Active or Independent Deliberation

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 11.7

I have been using the term “deliberation” to refer to the active give-and take process. However, in English, the word “deliberation” also has a second meaning. Rather than requiring a give and take of arguments between people, deliberation can refer to an internal thought process, as in deliberating with oneself. Professor John Anthony Garry of Queens University in Northern Ireland and his colleagues, in describing a theoretical sortition system named “randomocracy,” refers to this as “imaginative deliberation.” But even if participants take no part in giving arguments, it is still essential that they be presented with competing views in order to develop informed preferences. As suggested by the argumentative theory of reasoning, it is our ability to detect flaws in other people’s competing arguments where we as humans do best.

While active give-and-take deliberation within a diverse representative group has the potential for finding consensual win-win policies in the common interest, this is certainly not assured. There is a possibility of the group dividing into polarized factions, on one hand, and there is also a significant danger of succumbing to information cascades, and groupthink on the other. A consensus may be the result of a problematic groupthink dynamic that results in a policy, which no other mini-public, or the community at large, would find desirable.

Irving Janis, published the first in-depth articles on “groupthink” in the early 1970s, which included an analysis of decision-making dynamics during such events as the Kennedy administration Bay of Pigs fiasco. Janis noted that the term “groupthink" (with a tip of the hat to George Orwell and his neologisms in his novel 1984, such as “goodthink” and “doublethink”) refers to the

“development of group norms that bolster morale at the expense of critical thinking."  [And arise when participants are] "motivated to avoid being too harsh in their judgments of their leaders’, or their colleagues' ideas. They adopt a soft line of criticism, even in their own thinking. At their meetings, all the members are amiable and seek complete concurrence on every important issue, with no bickering or conflict to spoil the cozy, ‘we-feeling’ atmosphere."

This sounds worryingly like the cultural norm that could be generated within a citizens’ assembly (depending on process and facilitation). The mere fact that the participants and facilitators feel good about the work they have done, should not be taken at face value. 

Janis proposed several procedures to minimize the risk of groupthink.  He proposed nondirective group leadership, encouragement of dissent (rather than mere toleration), and breaking discussion into separate sub-groups, to see if they all come to similar conclusions. Thankfully, all of these have become fairly standard in citizens’ assemblies, though some facilitators may elevate the search for consensus above the importance of dissent. Note that these desirable features are contrary to the fundamental character of political parties in electoral systems, which typically develop policy proposals with strong leaders and relatively like-minded partisans.

As mentioned previously, in pseudo-deliberative bodies, such as Congress, there is no interest whatsoever in adopting a good deliberative process. What passes for debate is actually performance and declaration of in-group solidarity in preparation for the next election, rather than an attempt to inform or learn from each other and find common ground. Disinterest in good deliberative process is also typical in multi-party electoral systems. There is substantial negotiation between party leaders, centered around power. They negotiate over the formation of a coalition government, or on a particular policy – but this is almost never a deliberative process. Different countries, and different political parties within them, have a variety of internal processes, but these negotiations are not deliberative, and rarely, if ever, occur in the legislative chamber itself, among the “back benchers,” or ostensible “representatives.” The crafting of draft legislation is done within political parties, which gather people who think similarly, with a narrow diversity of opinion, forfeiting collective intelligence.

Although good process can reduce the risk of groupthink, the search for consensus and community spirit, in citizens’ assemblies, as well as any inaccuracy of a stratified sample in creating a fully representative group, means that groupthink is always a risk. As I proposed above (and in various other published works) a good approach to this problem is to use the “check and balance” of a sequential process. One mini-public employs active deliberation (using collective intelligence) for crafting proposals, and an independent jury (using the wisdom of crowds) judges the product of the first mini-public. 

Note that the function of lottery selection is actually somewhat different for a proposal drafting citizens’ assembly than for a final adoption jury. The drafting phase is best tackled by somewhat smaller bodies to allow all-to-all communication, and to use collective intelligence through active deliberation, particularly benefits from diversity. However, since this body is not making any final decision about adopting their proposal, the accuracy of their representativeness is less crucial, and approximate may suffice. This initial body will need to serve for a substantial term (e.g. numerous weekends, perhaps for months). But the final adoption body, using independent assessment of pro and con arguments, can be substantially larger, since they do not need to engage in all-to-all communication, but only listen. This larger second body may serve for a very short term, but must be accurately representative to earn legitimacy. So for the first body, lotteries enhance diversity, and for the second, representativeness, and for both, protection against self-selection special interest, and corruption. 

I will examine the historic recognition of this distinction between active and internal deliberation for lawmaking in the next post.