair policies is quite a challenge. However, I believe that this mini deliberation around marijuana policy could set the stage for a consistent implementation of deliberative environments in future Davidson policy discussions.

Risks and Rewards of Deliberation for Our Political Environment

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By Henry Griffith, DCI Fellow

Political division and hostility have almost unambiguously grown to new heights in recent decades in most modern democracies around the world. Most citizens pay more attention to politics and their political experiences than ever before; yet, despite this tangible political vigor, proper democratic behavior has been stunted with the intensified hostility that individuals feel towards people with different views.

Such a state of democracy is, at least in part, the reason for the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative in the first place. And in my short stint in the DCI, I have seen firsthand the ability of deliberation to cool down some of these emotional political responses that have become almost natural in today’s democracy. I wish to pursue a parallel thought that commends deliberation for its successes while also recognizing that as a political activity it could result in a further continuation of the cycle of polarization that we see play out today. In this way, I hope to paint a more comprehensive picture of deliberation’s successes, its possible risks, and the ways that the deliberative process itself might actively help ease those risks within the context of current democracies.

Many of these ideas originate from Robert Talisse’s book, titled Overdoing Democracy, which I studied in a course last spring. In it, Talisse, a Vanderbilt professor of philosophy, argues that we have pushed democracy to an extreme, wherein politics seemingly occupies or is reflected in all parts of our lives. As he points out, people seem to have gained the uncanny ability to connect consumption choices with someone’s political beliefs. For example, an individual’s choice to drive a truck or a hybrid has become an almost natural signal of their purported political beliefs. While this form of political association has long existed, more and more of our seemingly mundane activities, such as where we buy our coffee or which gym we belong to, are becoming associated with a political valence. He attributes this ability and this growing reflection to what he calls political infiltration, and specifically to the “reach” of politics into our lives.

Political infiltration can help to explain the gradually deteriorating wall that we see today between our conceptions of the individual and the citizen. In other words, politics is infiltrating our lives to such a degree that we have grown to regard ourselves and others first and foremost as citizens rather than people. This shift is crucial, for it means that previously benign actions and choices have become deeply connected with people’s political identities. Due to this deteriorated wall, many citizens now understandably interact with politics with greater outrage, for it has become increasingly difficult for people to separate attacks on their ideas from attacks on their person. This idea leads into the next key components of political infiltration: political sorting and political fandom.

Due to the difficulty of separating attacks on ideas from attacks on the person, many people have physically sorted themselves in life in order that they don’t suffer as many of these “‘personal” attacks. It has therefore become more commonplace for the people at someone’s favorite coffee shop, grocery store, or just within one’s neighborhood to share similar political beliefs. The danger in this sorting can be seen by understanding group polarization. Group polarization is the gradual process in which individuals surrounded by people that agree with them take on a more extreme version of their original position. The affirmation from those that agree with them seems to provide enough psychological encouragement to where people come to believe in a slightly more extreme position. Through group polarization individuals have gradually intensified their views, leading to the transformation from citizens to political fans who have loyalties to their political “teams” or parties that transcend their loyalty to proper democratic procedure.

It is from this setup of political fandom and group polarization that we can recognize some of deliberation’s possible risks when done improperly. If people’s lives are filled with those who generally agree with them, deliberation could be composed purely of people that agree with each other. This would further the process of group polarization and lead to more intensified views and greater antipathy towards the opposing party. This antipathy is particularly troublesome because proper deliberation and democracy rely on a mutual trust that the people with whom one disagrees will respect the process and engage as rational participants. Thus, a possible risk of deliberation is that it could transform political fans into even greater political fans. And, as we have seen in recent years in the United States, distrust of and antipathy towards those with alternative views can result in the refusal to listen to them, meaning that people become more group polarized and even greater political fans. This is the polarization cycle and given that deliberation can be understood as a political activity, it is possible that improper deliberation would only further this cycle.

Despite these risks of deliberation, it has built-in defense mechanisms which, when done properly, help to ease some of the potential risk of furthering the polarization cycle. The first element of proper deliberation necessary to mention are the set ground rules and agreements that are established from the outset which help to guide the conversation and correct comments that might reflect people’s political fandom. These agreements can help to cool individuals’ knee-jerk comments as the facilitator pushes individuals to provide accessible reasons for their positions. The second related element are the deliberative dispositions, including egalitarianism, humility, and open-mindedness (among others), which are also utilized by the facilitator to push the participants to detach from their potentially instinctual political responses.

A third crucial feature of deliberation, as it relates to group polarization and fandom, is the devil’s advocacy that the facilitator(s) takes on. Deliberation must try its best to represent all voices in the discussion, or at least recognize when certain perspectives might not be present given the people available. This is where proper deliberation can make the most direct impact in countering group polarization. If we recall, group polarization occurs when everyone in a group setting agrees with one another and takes on a more extreme position. But with proper facilitation, devil’s advocacy helps to fill in the potential gaps in beliefs and almost simulate a group composed of different views. In this way, facilitation can limit some of the psychological belief affirmation.

All three of these elements point towards the key distinguishing element of deliberation: facilitation. Facilitation lies at the heart of deliberation, and proper deliberation (especially in a highly politicized environment like we see today) requires facilitation that guides and pushes the participants while playing the devil’s advocate to fill in any gaps in the deliberation.

Political infiltration and fandom have made it exceedingly difficult to separate politics from even the smallest actions and choices in our lives. In his book, Talisse recommends pursuing collective activities that are intentionally non-political to detach from this political inundation. While I believe that such activities would be beneficial, I think it is unreasonable to believe that this alone would succeed in controlling citizens’ growing political fandom. Based on deliberation’s features, it seems like the combination of this non-political activity with proper deliberation could seriously help to lessen the polarization cycle that we see creating political fandom and general antipathy in the broad political environment. While I still believe that the potentially political nature of deliberations could increase polarization in certain cases, proper deliberation with agreements, guidelines, and facilitation seems to present a viable avenue for cooling political distrust and reengaging citizens with the mutual trust in the rationality of their opponents.