Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Kevin Garcia-Galindo

Enclave Deliberation: How to Highlight Common Goals and Develop Creative Solutions

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By Kevin Garcia-Galindo, DCI Fellow

For my DCI Fellowship Project, I decided to center on the issues of diversity and inclusion that have been so pertinent on campus throughout my time at Davidson. I, however, chose to experiment more with different kinds of deliberations.

Specifically, my DCI project centered on something very different from the goals of the DCI’s usual style of deliberation. My project could be categorized as an enclave deliberation, meaning that there was a clear selection bias that I took into account when I chose my participants. The goal of my deliberation was not to try to change anyone’s opinions but rather to encourage the dispersion of ideas within a group who all share one common characteristic.

Research often gives the practice of enclave deliberation a bad name. Some question how if it is so easy to wall oneself off from views from the other side (through who you follow on social media or which cable news stations you watch, for example), then why should we focus any more on bringing similarly minded people together? Moreover, political scientists often argue that enclave deliberation can lead to increased group polarization.

Enclave deliberation, however, is the most common type of deliberation we encounter in daily life, and it is a fundamental part of a healthy working democracy. This is because most of us learn about our own stances and positions from people who are most like us. Furthermore, because enclave deliberations tend to be less formal and structured, more people tend to be more comfortable attending them, especially with how much work a more structured deliberation can seem to require.

I believe my DCI personal project proves that enclave deliberations do not have to encourage political polarization, and even more, enclave deliberations can actually lead to a broad diffusion of diverse ideas even when most of the members share at least one major characteristic together.

For my personal project, the point of connection for all my participants was that they were all part of the Chidsey Leadership Fellows program. As a Fellow myself, I knew that If I wanted to talk about diversity and inclusion with student campus leaders, then there was no better way to do this than to talk directly with the group on campus that focuses on forming a group of diverse leaders. Moreover, I knew that because of the high level of diversity within Chidsey Leadership, they would be disproportionately more likely to have been affected by recent controversies on campus.

To give a short synopsis of these issues: Students in the past year have expressed resentment towards Davidson’s administration because they have perceived some of its decisions as disproportionately and negatively affecting low-income, first-generation, gender and racial minority students. From the current controversy around the administration preventing Dining Dollars being used to buy Plan B, and the past controversies that came and went, such as the movement to add Asian Studies as a major, the petition to change the name of Chambers, and the ruckus that was caused when students heard that our Summit coffee shop could be shut down, many students on campus believe that the administration takes issues of diversity and inclusion far too lightly. As a first gen person of color (POC) student myself, I was privy to a lot of the conversations that happened directly around these issues, and I can confirm they reinforced many of the feelings about how POC were being valued on campus.

The issue, however, was not that there was not enough communication between administration and students, but rather what I personally saw was that there was not enough communication among affinity groups and students for them to be able to reach common ground on these issues. Student government and the quotidian student petition of the day signaled to me that there was already enough student-administration communication; whether it was effective was not something I could really determine or had the energy to do.

As a result, I instead focused on creating an enclave deliberation where I could bring together this already close-knit group to discuss an issue that they were all being affected by. A difference I would point out between what I did here as opposed to the kind of enclave deliberation that most of the research points to is that my participants only related to each other in one specific way as opposed to sharing a multitude of characteristics. As a result, I am more inclined to call this a hybrid style of deliberation that had characteristics of both a more structured and broad-based style of deliberation and an enclave deliberation.

The goal of my deliberation was not necessarily to change anyone’s mind but to encourage people from different groups to share their own perspectives on an issue that affects all of them. The defining difference between what I did here and a more traditional deliberation is that I did not focus on discussing whether diversity and inclusion is an issue to begin with, but rather I focused on bringing together people who had already reached that conclusion and instead focused on encouraging them to work together to find solutions.

Spending so much time on just discussing the validity of an issue and never getting to proposing a solution is something that you see ad nauseam in many kinds of debates. For example, we often see this dynamic in debates around abortion where the pro-life and pro-choice sides never change their opinions but rather opt instead only to make small adjustments to their proposals. Consider how pro-life advocates who believe that abortion is immoral in all cases concede allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest, or how even pro-choice absolutists sometimes concede banning the most invasive and late-term types of abortions. Rarely is there anyone brave enough to concede more than is necessary to still come out winning.

But what happens when the most common proposals are not so concretely defined? Or when the topic is centered directly at giving those who normally do not have an outlet a chance to speak? What I think you get is an enclave deliberation where you truly get the chance to work together to find solutions and proposals.

Some may critique my thinking by saying that this kind of deliberation is not very effective at bringing the complete spectrum of ideas into discussion and that no meaningful consensus can ever be found unless you bring together people who represent the entire spectrum of possible views. To this I respond by saying that the task of my deliberation was not to start and end the debate around diversity and inclusion, but rather it was to create an effective starting point for a future more-representative deliberation.

I am very aware that there is still a lot of dialogue that needs to happen, but I take my project to represent a starting point for students to be better equipped to engage with the administration robustly, thoughtfully, and productively by first deliberating among themselves. Without this type of enclave conversation, I think it would be hard to be able to move very far in an actual deliberation between the administration and students.

What I think my deliberation proves is that there can exist many ways to maneuver through a difficult issue using structured deliberation as a tool. The approach we took represents an important way to do so that brings together different stakeholders who may not otherwise have the opportunity to reflect on their shared objectives.

Why Egalitarianism in Deliberation Is Essential

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Photo of Equality Stamp

By Kevin Garcia-Galindo, DCI Fellow

British Philosopher Isaiah Berlin once stated that “equality does not need any justification but only inequality does.” I bring this up because it highlights the universality of the idea of egalitarianism as the view of equality being good on its own behalf or virtuous in comparison to the demerits of inequality. This idea is interesting because egalitarianism is rarely something we stress about in public life, let alone our private lives where we often make judgements about other people’s abilities and worth quotidian.

Training to become a DCI deliberation facilitator has taught me many things, including the worth and impact egalitarianism has on deliberation. Learning that egalitarianism is an essential part of deliberation really got me thinking about why exactly is it not used more often in other scenarios like national politics or workplace meetings where a more equal playing field of ideas could aid problem solving and creativity among teams? The simple answer is that egalitarianism is a difficult idea to implement, especially into historically hierarchical systems of work and problem solving.

The truth is that egalitarianism has its place and time, especially in those situations where speed of deliberation is not a priority. It is often disadvantageous in situations where rank, experience, and expertise clearly outrank everything else, e.g., you clearly would never deliberate in an egalitarian fashion with your plumber how to fix the sink if you have never even touched the tubing under your sink.

Egalitarianism is, however, despite its limitations, still considered an essential part of deliberation, mainly because if defined and implemented correctly it can make all the difference in not only coming to an adequate action plan after deliberation, but also making sure that participants feel as though their opinions matter in reaching that conclusion.

Egalitarianism is a complicated term because of the many different conceptions of equality one can have that are tied to justice, wealth, or capabilities, among other things. When I use the term egalitarianism, I use it in its most basic and commonly understood Western European and Anglo-American definition of the word signifying that all human beings are endowed with a specified number of natural rights and, especially in the Christian notion, a natural equal value and worth. One does not need to go this far in depth about the significant weight and meaning of the word egalitarianism, but I only do it as an attempt to dispel the word of any of the connotational deviations that it has gained over the years from being associated with different groups and ideologies.

In the divided deliberative landscape of today, egalitarianism has two distinct connotations, one associated with an extreme aversion to expert opinion and the other characterized by the raising of marginalized voices. This is partly the reason why trying to enforce egalitarianism in our own private and public lives is so hard to do and why most people simply ignore it.

A middle ground needs to be sought between valuing expert opinions and helping raise historically marginalized voices. This is an incredibly difficult task due to the very nature of human communication and interaction. Think of the Dunning-Kruger effect as described in psychology, which outlines the way many of us have distorted views of own capabilities and experiences, especially when we are just beginning to understand a concept. Often, those who know the least will rank themselves the most knowledgeable while those who know the most will underscore their capabilities. In other words, it’s very possible that if you don’t know a lot, you will know even less about all the things you don’t know. The inverse being that if you’re an expert, you will also be an expert at critiquing your own knowledge.

Furthermore, take for example social comparison theory, which suggests that the reason why we are constantly comparing ourselves to others is due to how our egos are always in search of our next boost and how as humans we are simply unable to live outside of hierarchical spaces.

Psychology has a lot to say about how we measure our capabilities and success against our peers, specifically how, under perfect conditions, social comparison can help us know the extent of our own abilities and how in imperfect conditions, it can serve as a vector for low self-esteem.

So, how does this relate to deliberation? It relates because very rarely will there be any discussion worth deliberating upon without the aid of expert thinkers who have studied a particular subject or stakeholders who have been affected by that same subject. Using an egalitarian outlook on deliberation means recognizing the different kinds of expertise that a multitude of people can offer, and maybe also how inexperience within a certain subject can also be a positive.

To set a picture in your mind, consider a deliberation on the future of public education with three main participants: an academic research fellow of a libertarian think tank who has studied public, charter, and private education differences for decades, a father who has recently transferred his son into homeschooling to exercise greater control over what he learns, and you. In this situation, you are most likely the deliberator with the least expertise, but why is that not a problem?

Because expertise in a certain subject is often tied to a certain bias or common expert opinion. These experts have clearly already landed on a side of the debate already and will most likely want to regurgitate many of the common talking points of their position pushing for greater school choice and competition within the educational system. This could be a valuable experience for someone like you, who might not be well versed in these sorts of arguments, but it might also push these experts to be a lot more conscientious about how their views and opinions are appraised by the common person. After all, are you not more representative of the average stakeholder view than anyone else on this board? Is the purpose of deliberation really a space we want dominated by a few elite experts? Is a government ruled by elites, or as Plato described in the Republic, “philosopher kings,” not called an “aristocracy”?

Another common response to this scenario might be to say, “why not have experts of varying opinions work together in deliberation?” My response is that if that were a solution, then simply having two “philosopher kings” could make an aristocracy work. Two experts of different opinions do not produce better discussion most of the time; rather, they simply may produce more discussion, often with less to show for it. Nowhere are fewer concessions given than during a deliberation between two strong willed experts who do not want to give any ground. Experts have more to lose than we normally recognize in these sorts of situations. Would not a more centered and openminded person be more able to offer more creative or distinct opinions than experts who already have their answer set in stone? Furthermore, somewhat counterintuitively, would a less knowledgeable person not be better equipped to be skeptical (as opposed to argumentative) or at least encourage the expert to elaborate on his ideas more precisely?

As I said earlier, under perfect conditions, egalitarianism can breed an aura where everyone feels like they are contributing to the deliberation. Sometimes it is essential to advocate for the importance of those who know less about the issue at hand because it can be so hard to make them feel adequate in such important discussions for the reasons I outlined earlier. Egalitarianism is something that needs to be built upon and refined over time by making sure that neither the experts nor the less knowledgeable deliberators gain too much control of the deliberation. After all, while we want to hear their perspectives, no one wants to be berated by biased experts or overwhelmed by unorganized opinions and ideas by people who don’t know much about the issue.

Part of my mission this year as a DCI Fellow will be to use egalitarianism within the deliberations I facilitate in the same way I have outlined across this paper. Part of that effort will be me emphasizing respect for different perspectives and levels of expertise. But other times it may be preventing the experts from taking too much control of the conversation or affirming those who feel that they have nothing to add that their opinion is valuable and imperative. Pointing out how valuable opinions from all levels of expertise are might just be what defines how people come and leave feeling about the deliberations I lead.

Deliberation should be democratic and egalitarian in nature because if it ever becomes a discussion of only the views of a special few, then it ceases to be a method for producing democratic and intersectional solutions and one simply for self-praise and banter.