Advocates and skeptics of the prospects for deliberative democracy are as divided as red and blue state partisans, while most onlookers simply shrug and dismiss their dispute. In their new book Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality, André Bächtiger and John Parkinson aim to bridge this chasm and breathe new life into this long-standing but often tired debate. The authors’ central claim is that engagement on deliberative democracy has suffered from blind spots, overstatements, and rigidities that have left all parties grappling with the issues in ways that are often unproductive and unrealistic. Addressing these limitations, the authors aim to offer a “novel understanding of deliberation” (p. 1) that they hope will bridge the theory–practice divide and help scholars of all stripes come to more realistic terms with the prospects and limitations for deliberative democracy as an emergent possibility.
Facing the problem of polarization between “true believers” and scoffing skeptics, Bächtiger and Parkinson proceed in three stages. They first sketch a model retaining the core qualities of deliberation as reason giving and reflective listening and add an understanding of deliberation as situated within larger social and cultural processes. This step recognizes deliberation as one script or practice among many other constitutive scripts that circulate and vie for our acceptance as valid conventions. This, in turn, lends deliberation three core qualities: contingency—context and goal dependence; performativity—generation by “creative actors who make productive and flexible use of various forms of communication,” including deliberation practices (p. 154); and the distribution of deliberative acts—in which deliberation occurs through many sites and agents, involving many competing scripts (which they call memes) and acts of translation, transformation, and implementation.
Elaborating this more flexible model, the authors offer a two-chapter “critical inventory” of the research on small-scale deliberations and two chapters evaluating research on large-scale deliberative systems, including empirical markers that may signal when large-scale deliberation is occurring and worthy of scholarly study. In their final chapter, they propose that effective research needs to be methodologically pluralist, drawing insight from across our discipline and beyond through a problem-driven, goal- and context-specific approach. To illustrate this potential, they highlight new empirical methods for tracking and interpreting large-scale deliberative trends and topical conversations, including big data analysis, network science, and large-scale quantification of deliberative content.
Among the many virtues of this book is the performance of its own prescription—namely, the bridging of academic divides to renew the study of public deliberation. Here is a fruitful collaboration between a theorist and an empiricist willing to diversify their outlooks through mutual engagement. In so doing, they reach beyond their existing silos to incorporate an up-to-date cultural approach, thus situating deliberation as part of ongoing processes in which status quo conventions are continually either remade or maintained. This vital move offers a bridge from which diverse scholars can look again at emergent deliberative practice by attending to what is actually happening in public life through many relevant methods. This approach wisely dispenses with the false dichotomy between scientific and interpretive methods, acknowledging the value of both, especially in combination. All of us can benefit from this invitation to lay down our methodological disputes—our own form of “tribal affiliation” (p. 142)—for the greater good of expanding knowledge in this time of political turmoil.
One possible drawback of the book may be its timing, which may either obscure or perfectly frame its full import. In the United States and beyond, politics today is the realm of the bizarre and truth impaired. Manipulative and often bigoted speech is normalized, and even mundane elements of daily life take on the mantle of partisan hatreds and suspicions. In these waters, debating the idea of large-scale conversation becoming the centerpiece of a newly emergent form of democracy may seem laughable. Yet political mayhem is not the only outcome today. Partisan turmoil has sparked calls for open-minded public conversation. Evidence of such emerging conversations and their early impact on policy and practice is a valid reason for hope and new research.
Bächtiger and Parkinson, however, gesture only briefly to these promising new developments, primarily through their references to future work. Other chapters remain somewhat abstract with few empirical examples, even on practicalities such as what makes a useful deliberative meme (pp. 98–100). In their residual tendency toward abstraction—a forgivable hazard of model building—some of the authors’ most valuable theoretical contributions potentially obscure how renewed scholarly attention to deliberation at this chaotic moment may yield unexpectedly powerful results as political peril animates grassroots efforts to create balanced public conversation and relevant change.
One example of this overshadowing arises from the authors’ otherwise useful distinction between two approaches to large-scale deliberation: additive and summative. The additive approach they define as bringing deliberative acts into existing democratic practice to provide democracy with a “deliberative timbre” (p. 7). In the summative mode, specific communication events may or may not be deliberative, but their complex totality creates large-scale public reflection and choices with clear and implemented outcomes. The authors however, set aside the summative in favor of the additive, stating that “there is no prior empirical work and precious little theoretical work to go on” in terms of the summative (p. 8).
Yet this is not strictly true, and brief summative examples seem to exist even in their own chapters. As an applied theorist, for example, I have published a study of 28 years of US public engagement on LGBT equality (1987–2015) featuring an exploratory data analysis of more than 8,000 deliberative expressions across diverse domains, including sports, religion, and social groups. Through such summative conversation the US public reflected on and adopted new ways of understanding marriage, family, gender, and sexuality in a major transformation in cultural scripts and policy that is still ongoing (Edwina Barvosa, Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems, 2018). The LGBT equality case reveals patterns in deliberative system growth, key catalysts, the social infrastructure by which a public builds a system, and specific communication practices that help participants sidestep the hazards of implicit bias and polarizing speech in easily accessible and often pleasurable ways. If this is so, a visible summative deliberative system has already emerged organically in the United States on at least one topic.
Moreover, this does not seem to be a solitary occurrence. Bächtiger and Parkinson make tantalizingly brief note of the case of public deliberation on Scottish independence in which the Scottish government “resisted the urge to design and manage the process itself [resulting in]….an astonishing outburst of conversation at bus stops and kitchen tables, in market squares and online forums….[through which] Scots created a new understanding of what was distinctively Scottish about their approach to the state and public policy” (p. 91). As old political practices break down, democratic publics seem increasingly able and inclined to create large-scale conversations capable of decisively shifting social and political practice. Similar public-led discussions appear to be emerging in the United States and elsewhere on issues such as rape and sexual assault, gun violence, racial inequities, economic inequality, and potentially climate change. This is so even under polarized conditions, which, in the LGBT case, frequently sparked reasoned reflection across political divides.
In short, summative deliberation appears to be where the action is and additive practices may spur this to greater heights. Only time and more empirical study will tell. Although worn-out scholarly lenses might lead us to overlook these developments, this book offers a valuable framework from which we can renew informed scholarly discussion and bring together the wise and visionary minds of advocates and skeptics alike to reexamine the shifting prospects for deliberative democracy. The day may yet come when we are retrospectively grateful for the currently painful political turmoil that brings to the surface not only many elements in need of public deliberation but also the dire necessity for democratic publics to find their own way into productive conversation.
