Committed to deliberation

June 3rd, 2010

By Peter Levine, Director of Research and Director of CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement), Tufts University

Our national political dialogue is broken. The political talk on television and radio is often harsh, divisive, and trivial, as if we lacked the maturity to address our serious national problems together. According to a recent national survey by Daniel Shea and Melissa Kovacs, 95 percent of Americans believe that civility is important in politics.  Most respondents — especially those who listen to the radio or pay close attention to politics — believe that civility has declined.

Our national political dialogue is at its worst when we are faced with limitations, scarce resources, and the need to make difficult choices. That is when our leaders and pundits seem most inclined to adopt unreasonable and unrealistic positions and sling mud at their opponents.

Meanwhile, at the local level in numerous communities across America, citizens have learned better ways of collaborating. Whether through National Issues Forums, Study Circles, Consensus Councils, Public Conversations, watershed management councils, or many homegrown models for public deliberation, diverse people have come together to make difficult decisions. AmericaSpeaks has been an important partner in these efforts, helping communities to organize community-wide summits called 21st Century Town Meetings®. Matt Leigninger’s book The Next Form of Democracy describes many such examples.

In 2007, the National Conference on Citizenship asked a national sample of Americans whether “within the last year,” they had “been involved in a meeting (either face-to-face or online) to determine ideas and solutions for problems” in their communities and whether that discussion included people who held views different from the respondent’s own. The combination of these two questions yielded a group — 18 percent of the whole sample, or more than 39 million adult Americans — who were involved in practical discussions with people of diverse views. Even accounting for some exaggeration in survey responses, it’s clear that millions of Americans have direct personal experience with deliberation and are committed to it.

The most pressing challenge is to connect all that local work to national politics and policy. If we can’t make national decisions deliberatively, we are bound to make them badly — especially in times of scarcity, when we have too few resources to deal with too many social and environmental problems.

That is why AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy is so important. Participants will go to the heart of the matter by tackling the federal budget, which is the framework for almost all other national policies. I am confident they will address this difficult, divisive, and complex topic just as they handle equally challenging questions at the local level — with maturity, civility, and collective wisdom. They will model a whole new form of politics that we desperately need.

Like this? share it on: