Norms of Deliberation: An Inductive Study

TLDR

Deliberation theory has traditionally been derived from abstract principles of rationality, liberty, and equality, but critics have argued that this neglects the experiences of marginalized groups, prompting contemporary theorists to broaden and reframe these principles, yet the field still lacks direct input from practitioners. The authors aim to fill this gap by adopting an inductive approach that mines observations from facilitators of small‑group deliberations on public issues to uncover explicit and implicit deliberative norms. They collected and analyzed facilitator observations from small‑group deliberations, using inductive mining to identify normative patterns. The identified norms differ in several respects from those derived solely from abstract principles or from generalized experiences of marginalized groups.

Abstract

Writers on the practice of deliberation usually take their cues about what deliberation ought to be from the theoretical literature, sometimes adding elements from their own experience. Until recently, that theoretical literature deductively derived its ideal conception of deliberation from the abstract principles of rationality, liberty, and equality. Then critics of the early stream of theorizing drew from experience and past work on the position of minorities and oppressed groups to fault the early theorists for proposing ideals that, when put into practice, were likely to exclude or marginalize members of disadvantaged groups. More recently, in response to these critiques, contemporary deliberative theorists have broadened and reframed some of these principles. Deliberative theory, however, remains relatively unleavened by the direct experience of deliberation practitioners. To address this problem, we have adopted the explicitly inductive method of mining the observations of facilitators of small-group deliberation on public issues for explicit and implicit deliberative norms. The results differ in several ways from the results of theory derived from abstract principles or the generalized experiences of marginalized groups.