Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

Abstract

In this article, we argue that the C ultural T heory pioneered by M ary D ouglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or “minipublics”) that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use C ultural T heory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe J ohn D ryzek's and S imon N iemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how C ultural T heory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.