Articles, Chapters, and Book Reviews

Studying Democratic Innovations: Toward a Problem-Driven Approach to Case Study Research (Policy Studies, 2019)

Hajer and Wagenaar (2003. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv, 16) advanced a conception of policy analysis – “Deliberative Policy Analysis” – that “rests on three pillars: interpretation, practice and deliberation.” This form of policy analysis, they argued, supports “more direct, participatory forms of democracy” involving “democratic deliberation on concrete issues” (xv, 29). Since their writing, empirical research on such initiatives – “democratic innovations,” for short – has blossomed. However, while deliberative policy analysis is itself post-positivist in orientation, many researchers bring a (quasi-) positivist orientation to their work on democratic innovations. A key challenge for deliberative policy analysts is, then, how to participate in this field of inquiry while maintaining a post-positivist orientation. Pragmatist philosophy, I submit, can help them to meet this challenge. Pragmatism rejects a number of positivist assumptions about the nature of empirical inquiry. Relatedly, it supports the claim that policy analysis should be interpretive, practice-oriented, and deliberative. Indeed, it suggests that policy analysis cannot avoid being so. By way of illustration, I indicate how pragmatism points to an approach to case study research that rests on the three pillars.

What is Normative Democratic Theory For? Beyond Procedural Minimalism (Pragmatism Today, 2020)

Everyday experience indicates that when we reason intelligently about how to craft a democratic process, which treats persons as “free and equal,” we reason about procedures, virtues, and cultural practices in conjunction. This suggests that normative democratic theory should aid us in so reasoning. Yet, the prominent theories of Robert Dahl, Jürgen Habermas, and Joshua Cohen push us away from this recognition. The explanation for this concerns the procedural minimalism that characterizes each theory and the tenuous relationship each has to empirical inquiry. These criticisms point toward an attractive account of the status and function of normative democratic theory in democratic practice: such theory should emerge out of lived experience with the values of “free” and “equal” treatment and should guide inquiry into the procedures, virtues, and cultural practices that, in some particular context, are most apt to promote those values. The argument appropriates two ideas from John Dewey. First, our moral or ethical theories should offer interpretations of relevant aspects of “moral or ethical experience,” based on observation of humans as they pursue certain values in their actions. Second, we should treat these theories as “tools” for practical reasoning, which function to extend the goods that inhere in the relevant kinds of experience.

Re-Engaging Normative and Empirical Democratic Theory: or, Why Normative Democratic Theory is Empirical All the Way Down (Critical Review, 2022)

Historically, many philosophers and social scientists have sharply distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” forms of inquiry. In response, some have called for a re-engagement of these forms of inquiry. Here I offer a novel way of justifying such re-engagement in democratic theory. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I argue that normative democratic theory is a form of practical reasoning, hence inevitably involves empirical inquiry. Thus, in reasoning about what democratic processes ought to look like, we should avoid sharply distinguishing normative from empirical forms of reasoning, just as we should avoid sharply distinguishing theoretical from practical forms of reasoning.  

Qualitative Assessment of Deliberation. With Mark Bevir. In: The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. André Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren (Oxford University Press, 2018)

This chapter discusses three qualitative approaches to the assessment of deliberative participation: speech analysis, ethnography, and comparative case studies. In discussing these approaches, it considers exemplars of “problem-driven” research. With respect to research on deliberative democracy, problem-driven research may be characterized as research that is inspired by, and that seeks to contribute to the resolution of, substantive problems associated with the political project of deliberative democracy. The chapter illustrates what problem-driven research looks like by considering three qualitative exemplars of it: one involving speech analysis, another involving ethnography, and a third involving comparative case studies. Each exemplar is concerned with when and how citizens deliberate. Empirical evidence is primarily drawn from the United States of America, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Innovations in Democratic Governance.With Mark Bevir. In: Innovations in Public Governance, ed. Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko, Stephen J. Bailey, Pekka Valkama (IOS Press, 2011)

This chapter explores how direct citizen participation can feature throughout the varied stages of the public policy cascade. It discusses a range of democratic innovations for public participation, focusing on three aspects of the policy process: public opinion formation, decision-making, and implementation. The case studies indicate how public participation can operate at multiple geographical scales – ranging from the neighborhood level all the way up to the transnational – and illustrate how participation at different levels might be linked up. The examples explore ways that citizens might craft their own rules for participation; monitor those rules and the policies they help generate; and cooperatively implement their own local policies. They also suggest ways in which the role of experts and officials might be transformed into one of largely supporting and facilitating public participation. To conclude, the authors discuss a few ways in which innovative practices might contribute to a more effective policy process. 

Book Review: André Bächtiger and John Parkinson, Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality. Oxford University Press, 2019 (published in Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 2020)

André Bächtiger and John Parkinson set out to develop nothing less than “a novel understanding of deliberation” that will deliver more “plausible” and “persuasive” “empirical results” (1). It is commonly assumed that “deliberation can be adequately defined for empirical purposes without asking what its goals and contexts are” (2). Yet, as the authors observe, “this cannot be right” (ibid.). Mapping and Measuring Deliberation makes a case for a contextualist approach to the study of deliberation. Actors’ goals and communicative acts, and the standards by which we judge them, can and should vary with context (40). The book makes a compelling case for this proposition. Regrettably, however, the authors depart from their own professed contextualism in key respects. (Note: page citations are to the book, not the review.)

Book Review: Jonathan Beecher Field, Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation. University of Minnesota Press, 2019 (published in American Literary History, 2022)

Field offers an insightful account of how the traditional institution of the New England town meeting “has been repurposed in the service of various neoliberal institutions,” especially universities and corporations (5). Town hall meetings may mimic deliberative-democratic processes in which participants exercise decision-making authority, but they do “not offer any direct power to the people assembled” (as traditional town meetings do) (3). Instead, town hall meetings permit “elected officials, university leaders, and CEOs to perform the act of listening in order to mollify a public, especially in situations where that public has no power to give their grievances electoral or budgetary teeth” (7, my italics). This book review briefly describes how the norms of everyday discourse allow us to appreciate why this “performance of listening” so easily incenses us. Relatedly, it unpacks Field’s claim that town hall meetings represent “a perversion of democracy” (8). Overall, Field’s book adeptly accounts for the metamorphosis of town meetings into town hall meetings. However, a degree of hyperbole, and so fatalism, afflicts the book’s overarching narrative. (Note: page citations are to the book, not the review.)