Norms of Deliberation: An Inductive Study

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.