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136 pages

English

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In Voice and Judgment: The Practice of Public Politics, Robert Kingston, senior associate of the Kettering Foundation, provides a comprehensive analysis of the continuing public deliberations carried out, nationwide, over the past 30-some years, under the auspices of the National Issues Forums and other organizations.The task of publicly "talking through" a national or community problem is not always easy. Nor has an answer (or an agreement) always been found-or universally shared! But what regularly does emerge, when people deliberate, is a kind of shared understanding. At best, it is the sense of a shared public will. More important yet, such public deliberations suggest something of what it may take to make democracy work as it should. And, after several decades of deliberation, some of us have come to suspect that at the core of our democracy may be less the right to vote than the opportunity to deliberate.This study responds to critical and controversial domestic and multinational issues that have challenged-and sometimes still do challenge-citizens' relations to each other and their degrees of trust in their elective government. Many such issues remain continuing problems for the American public and its leadership; but the public discussion of each reveals, in compelling ways, not merely the need for, but also the extraordinary promise of public deliberation as a means of moving tensely conflicting issues toward the kind of shared understanding from which viable public policies may grow-or to an increasingly shared understanding even of issues that, at points, have seemed to bear irreconcilable expectations.The public voice is seldom the voice that the establishment-the political, corporate, and press establishments-is anxious to hear. And unless we are prepared to present and explain the dilemmas that the public acknowledges and is preparing to cope with-rather than primarily the opinions that people in their uncertainty express-we might as well leave the public voice at home.The continuing practice of public deliberation itself reveals, in this book, the slow-paced movement that translates the idea of change into the conceptualizing of public action.

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Publié par	Kettering Foundation
Date de parution	01 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781945577291
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0474€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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VOICE AND
JUDGMENT
The Practice of Public Politics
Robert J. Kingston
© 2012 by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Voice and Judgment: The Practice of Public Politics is published by the Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions
Kettering Foundation Press
200 Commons Road
Dayton, Ohio 45459
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First edition, 2012
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-923993-42-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012940499
“… after several decades of deliberation,
some of us have come to suspect that at the
core of our democracy may be less the right
to vote than the opportunity to deliberate.”
______________________
_____________________________
______________________
For
DAVID MATHEWS
and
DANIEL YANKELOVICH
without whose work, the importance
of public politics in a democracy
might not have been understood,
nor this book about it written.
______________________
_____________________________
______________________
C ONTENTS
______________________
_____________________________
______________________
INTRODUCTION
I. AMIDST VALUES AND INTERESTS … FINDING A PUBLIC VOICE
The Public and Public Policy
Hasty Judgments and an Emerging Voice
II. SEARCHING FOR BALANCE … AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD
The Illusory Flight of Hawk and Dove
Seeing Ourselves … and Our Responsibilities
Values, Interests … and the “Rights” of Others
Commonalities of Concern … in a New Century
The Trace of a Collective Will
III. SHARED EXPERIENCE AND COLLECTIVE UNDERSTANDING … THE OUTCOMES OF PUBLIC DELIBERATION
The Modes of Public Politics
Framing a Public Purpose … the Immigration “Problem”
Fixing a Direction … the Energy “Problem”
A Deliberative Political Culture
IV. FACING THE ODDS … WHEN KNOWING WHAT WE LIKE IS NOT ENOUGH
The Citizens’ Challenge—and the Government’s?
Disagreement, Compromise … or Understanding
The Political Import of Public Thought
V. DELIBERATIVE COMMUNITIES … THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR WILL
Deliberative Learning, Common Trust, and Individual Need
Public Education … the Problems We Live With
A Community’s Problem … Leaving People Behind
The Community, Practicing Politics
VI. RECLAIMING THE PUBLIC ROLE
Voice and Judgment
Reflection … and Experience
Coming to Knowing
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS … AND A NOTE ON THE SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I NTRODUCTION
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AS READERS WHO ARE THEMSELVES familiar with public deliberation may know, the task of publicly talking through a national or community problem is not always easy. Nor has an answer (or an agreement) always been found—or universally shared! But what regularly does emerge, when a people deliberates, is a kind of shared understanding. At best, it is the sense of a shared public will. More important yet, such public deliberations, shot through with both reservations about and important recognition of the commonality of American experience, suggest something of what it may take to make democracy work as it should. And intriguingly, after several decades of deliberation, some of us have come to suspect that at the core of our democracy may be less the right to vote than the opportunity to deliberate.
This study of deliberation and its value is presented in six chapters, with each chapter growing from what preceded it. The first sets the stage or elaborates the purpose of what follows by describing the circumstances under which, and the intentions with which, two organizations in particular—Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, and Public Agenda in New York City—set out to learn more clearly how the public might find and exert its will in shaping its communities and directing its nation (which sometimes seems, paradoxically, more oligarchy than democracy). Chapter 1 also introduces the vehicle then designed for this exploration of “public politics,” the National Issues Forums.
Because it is sometimes easier to trace patterns of behavior—and in this case, of public thinking—by examining reactions to comparable exigencies over time, the second chapter focuses upon Americans’ slowly developing sense of their role in the world, as revealed in public deliberations on that topic over the past quarter of a century. While focusing on what is often loosely referred to as foreign policy, the chapter explores half a dozen recognizably different historical moments—from the fear of nuclear annihilation in the early 1980s, through the Vietnam era, to the ending of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Middle East as this country’s more fearful horizon—each of which was encapsulated in a carefully framed discussion guide (variously also called by Kettering an “issue book” or an “issue guide”) and explored nationwide by deliberative public groups. Some of these group discussions were recorded on camera and their outcomes reviewed by politicians, professionals, and the press, thereby providing for 16 years the substance of a popular, nationwide PBS television program, A Public Voice , on which we will often draw.
Then follow two chapters on public thinking, primarily responding, in distinctively different patterns, to three critical and controversial domestic issues that have challenged and still do challenge citizens’ relations to each other and their degrees of trust in their elective government. Along with brief references to deliberations on several different issues, Chapter 3 focuses its attention primarily on the issues of “immigration” and “energy” (which is to say, what is called “the energy crisis,” with its sometimes suggested implications for the economy, global warming, and international competition). Both issues remain continuing problems for the American public and its leadership, but the discussion of each reveals, in a compelling way, not merely the need for, but also the extraordinary promise of public deliberation as a means of moving tensely conflicting issues toward the kind of shared understanding from which viable public policy may grow—or to an increasingly shared understanding even of issues that, at points, have seemed to bare irreconcilable expectations! The fourth chapter, while similarly employing brief references to a range of public deliberations over the years, focuses upon the nation’s healthcare problems, which, after several earlier efforts, eventually became the core substance of forums in 2007 and 2008. The topic of health care in this chapter reveals with stark clarity the degree to which interests and convictions may contend irrevocably—perhaps unalterably—when democracy itself is understood as a contest between predetermined opinions wherein practiced interests are at stake. At question in modern America (and in Europe too, of course) is still whether democracy is the only ultimately acceptable response to public challenges. Public deliberation, so far, has not come to a way out of all such problems that it sees, in part because while we may share some common values, and even a few common experiences, our individual interests often remain different if not inherently at odds.
The fifth chapter therefore brings our analysis of public thinking to bear on communities themselves, as they wrestle with issues that occur nationally yet reveal their implications most clearly to those who share their destinies in a common culture and place, where they experience the implications of political decisions with some immediacy. The public school—its accomplishments, purpose, and destiny—has proved a most popular issue for discussion in communities around the nation over the past 30 years; more often than any other issue it has appealed to local groups eager to frame problems to which a community’s attention needs to be addressed. That it remains an issue both popular and elusive is reason in itself for inclusion; more important, however, we begin to see in this context why the school, like the topics of other provocative and contested local issues, remains more often talked about than agreeably improved. Understandings in a community need often to be changed before opinions can be!
The public’s deliberative process remains, ultimately, in itself a process of learning; and perhaps, ultimately, government itself is a hard process to learn. Thus, finally, a closing chapter looks at Americans’ repeated deliberations about their own sense of their government’s worth, or their reservations about it, and considers what continued deliberative judgments by the public—or at least the serious attempt to reach such judgments—might suggest for our future as a democracy. This is the central aim of the book: to show the role of public deliberation on the path toward the practice of democracy, and the challenge that faces a democratic people if it is truly bent upon self-government.
The phrase public politics , which this book has adopted in its title, is itself a commonly and variously used coinage of David Mathews. It suggests that the public, a community of citizens, has its own way of “doing politics.” At its best, that way is deliberative: a way of weighing the likely outcomes of different courses of action, undertaken to cope collectively with shared community or national problems. “Come let us reason together!” This little volume is about citizens reasoning together, that they may live together more harmoniously and more productively, therefore.
I.
A MIDST V ALUES AND I NTERESTS … F INDING A P UBLIC V OICE
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AT AN INFORMAL LUNCHEON at the White House early in 1975, the late Walt