Page 49 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Community Conversations can reflect a practice that operationalizes group development theories

and enlivens concepts. I will describe some processes and review results from those interactions.

Research Questions in Participatory and Deliberative Practice

For all the recent discussion on the virtues and vices of public deliberation, surprisingly

little attention has been given to how deliberative procedures actually operate in different contexts.

Over the past 30 years, the practice of participatory civic engagement has grown in popularity as

a tool for helping citizens address locally based concerns and determining appropriate courses of

action. During that period, scholars have investigated deliberation and deliberative democracy for

its conditions, purposes, and features as a civic approach for broad-based public interaction.

Deliberative democracy recognizes a conflict of interest between the citizen participating, those

affected or victimized by the process being undertaken, and the group-entity that organizes the

decision. Thus, it usually involves an extensive outreach effort to include marginalized, isolated,

ignored groups in decisions, and to extensively document dissent, grounds for dissent, and future

predictions of consequences of actions. It focuses as much on the process as the results. In this

form its very involved as a complete theory of civics. (Brennan 2017 p.98)

On the other hand, many practitioners of deliberative democracy attempt to be as neutral

and open-ended as possible, inviting (or even randomly selecting) people who represent a wide

range of views and providing them with balanced materials to guide their discussions. Examples

include National Issues Forums, the Millennium Action Project (that I am participating in),

Choices for the 21st Century, the Citizens' Initiative Review, and the 21st-century town meetings

convened by AmericaSpeaks, among other study groups, deliberative opinion polls, etc. mentioned

earlier that are organized with national leadership. In most of these causes, deliberative democracy

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