No abstract

Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists over the last twenty years. Many scholars in political behavior, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue (inter alia) that most people dislike politics, and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large, representative samples investigating people's hypothetical willingness to deliberate and their actual behavior in response to a real invitation to deliberate with their member of Congress, we find: 1) that willingness to deliberate in the U.S. is much more widespread than expected; and 2) that it is precisely people who are less likely to participate in traditional partisan politics who are most interested in deliberative participation. They are attracted to such participation as a partial alternative to "politics as usual." 1 Deliberative democracy has entered a kind of adolescence. Many of the broad questions emerging from its infancy have been explored extensively, so that we know much more about both deliberation's potential and its limits than we did a decade ago. That being said, the future is still quite open, especially in matters of how deliberation can work in practice. There are still purely theoretical questions remaining, to be sure, but many of the big advances in our understanding of deliberation are likely to come through carefully aligning normative and empirical inquiry in a way that allows the two to speak to each other in mutually interpretable terms (Thompson, 2008: 16; Neblo, 2005: 170).In that spirit, we propose to start at the beginning: rather than focusing on the content of applied deliberation, we analyze who is willing to engage in deliberation in the first place. We pose the question as "Who is willing to deliberate?" rather than simply "Who deliberates?" 1 Our question is pertinent since some deliberative democrats claim that people would deliberate more if we gave them better opportunities. Cook et. al. (2007: 33), for example, found that "85% of those who said they had not attended a meeting to discuss public issues reported they had never been invited to do so." Many scholars of political behavior are skeptical that more opportunities will make a difference, believing that people simply do not want to deliberate (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002). If the deliberative democrats are right, however, then the two questions are crucially distinct: current patterns of deliberation do not necessarily reflect how citizens would participate given more attractive opportunities. Thus we broaden our focus beyond current levels of deliberation in the mass public, and the characteristics of those who already engage in it without being offered novel opportunities. We expand our inquiry to systematically investigate people's willingness to deliberate under varying conditions. We directly asked respondents how interested they would be in 1 "Who Deliberates?" is the title of two important pieces of...

Competing interests: A.Fu. serves on the Board of Directors of Common Cause and Everyday Democracy and is an occasional consultant to Apple.

No abstract

No abstract