Program on Deliberative Democracy and
Local Governance

This new ISPS initiative is refining methods for bringing the voices of “ordinary” citizens into the public arena and studying what happens when they deliberate together. At a time when opportunities for citizens to engage across their differences are increasingly rare and increasingly important, ISPS is designing and managing local civic deliberations, in Yale’s home city and in communities across the country. The program, being developed by Cynthia Farrar in collaboration with the director of ISPS, Donald Green, is intended to enrich both the practice and the understanding of deliberation and democracy. Three major projects are currently underway: the New Haven-based “Citizens Forum,” the "Hill Neighborhood Forum," and the national By the People project.

The method of public consultation being developed and refined by ISPS in collaboration with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy, and local partners in New Haven and across the country, is an adaptation of Deliberative Polling™, pioneered by James Fishkin of Stanford (http://cdd.stanford.edu/). This process offers insight into what citizens would think about a specific public policy issue if they had an opportunity to better inform themselves and to reflect on the alternatives.

The distinctive features of the process include random selection, the balanced, structured, and nonpartisan character of the discussion, and documentation of participants’ views after they have had an opportunity to consider varied perspectives. A microcosm of the relevant region is randomly invited and paid to participate in discussion about the issues. After reading balanced briefing materials, questioning experts representing a range of perspectives, and engaging in moderated small-group discussion with their peers, participants are polled on the issues they have discussed. No attempt is made to promote a specific agenda or to move participants toward consensus.

A TOOL FOR LOCAL GOVERNANCE

• Deliberations of this kind may be particularly useful on issues on which
  • Citizens tend to be uninformed
  • Understanding others’ perspectives is essential to clarity about what is at stake and about what kinds of trade-offs might be workable
  • Elected officials and policymakers are operating with received wisdom about what the public will support
  • Problems and solutions transcend political boundaries, e.g. sprawl, pollution, transportation, affordable housing.
• Promising contexts for applying and refining the model include
  • Consideration of regional land-use and fiscal policies that affect local development, including ‘smart-growth’ initiatives
  • Municipal planning, when leaders are seeking to engage a broader and less entrenched group of citizens in serious, informed reflection on the underlying principles and trade-offs involved in decisions about physical development, budgets, education, and other local challenges.
  • o Public consultation on utility investments and infrastructure (for more information, consult http://www.gldgrp.com/public_input/ and http://www.nspower.ca/DP/index.shtml)
  • Transportation strategy at the state level
• New Haven was the first community to explore the potential of this method as a tool for sustained civic engagement and local governance, by streamlining and repeating the process with different people each time and initiating a process for follow-up with participants and communication with elected officials and policymakers. By institutionalizing these events in local communities, it may be possible to alter what citizens expect of themselves and of their elected officials.
• The process of organizing the deliberations and sustaining participant involvement builds civic infrastructure at the local level: libraries, universities, broadcasting and the press, community foundations, traditional civic groups and new ones, extend their missions and their reach.

A FIELD EXPERIMENT

• Because participants are randomly assigned to discussion groups, each deliberation is an opportunity for an experiment about the causes of opinion change.
• Rigorous experimental designs can be implemented without interfering with the civic character of the events.
• The term “field experiment” refers to fully-randomized research designs in which observations in a naturalistic setting are assigned treatment and control conditions. (http://www.yale.edu/isps/experimental/)

CURRENT PROJECTS

Citizens Forum

The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the League of Women Voters of Connecticut, and ISPS have partnered to convene three regional deliberations in Greater New Haven (plus a Deliberation Day event – see below). By streamlining and adapting the Deliberative Poll™ model, the Forum has made a new kind of public consultation tool available for use in various local and state contexts.

These “Citizens Forums” mark the first time that one community has committed to repeated deliberations of this kind, using the deliberative polling process to engage and inform its citizenry. The citizens participating in these events have discussed topics ranging from regional tax-sharing and the financing of public schools to the future of the local airport and how best to deal with overcrowding in state prisons. Citizens Forum participants have also engaged in follow-up activities such as meeting with local elected officials and involving others in ongoing discussions.

The impact of the Forum has been broad:

• Participants: they make connections across differences and learn about and become engaged in issues they have not previously considered.
• Ongoing civic engagement: through follow-up meetings with local elected officials and advocacy groups.
• Connections with elected officials and policymakers: elected officials (both local and state) and key policymakers have been involved in the planning process, observed the event, and met with participants.
• Reaching the general public: extensive press coverage has increased the visibility of the Citizens Forum; turnout has increased.
• Dissemination and discussion of issues and results: the survey results and information about the approach have been distributed to elected officials, policymakers, and civic groups. Participants themselves have also met with their elected officials to discuss these issues.
• Strengthening partnerships: the Forum expands the range of voices being heard in policy discussions and enables local advocacy groups, associations, and institutions to assume a broader civic role

Additional survey results on the financing of local services are available here.

For more information, please visit the Community Foundation’s website at www.cfngh.org. Click the “Citizens Forum” link on the right side of the home-page for additional survey results, press coverage, and program details.

Hill Neighborhood Forum

In 2005, ISPS worked with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to adapt the Forum concept to the needs of a specific neighborhood. The Hill Neighborhood Forum was organized to help launch the Community Foundation’s Urban Neighborhoods Initiative.  The Foundation wished to consult a cross-section of residents of the Hill neighborhood in New Haven about their vision of what investment in the neighborhood might achieve. The Hill Neighborhood Forum has also served to galvanize ongoing community engagement and to build resident leadership.

Hill residents were randomly invited to the Forum, through a process of door to door recruitment (rather than the random-digit-dialing used for the regional Forums).  They were paid $50 for attendance at the first event, and an additional $150 if they returned to the second one.  Virtually all of those who came to the first event attended both.  Youth related to Forum participants were invited to attend the second session, and were paid $50.  Participants received a background document before the first event, and between the two sessions.  The Forums took place on June 25th and July 16th.  The first Saturday discussion focused on "what is going on in the Hill" and on the second Saturday, participants identified a specific project that they could work on with the Foundation and other partners.  Participants expressed a desire to create a family resource center and to increase opportunities for youth, with particular emphasis on job readiness. 

Since the summer, a group of Forum participants have been serving on a Workgroup to begin the planning process for these initiatives. As of December 2005, they are preparing to hire a community networker and a communications assistant to begin to mobilize volunteers to address the youth issues and to work with local funders and organizations to plan a family resource center.

For further information, contact Ana Arroyo of the Community Foundation, aarroyo@cfgnh.org or Cynthia Farrar of ISPS, Cynthia.farrar@yale.edu.

A preview of the first event, and a summary of what occurred at each session of the Hill Neighborhood Forum can be found in the following newsletters, which were distributed to all participants:

Hill Neighborhood Forum

Hill Neighborhood Forum News, Volume 1 Number 2

Hill Neighborhood Forum News, Volume 1, Number 3

By the People

ISPS has partnered with MacNeil/Lehrer Production’s By the People project to help local civic coalitions convene deliberations on the topic of “America’s role in the World” in collaboration with local public broadcasting. Two sets of deliberations have occurred: ten in January 2004 and another seventeen in October 2004 (including 7 of the original 10). The topics in both rounds were national security and the global economy; in October, the economic issue was framed as a question about American jobs, and a number of sites provided a local framework for the discussion. Held three weeks before the presidential elections, PBS Deliberation Day enabled citizens to move past horse-race politics and talk about what was really at stake in the elections. As one Idaho participant noted, the discussion "…left us with a sense that we could respectfully disagree, while cultivating a broader awareness of the impact of this election.” Local public broadcasting and print media provided extensive coverage of both phases; and Jim Lehrer hosted prime-time specials both in January and in October.

With this template for invigorated civic dialogue, these activities and partnership relationships are being redirected to other issues on the community’s agenda. Examples include Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Public Square, the Voice of the Voter in Rochester, Leadership Lincoln in Nebraska, and the Citizens Forum in New Haven.

The By the People project will continue in 2005 and beyond, with a greater emphasis on locally-salient issues with national resonance and global implications. ISPS will be working with By the People to consolidate a local/national infrastructure for broader and sustained civic engagement.

For more information, please consult the By the People website at www.by-the-people.org.

PUBLICATIONS

Deliberation Day by Yale professor Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin (excerpts available at http://www.citsov.org/)

“Deliberative Polling: from Experiment to Community Resource.” James Fishkin and Cynthia Farrar chapter in The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty- First Century, John Gastil and Peter Levine, eds.

For additional information about any aspect of this ISPS program, contact Cynthia Farrar at cynthia.farrar@yale.edu or 203-432-4070.