John Gastil on Building an Integrated and Empowered Form of Civic Engagement
This post excerpts from Building a Democracy Machine: Toward an Integrated and Empowered Form of Civic Engagement by Pennsylvania State University Professor John Gastil, the latest contribution to the Ash Center’s working paper series. Gastil is a leading scholar on deliberative democracy who headlined a spring 2015 panel discussion at the Ash Center on Citizens Initiative Review.
In Building a Democracy Machine, Gastil proposes a way to connect and unleash the latent potential of the dozens — and possibly hundreds — of available online platforms all aiming to facilitate civic engagement. With the intent of attracting feedback and collaborators, Gastil lays out both a vision and a practical plan for building a civic web portal that could generate the empowered deliberation and public legitimacy that healthy democratic governance needs. In the excerpt below, Gastil begins his paper by making the case for rethinking our current models of public consultation and engagement, mining the literature for what we have learned about designing effective deliberation and participation mechanisms, and highlighting some of the notable digital tools that would comprise the foundation of a new ‘Democracy Machine’.
Read the full paper here.
The Problem of Public Consultation
Consider for a moment a strange fact: Nobody has produced a reasonably precise estimate of how much money government spends on public consultation and public relations in the United States. We see land use and planning notices posted on fences in our neighborhoods, and we see in the news high-profile public hearings on catastrophes, such as the toxic water supply in Flint, Michigan.
Behind such actions are statutes and principles of government that compel ongoing citizen consultation at every level of government in the US. For instance, the Federal Administrative Procedure Act (1946) requires “notice and comment.” Agencies “shall give interested persons an opportunity to participate in… rulemaking through submission of written data, views, or arguments.” Furthermore, agencies must give “consideration of the relevant matter presented” and justify rules by stating “their basis and purpose.”
Most state and local governments have in their founding documents passages such as this one from Article 1 of the California State Constitution: “The people have the right to instruct their representatives, petition government for redress of grievances, and assemble freely to consult for the common good.” In the heart of Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara County Mission Statement reads, “We create an inclusive environment that supports the diversity of our community. We take action to communicate openly and frequently, encouraging public participation.” Even without a mandate or mission statement, most elected officials really do want and need constituent feedback to enable them to govern effectively.
Given so much regular public consultation, the price tag must be large. A recent Congressional Research Service study found that the federal government spends roughly a billion dollars each year on public relations and advertising. The US Travel Association estimated that the feds spend nearly 18 billion dollars annually on meetings (including travel, naturally). Consultation accounts for part of those budgets, but it also involves considerable unbudgeted staff time. As a rough approximation, let us assume the magnitude of government spending on consultation is at least one billion dollars. Even that figure represents one-sixth of what public officials and agencies already spend on “civic technology” in all its forms, but a billion dollars is probably within a magnitude of the total spending.
What does that money buy? With public distrust in the US government hovering near its highest point in the history of polling, it appears that citizens doubt the sincerity of public consultation. True enough, a 2010 Knight Foundation study showed that those attending public meetings came away feeling less efficacious and more detached from their community.
Read the full paper here
Consider what citizens see when they meet with government. The most ubiquitous form of public engagement may be the public hearing format. Even the government officials who organize these know that these meetings have limitations, or worse. Since hearings are often required by law, officials and citizens alike can start a hearing in a legalistic frame of mind. The aim is to fulfill requirements or prepare arguments, rather than deliberate. Most hearings are poorly attended, and officials often see lining up in the speaking queue only familiar faces, who will sing familiar songs.
If, on the other hand, political arsonists fan partisan flames, public meetings become pure theater. Such was the case for the infamous 2009 “town hall meetings” held around the country in advance of the Affordable Care Act. When members of Congress went home to hold these sessions, an angry crowd greeted them with shouts and bitter complaints, including scripted, baseless arguments developed by conservative groups intent on derailing the proposed legislation.
To avoid a raucous scene, Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln joined many colleagues in avoiding such meetings altogether. “If people genuinely wanted to have a constructive conversation, then that would be a different thing,” she said. “But that has not been what we’ve seen.”
Efforts to solicit input quietly, through a process called e-rulemaking, have yielded mixed results. The best successes in this online consultation have drawn fresh insights from citizens who would not have made the same contribution through a face-to-face meeting. Soliciting feedback via the Internet, however, also invites mass comment campaigns, which clog up the process and may, if anything, dampen the substantive impact of more thoughtful public input.
The bottom line? The government spends an incredible amount of money, partly out of obligation, to engage the public in a way that often proves counterproductive.
A Public Ready to Engage
The most cynical remedy to this situation involves government simply cutting its losses by paring back consultation and trusting in elections as a sufficient means of public input. However elegant that solution might seem, it ignores the fact that Open Meetings Laws and other statutes mandate consultation. Moreover, pushing the public away will have unintended consequences, such as pushing citizens to draft more ballot measures, which can yield legislation inferior to that which could have been crafted more collaboratively.
More importantly, the impulse to give up on consultation overlooks the public’s readiness to engage, when invited to do so in the right context. Much ink has been spilled to demonstrate the public’s apathy about public policy, or at least its willingness simply to let government govern. There is truth to both claims, but an equally strong pattern of facts shows a public that will engage, thoughtfully and forcefully, when given the right set of incentives and feedback.
Citizens from all walks of life will raise their hands when called on to serve in ways that give them a real voice on consequential questions. This has been shown in real-world deliberative events, both large and small. An experiment published in in the American Political Science Review made the point best when it showed that most people who want to let the experts govern, without further public input, actually “have highly conditional attitudes regarding participation.” It turns out that “their frustration with status quo politics is not the same as apathy or dislike of political involvement per se.” When invited into a deliberative forum that promises meaningful discussion, including with one’s elected representative, even most citizens normally tagged as apathetic or complacent were ready to take part.
Such findings underscore the importance of context. A smart government recognizes the need for a coordinated and carefully designed set of opportunities to maximize the quantity and overall value of public engagement. A few cities have won international recognition for thoughtfully engaging their citizens, such as Recife, Brazil, for its well-built Participatory Budgeting program, which effectively draws disenfranchised citizens into real budget decisions that improve their daily lives. That same process has now caught on in the US, with tens of millions of dollars on the line each year in cities across the country.
In the US, the city of Austin, Texas, has one of the most ambitious programs, headed by a Community Engagement Consultant. The public helped build the program itself, which develops new engagement opportunities in accordance with principles such as accountability, accessibility, fairness, and stewardship. One of the fruits of this effort is the SpeakUpAustin! web portal, through which citizens can learn about upcoming projects, offer input through surveys or comments, and join ongoing discussions.
What is most encouraging about this example is the city’s aim to integrate various opportunities and keep citizens connected with the city over time.
Building a Better Public Engagement Portal
Austin and many cities like it are taking these ideas in the right direction, but these efforts would become more effective by working through a so-called Democracy Machine, which is described here in detail.
The Democracy Machine would exist as an online portal that links together extant forms of engagement, both online and in-person, to maximize their reach and impact. By interconnecting complementary forms of civic learning, engagement, and influence, the Machine itself would improve the quality of public input, the responsiveness of the rules and laws shaped by it, and the very legitimacy of government.
The fuel that starts up the Democracy Machine’s motor is the funding from public officials and agencies who wish to engage the public on a particular issue. The Machine uses that call for consultation to bring forward large numbers of individual citizens, who choose among different forms of engagement. Some might choose to complete lightweight surveys, where they learn about alternative administrative rule building a democracy machine: Toward an Integrated and Empowered Form of Civic Engagement proposals, state individual preferences, and offer commentary. Others might choose intensive opportunities for open-ended discussion or focused policy deliberation.
Through an iterative process, the Machine distills citizen input into precise and well-reasoned recommendations, which go back to the government office that initiated the process. That same office feeds back into the Machine its response to the input and follows up later, in weeks, months, or even years, with assessments of the efficacy of the adopted policy. Through the Machine, the citizens who helped shape the recommendations learn of the government policy choice and its downstream consequences.
Ultimately, the Machine asks citizens to assess the government’s responsiveness and the wisdom of its judgment. (This process will sometimes hold a mirror to the citizens themselves, should they ultimately deem their own input to have been ill-advised.) Agencies found to be responsive and effective get a discount for the cost of their next consultation. If the government disregards the decisions made by citizens, the Machine provides a verifiable record of public judgment that could be used to hold officials accountable.
Figure 1 summarizes the basic operation of the Machine and shows more clearly its central distinctive feature: a long-term feedback loop. Too often, citizens show up for a meeting, fill out a survey, or send a letter or message through social media, only to get a prompt response of little substance. Even those who participate in a satisfying meeting with public officials rarely learn what ultimately came from it. Citizens do not get the satisfaction of seeing their energy go to good use, and government gets no credit for being responsive. This makes many citizens cynical about the very idea of engagement, and it makes governments resent their public participation mandates.
Linking inputs to outputs, and then giving citizens the chance to evaluate those outputs, simultaneously combats cynicism, resentment, and unresponsiveness.
Figure 1. A sketch of the long feedback loop in the democracy machine
Components of the Democracy Machine Already in Operation
As stated earlier, the Democracy Machine is as much about connecting pre-existing online tools as it is about establishing a civic web portal with novel features. Perhaps the most important component of the Machine is the Common Ground for Action online deliberation space co-created by Conteneo Software and the Kettering Foundation.
Loosely based on the National Issues Forums program, Common Ground for Action is a highly structured online deliberative forum in which four to eight citizens meet for one or two hours to talk through a challenging policy issue. Graphics generated in real time by the users themselves show the shifting shape of a discussion group’s common ground. By sharing personal stories and experiences, assessing three to four options rooted in values, and reflecting on the advantages and tradeoffs of a larger list of potential actions, the forums help participants discover where they can agree to move forward. Reviews of past studies have shown that, on particularly polarizing issues such as immigration, breaking down hardened positions requires discussions with these characteristics.
Figure 2 shows an example of one such group identifying the set of health care reform actions they can all live with, after discussion. What is unique about Common Ground for Action is that it can show policymakers not just the aggregated judgment of many individuals but also the granular results of these group interactions. By sharing personal stories, assessing three to four policy choices, and reflecting on the pros and cons of a larger list of potential actions, the forums help participants discover where they can reach agreement.
Figure 2. A screenshot of the final stage of a common ground for action forum
There is no secret to the process, beyond the mundane magic of honest dialogue and focused deliberation. For years, well-structured discussion processes have proven their mettle as a means of generating policy insights from lay citizens. Even randomly selected groups of citizens deliberating in chat-like environments have shown that they can sometimes work as effectively as their face-to-face counterparts. By capturing the details of these discussions, Common Ground for Action generates a rich dataset for analysis. Pooling such data across hundreds or thousands of forums could provide powerful insights to policymakers about where and how to act.
Whereas the Common Ground for Action interface helps participants work through a pre-structured discussion guide, sites like the Madison Project and the Legislation Lab provide examples of platforms wherein citizens can generate legislation itself. Crowdsourcing legislation is not as chaotic as it might sound, and the Legislation Lab has worked on everything from drafting tenancy law in New York City to the Kurdish constitution.
Online tools can meet citizens at an even wider array of entry points to the political process. James Fishkin, who created the Deliberative Polling system used across the globe, has suggested that deliberative events may work well not only for policy consultation and constitutional change, but also as tools for nominating and evaluating candidates and ballot propositions.
Online variations on this idea include the Living Voters Guide, which helps citizens think through the pros and cons of ballot measures in the state of Washington. Funding from the National Science Foundation helped get this project off the ground, and an ongoing partnership with the Seattle Public Library has built a fact-checking function into this guide, lest its users get tangled up in nonsense posted by less conscientious citizens.
Others, such as Public Agenda’s Matt Leighninger, have already made roll calls of such processes, but the examples provided here should suffice to illustrate the range of tools already operating online. The trick is to get them to work in concert and in a way that sustains them over time. For every functional online method of civic engagement, 12 have already folded for lack of sustained use and development. A Democracy Machine would promise to not simply link up those components but help their developers increase their usage and keep them in good repair.
Read the full paper here.
John Gastil (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences and Political Science and a Senior Scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at the Pennsylvania State University. Gastil’s research focuses on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. Those readers who wish to help build the Democracy Machine, as well as those who have suggestions or critiques, should contact directly the CEO of Conteneo Inc., Luke Hohmann (luke.hohmann@conteneo.co), who has volunteered to be the Machine’s chief architect. Gastil can be contacted at jgastil@psu.edu.
Originally published at www.challengestodemocracy.us.
