Seeing is believing when it comes to deliberation

Last month, the Deliberative Democracy consortium published a study on Bridging the Gap between officials and the public in engagement. The research consisted of interviews with lawmakers in the US to establish what they want from public deliberation and how it can work for their purposes. The research highlighted many useful pointers on how to design dialogue that has influence, but one finding in particular stuck out. The research found that the majority of lawmakers interviewed:

did not know what public deliberation was and, even after explanation, had trouble understanding how this approach differs from what they already do to engage their constituents... Perhaps most interesting was the sheer scepticism lawmakers expressed about the feasibility of deliberation. [They] generally did not believe public deliberation is possible.

The power of personally experiencing dialogue has been noted before. The evaluation of Sciencewise-ERC, which was published earlier this year, remarked ‘there is particular value for policy makers when they hear public views in person so they see, hear and feel the strength of public views on particular issues’. The evaluation also found that experiencing dialogue was very effective in overcoming scepticism among participants, who were generally keen to take part again.

The best way to convince someone of the value of participation, then, is to invite them to view it or even better, to take part. However, while there may be no real substitute for sitting in the room where dialogue is taking place, are there other ways to imitate this experience which can communicate dialogue effectively? For policy makers, could short YouTube videos of small group discussions be produced alongside dialogue reports of policy recommendations? Or, are there ways to bring dialogue to areas where more people are touched and influenced by it? Some work has already been done looking at ways of taking various forms of dialogue to the streets, such as Talkaoke, a ‘mobile talk show’, which initiates participant-led discussions in public spaces and as used by Sciencewise-ERC at events with the Science Museum in 2011, or Street Talk, which last year ran deliberation on street corners on the topic of body donation. However it is done, the evidence to date suggests that attempts to explain dialogue will be less influential than initiatives that are able to demonstrate it in action.