Deliberation Naturalized: Improving Real Existing Deliberative Democracy

"This is a book of political theory of an empirically informed sort. As I said at the outset, political theory historically was either the history of ideas, applied moral philosophy, or pompous poetry. Empirically informed political theory is a new-ish genre, and there’s a growing body of work of this sort that I think is worth watching. The normative starting point for Tanasoca’s book is the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas, who is a philosopher on the pompous-poetry end of the spectrum I was just talking about. When his discourse ethics got adopted by political theorists, they were trying to give it a more political angle: how would we actually use this in practice? How are we going to operationalize this – what sort of institutions should we set up? What do we need in deliberative systems to make them work the way that Habermas says they should? So they started thinking about things like: we need to get everybody in the same room. We need to get them informed, but not brainwashed – give them neutral facts that pretty much everybody agrees upon. We need to have a moderator in the room to make sure that everybody is engaged in respectful mutual dialogue. All this was in aid of trying to implement in the lab the discourse ethics that Habermas was talking about in his poetry. And activists, in turn, got really interested in this. They used these technologies that the political theorists were developing to advise on, and in some cases even make , public policy. They did these experiments in various ways. The first was a set of Citizens’ Juries . Those were about twenty people, modelled on a jury in a law court, and they were given one particular problem to solve – “Should we build a hospital here or there?”, that sort of thing. One was on abortion in Ireland, and one was on constitutional reform in British Columbia. A single topic, maybe a big-ish topic, but just one; a small number of people; and discussions, typically over a weekend. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but frankly, a whole weekend spent talking about one single topic? That’s more time than you’ve devoted in a stretch to any decision in your life, right? Jim Fishkin invented a model of 200 people in a Deliberative Poll. An organization called America Speaks scaled it up to 2000 people. But even in these bigger events, the deliberation actually happened at tables of 20 people or fewer. They all got together for lunch and for plenary speeches, but the real deliberative work was always at a 20-person table. These experiments had interesting results. They showed that people were better informed after the deliberation; that they stayed better informed; and that opinions changed as a result of deliberation, and stayed changed. People didn’t necessarily agree on what they should do, but they agreed on what they disagreed about, so it’s a better-structured conversation. These looked like interesting exercises that you should try to adopt more widely – to nationalize, if you could. But that’s the problem. How do you scale up these 20-person events to 200 million people? That’s the challenge. That’s where Tanasoca comes in. The scaling-up proposals that were on the table were not at all plausible. A lot of people had thought about trying online deliberation – at least we don’t have to pay the hotel bill of all the people that way – but everybody talking on one big chat? Who’s going to read all that? So another thought was, we can do it all online and use AI to moderate and summarize… It was starting to sound like fantasyland. Tanasoca said, forget it, you don’t need any of that stuff. It’s easy because it happens naturally in conversation across the entire community. Her crucial insight is built on network theory. It’s all about friends of friends – I know one person, that person knows another person, that person knows another person. Assuming the information flows back and forth across that network in both directions, without too much loss, then in a sense the first person is in conversation with the last person, indirectly. They get information about what he knows, but also about what his concerns and interests and sensitivities are – not in detail, but in a general way. This happens naturally all the time, without any interference. One sample calculation that I was struck by in Tanasoca’s book was that, given certain assumptions – and they’re not terribly heroic assumptions – it looks like everybody is networked sufficiently closely to 70% of other people in their society to get reliable information from them. (The key assumption is you’re all on Facebook, right? Everybody who’s on Facebook is just over three degrees of separation from each other, and information travels reliably, experiments show, across three degrees of separation. Once you get much beyond that, information loss kicks in.) If you’re in indirect contact with 70% of the people in the country, then it looks like the scaling-up problem has disappeared, or indeed was never there. Of course, any model of deliberation requires not just that you be in contact with all these other people, but also that you’re prepared to listen and take seriously what they say, and be sensitive to their interests and all that. Tanasoca’s deliberation needs to assume that too, but so does any model of deliberative democracy. She was just solving the scaling-up problem, and I think that was a good solution to it, and an interesting contribution. The book was distinctive among political theories of deliberation for its heavy reliance on empirical information. You need a lot of facts about networks and how information travels through networks, and how many people with diverse points of view there are in your network. Are you in a bubble, or are you open to at least some dissenting voices in your network? All these things are empirical facts, and crucial to the account that Tanasoca was giving. To her credit, she saw the need for facts and dug them out. She didn’t just speculate and say, “Let’s assume.” Yes, her book is an exercise in normative political philosophy as well as empirical political philosophy. She ends up with some recommendations for how to improve this real existing deliberation. There are suggestions for how to increase people’s exposure to other points of view, for getting people to discuss sensitive topics that ordinarily you might not talk about in public, and for avoiding mindless repetitions of things – people just hitting ‘like’ without having read the entry, or Russian bots doing the same. So in that way, it’s a complete book: it starts with the normative problem, it goes through the empirics, and it ends up with normative suggestions."