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Koch provided insight into conflict and its effect on dialogue and inquiry. Inquiry begins

to break down when participants behave in a way that impedes compliance with moral principles

and the environment is fixed or inflexible, thereby limiting the opportunity to explore or reduce

the conflict (Koch, 1996). This awareness is useful to understanding the response to conflict within

a group setting and emphasizes the importance of creating the proper “Metasphere”. According to

Koch, moral principles are shared and agreed upon by participants, yet the shared method of

interaction he notes can be breached by factors such as “self-interest, fear, and the desire for

power” (p. 97). The instrumentalist perspective has a goal “to do something about, rather than be

satisfied to make a choice between a limited range of options and then have to defend it” (p. 99).

By viewing the role of coercion as a mechanism for attaining outcomes in democracies

through deliberation, Mansbridge (1996) has argued for an alternative approach, for the inclusion

of the term coercion to describe power by one or a group of individuals to influence an outcome

suggesting that scholars must acknowledge the relevance of coercion in addition to deliberation in

the democratic polity. Mansbridge’s study thus sheds light on the fact that coercion, at times, is

the only course of action in moving democracies forward, because, deliberation, in every instance,

does not necessarily lead to agreement. As Mansbridge (1996) asserted “Many of the best

contemporary political theorists have not faced squarely the role of conflicting interests, and

consequently of coercion, in any democratic polity” (p. 48).

Mansbridge presented varying levels of disagreement with theorists Arendt (1977), Wolin

(1996), Walzer (2002), and Habermas (1989), each of whom disagreed that coercion or power has

a role in democracy. Nevertheless, issues of coercion and power within civic engagement and

deliberative dialogue processes cannot be ignored, nor can the potential for these elements to

contribute to conflict and tension among participants. In developing her position about coercion

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