Is Telling Stories Good for Democracy? Rhetoric in Public Deliberation after 9/11

Abstract

This article develops a sociological perspective on the rhetorical conditions for good public deliberation, a topic of longstanding interest to scholars of the public sphere. The authors argue that the capacity of reason-giving, storytelling, and other rhetorical genres to foster deliberation depends on social conventions of the genre's use and popular beliefs about its credibility relative to other genres. Such beliefs are structured but contingently so: concerns about the generalizability of personal stories or the abstraction of logical arguments come into play on some occasions and not others. The authors appraise this argument by way of a systematic comparison of personal storytelling and reason-giving in public deliberation, the first such empirical study. Drawing upon an analysis of 1,415 claims made by 263 people in 12 discussion groups, the authors show that ordinary conventions of storytelling helped deliberators to identify their own preferences, demonstrate their appreciation of competing preferences, advance unfamiliar views, and reach areas of unanticipated agreement. The ambivalence, however, with which participants generally viewed storytelling as a rhetorical form restricted personal stories to discussions that were seen as without impact on the policymaking process. More broadly, by drawing attention to the evaluative structures through which people's use of cultural forms is differentially assessed, the authors provide an alternative to both instrumentalist and structuralist approaches to culture.