Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy
Diana C. Mutz
Last annotated on Friday September 1, 2017
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Hearing the Other Side Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy
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Drawing on her empirical work, Mutz concludes that it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.
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Preface
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1 1 Hearing the Other Side, in Theory and in Practice
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And despite the tremendous negative publicity that currently plagues American businesses, the American workplace is inadvertently performing an important public service simply by establishing a social context in which diverse groups of people are forced into daily interaction with one another.
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As I explain in subsequent chapters, my empirical work in this arena has led me to believe that there are fundamental incompatibilities between theories of participatory democracy and theories of deliberative democracy.
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Although diverse political networks foster a better understanding of multiple perspectives on issues and encourage political tolerance, they discourage political participation, particularly among those who are averse to conflict.
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it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one. The best social environment for cultivating political activism is one in which people are surrounded by those who agree with them, people who will reinforce the sense that their own political views are the only right and proper way to proceed.
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Studying a Moving Target
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Face-to-face discussions that cross lines of political difference are central to most conceptions of deliberative democracy.1 But many of the conditions necessary for approximating deliberative ideals such as Habermas’s “ideal speech situation”2 are unlikely to be realized in naturally occurring social contexts.3
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As Mansbridge notes, “Everyday talk, if not always deliberative, is nevertheless a crucial part of the full deliberative system.”
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Avoiding What’s Good for Use?
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“Religion and politics,” as the old saying goes, “should never be discussed in mixed company.”
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Political talk is now central to most current conceptions of how democracy functions.
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For example, Habermas’s “ideal speech situation” incorporates the assumption that exposure to dissimilar views will benefit the inhabitants of a public sphere by encouraging greater deliberation and reflection.
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Communitarian theorists further stress the importance of public discourse among people who are different from one another.
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Perhaps the most often cited proponent of communication across lines of difference is John Stuart Mill, who pointed out how a lack of contact with oppositional viewpoints diminishes the prospects for a public sphere:
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Likewise, Habermas assumes that exposure to dissimilar views will benefit the inhabitants of a public sphere by encouraging greater interpersonal deliberation and intrapersonal reflection.
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According to Arendt, exposure to conflicting political views also plays an integral role in encouraging “enlarged mentality,” that is, the capacity to form an opinion “by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent. . . .
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“Hence discussion rather than private deliberation would be necessary to ‘put on the table’ the various reasons and arguments that different individuals had in mind, and thus to ensure that no one could see the end result as arbitrary rather than reasonable and justifiable, even if not what he or she happened to see as most justifiable.”
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Social network studies have long suggested that likes talk to likes; in other words, people tend to selectively expose themselves to people who do not challenge their view of the world.
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What Is Meant by Diversity? Some Definitional Issues
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For purposes of this book, I use the term network to refer specifically to the people with whom a given person communicates on a direct, one-to-one basis.
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But consider diversity–heterogeneity in the form that Robert Ezra Park first ascribed it to cities: “a mosaic of little worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.”
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As sociologist Claude Fischer suggests, “As the society becomes more diverse, the individuals’ own social networks become less diverse. More than ever, perhaps, the child of an affluent professional family may live, learn, and play with only similar children;
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As discussed in Chapter 2, relatively few people think explicitly about the political climate when choosing a place to live, but lifestyle choices may serve as surrogates for political views, producing a similar end result.
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A Departure from Studying Political Preferences
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When those of dissimilar views interact, conformity pressures are argued to encourage those holding minority viewpoints to adopt the prevailing attitude. When those of like mind come together, the feared outcome is polarization: that is, people within homogeneous networks may be reinforced so that they hold the same viewpoints, only more strongly.
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Solomon Asch, whose reputation was built on studying conformity and its perils, acknowledged the capacity for something beneficial, something other than social influence, to result from exposure to oppositional views: The other is capable of arousing in me a doubt that would otherwise not occur to me. The clash of views generates events of far-reaching importance.
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Acknowledging the legitimacy of oppositional arguments is warned against in a popular test preparation book: “What’s important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.”
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Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy?
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The thesis of this book is that theories of participatory democracy are in important ways inconsistent with theories of deliberative democracy. The best possible social environment for purposes of either one of these two goals would naturally undermine the other.
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Like the cover of this book, the pinnacle of participatory democracy was, to my mind, a throng of highly politically active citizens carrying signs, shouting slogans, and cheering on the speeches of their political leaders.
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This was participatory democracy as I had known it. There was a level of enthusiasm and passion borne of shared purpose, and a camaraderie that emerged from the sheer amount of time spent together.
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it was politics as a way of life, to paraphrase Dewey.
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These partisans could easily be admired for their political knowledge and their activism, but they would be rather like what John Stuart Mill called “one eyed men,” that is, people whose perspectives were partial and thus inevitably somewhat narrow. As Mill acknowledged, “If they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of enquiry.”
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Could deliberation and participation really be part and parcel of the same goal? Would the same kind of social and political environment conducive to diverse political networks also promote participation? The chapters that follow attempt to answer these questions.
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2 Encountering Mixed Political Company With Whom and in What Context?
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political discussants tend more toward political agreement than disagreement.
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SI DISCUTE TRA SIMILI
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Not surprisingly, political discussion becomes more frequent as relationships become more intimate.
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Nonwhites are significantly more likely to engage in cross-cutting political conversation than whites. And as income increases, the frequency of disagreeable conversations declines. Exposure to disagreement is highest among those who have completed less than a high school
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As shown in Figure 2.4, those most knowledgeable about and interested in politics are not the people most exposed to oppositional political viewpoints.
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cross-cutting political networks are more common among political moderates.
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the homogeneity of the network reinforces those same views.
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Those highest in voluntary association memberships are least likely to report cross-cutting political conversations.
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So long as people are encouraged to have bigger networks, the promise of cross-cutting exposure will be fulfilled, at least so the argument goes.
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The number of like-minded discussants increases with network size to an even greater degree, from .61 to 2.41, that is, by 1.80.
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Finally, the line marked by triangles in Figure 2.8 illustrates the ratio of agreeable to disagreeable discussants, again by network size. Here the extent of agreement climbs steeply from one- to two-discussant networks, the opposite of the model prediction, then declines back to initial levels with networks of size three, and further toward heterogeneity at size four.
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Environments are traditionally understood as external, exogenous factors that impose constraints on people’s ability to exercise selectivity: “Contexts are structurally imposed, whereas networks are individually constructed.”
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According to this indicator, the United States is similar to Italy and Greece on the basis of the top panel of Figure 2.10. In all three countries just under 60 percent of respondents report a partisan first discussant, that is, one who is known to favor a candidate or party.
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The heterogeneity of a person’s network is not even a positive function of his or her amount of political conversation more generally.
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3 Benefits of Hearing the Other Side
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Theorists extol the virtues of political talk, foundations spend millions of dollars to encourage people of opposing views to talk
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There are obviously dozens of empirically testable hypotheses embedded in the assertions of deliberative theory. Unfortunately existing survey data provide few opportunities to test them.
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Communication environments that expose people to non–like-minded political views were hypothesized to promote (1) greater awareness of rationales for one’s own viewpoints, (2) greater awareness of rationales for oppositional viewpoints, and (3) greater tolerance.
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Green, Visser, and Tetlock
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studies unambiguously demonstrate that contact reduces prejudice, but not surprisingly, prejudice also lessens the amount of intergroup contact people have outside the laboratory.
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people who have had to learn how to “agree to disagree” in their daily lives better understand the need to do so as a matter of public policy.
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the extent of interpersonal contact across lines of religion, race, social class, culture, and nationality has been found to predict nonprejudicial attitudes toward groups not involved in the contact,
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quite a few empirical relationships have been attributed to exposure to non–like-minded political perspectives.
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The extent to which people are exposed to differing views also has been invoked in explanations for why women tend to be less tolerant than men, and why those in urban environments are more tolerant than those in rural areas.
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Figure 3.1 illustrates this proposed chain of events whereby exposure to people of differing political views increases awareness of rationales for differing viewpoints and thus increases political tolerance. This link is further supported by theorists such as Mead and Piaget
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As shown in Figure 3.2, the number of rationales that people could give for their own positions were, not surprisingly, significantly higher than those they could give for opposing views.
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Effects on Awareness of Rationales for Own and Oppositional Views
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counter to what theorists such as Mill have proposed, there was no compelling evidence that exposure to non–like-minded views had an impact on awareness of rationales for people’s own political perspectives.
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exposure to oppositional viewpoints significantly increases awareness of legitimate rationales for opposing views.
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As shown in Figure 3.4, people who have a civil orientation toward conflict are particularly likely to benefit from exposure to non–like-minded views.
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As shown in Figure 3.5, the size of the cognitive and affective effects on tolerance was modest, and the two effects were very similar in size. But together they produced a sizable effect on tolerance. If one generally perceives those opposed to one’s own views to have some legitimate, if not compelling reasons for being so, then one will be more likely to extend the rights of speech, assembly, and so forth, to disliked groups.
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As Figure 3.6 shows, among those high in perspective-taking ability, mean levels of tolerance were higher when subjects were exposed to rationales for oppositional views. However, among those low in perspective-taking ability, tolerance levels were lower when subjects were exposed to oppositional views.
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Does the composition of people’s social networks have meaningful consequences for political tolerance and democratic legitimacy? My answer to this question is yes, on the basis of evidence to date. Although these findings do not support the argument that more deliberation per se is what American politics needs most, the findings lend supporting evidence to claims about the benefits of one central tenet of deliberative theory: that the perspectives people advocate when they talk about politics must be contested.
CONCLUSIONI
4 The Dark Side of Mixed Political Company
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plenty of evidence points to the potential for negative outcomes as a result of communication
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Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, who argue in Stealth Democracy that deliberation is either bad for, or, at the very least, not beneficial for democracy.1 They base their argument on evidence from voluntary associations and from planned deliberative events in which diverse people are brought together to interact, with the goal of reaching consensus. Consistent with my findings, they suggest that voluntary groups tend to avoid potentially controversial topics in favor of more practical tasks,
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I dislike arguments with my husband, but I cannot, as a consequence, claim we would be better off not having them.
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But the “dark side” I mention in the chapter title is not about failed cross-cutting interactions; instead it refers to situations in which cross-cutting exposure succeeds in making people more aware of oppositional views.
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Failure through Success: The Political Costs of Mixed Company
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theories hint at the potential drawbacks of cross-cutting exposure for one democratic outcome in particular – political participation.
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“cross-pressures.”
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Lazarsfeld
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The People’s Choice was the first study to suggest that conflicts and inconsistencies among the factors influencing an individual’s vote decision had implications for political participation:
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“vacillation, apathy, and loss of interest in conflict-laden issues.”
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Although most research attention was focused on the instability of voting choices in cross-pressured groups, some researchers also observed that cross-pressured voters tended to make later political decisions and tended to express lower levels of political interest than those in more homogeneously supportive social environments.
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Whatever Happened to Cross-Pressures?
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By declaring themselves outside or “above” politics, people avoid taking potentially controversial positions, avoid pressure from those who might attempt to change their minds, and, most importantly, they help to preserve social harmony.
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To Be or Not to Be Ambivalent?
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First, political inaction could be induced by the ambivalence that cross-cutting exposure is likely to engender within an individual.
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Ambivalence also has been tied to having more balanced or even-handed judgments about political issues.43 For example, simultaneous awareness of conflicting considerations
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Social Accountability: Political Action versus Chickening Out
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Social accountability may also play a powerful role. In my own social environment, I have become increasingly aware of potentially offending others through even relatively innocuous political actions such as the display of bumper stickers.
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New Evidence for an Old Theory
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Figure 4.2 summarizes the strength of the relationship between cross-cutting exposure and the likelihood of voting in presidential and congressional elections,
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But Why Do Cross-Pressures Matter?
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How can we tell whether it is ambivalence driving people’s avoidance of politics or a desire to maintain smooth social relationships with others?
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This pattern provides strong evidence that for many people avoiding political involvement is a means of avoiding interpersonal conflict and controversy.
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When the analysis takes into account both ambivalence and social accountability, cross-cutting exposure no longer has any significant effects on participation. This finding suggests that collectively these two theories do a good job of accounting for the sum total of effects
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Social Accountability in Public and Private Participation
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one surprising pattern of results is that the size and strength of effects from cross-cutting exposure appear to be independent of whether the political act itself is private, as is the act of voting, as opposed to more public types of political acts.
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The results in this chapter suggest that people entrenched in politically heterogeneous social networks retreat from political activity mainly out of a desire to avoid putting their social relationships at risk. This interpretation is supported by the fact that it is those who are conflict avoidant, in particular, who are most likely to respond negatively to cross-cutting exposure
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Tragedy or Triumph?
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Most would not chastise citizens for backing off from political participation because they are ambivalent toward candidates or policy positions. Few would blame citizens for their lack of decisiveness
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On the other hand, political withdrawal caused by a fear of the possible responses of others in one’s social environment will strike most as more problematic in terms of what it says about American political culture.
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It is difficult to fault citizens for valuing smooth social interactions and wanting to get along with diverse others on a day to day basis. Because political interactions evoke anxieties and sometimes threaten social bonds,
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Americans have evolved a means of maintaining social harmony across lines of political difference by relegating their desires to have their own way, and their right to speak their own minds, to secondary status.
UN VALORE SOCIALE PERSEGUITO CON LA NON MILITAMZA
