November, 1999
Penn National Commission

"Discourse Programs"

Led by Jay Rosen, New York University

Ms. CAROLYN LUKENSMEYER: So the premise that we're taking is in all of American history, one of the extraordinary foundations of our democracy is small, face-to-face, authentic dialogue, the original New England town hall meeting. It has resonance. It touches people's spirit. They have pride in it. But the question becomes--or the challenge becomes you can't just replicate that in communities all over the country and hit the time cycle that the media demands or the time cycle that a congressional process demands.

So how do you take that nugget, that learning that is done so well by many different groups, and take what we have now been gifted with in the information age, all kinds of technologies that the premise was could take this to scale? So this is the imagination. Think of a map of the United States, 10 cities--Boston, Winston-Salem, Tallahassee; Lexington, Kentucky; Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Paul; Boise, Idaho; San Francisco; Albuquerque; Denver. In each of those cities, 200 demographically representative groups of citizens recruited by ch--their choice, but held to the--keep--keep the diversity that the community actually represents; the issue's Social Security, so the diversity is age, income, gender and ethnicity. Those of you know who know Social Security policy, those are very, very critical questions.

Citizens meet on Friday night in their communities for two hours. They are highly facilitated--this is a primary lesson. There has to be professional facilitation skills available. That's part of your chart. We need an enormous, massive influx of the capacity to do neutrally based, open-hearted, open-minded dialogue. That is not how we're taught to discourse, even in schools these days.

So citizens develop their position on Social Security or the issue they most care about having their national leaders hear about. They reconvene on Saturday for five hours, start with the president of the United States, Republican leadership available to them all on interactive, two-way satellite teleconferencing. Start with--and your image of the hourglass is wonderful. Part of where we are in this nation is people want that hourglass up-ended. People want that hourglass for the people to be on the top and the politics to be on the bottom.

In designing good citizen dialogue, you can do little bits of that, and you can do it in a way that's totally respectful of the politicians. The best ones get it and want more of it. It's part of how Bradley started trying to run his campaign. It's part of Hillary's listening process. Some politicians are getting: `We should stop broadcasting. We should listen.'

So the program was all 10 cities speak to the president and the Republican leadership. They have about a 20-minute dialogue. Leaders gone. We then open up, via two-way satellite television, a two-hour and 45-minute unscripted, spontaneous dialogue from citizens across these 10 cities. I look at Neal. One of the biggest learnings I had was how bloody hard it is to find an executive producer in television that will touch live television in 1999. Thank God we found some. But--so that--that took it to scale. That was 2,000 citizens demographically representative. We replicated this three times. In 15 months, we did almost 50,000 Americans, every walk of life, that dedicated six to eight hours of dialogue on Social Security. We--I haven't told you this story about how we did media and how we did polling. We built up real credibility in Congress.

So I know Mike will ask me this question if I don't say it at the front end: What difference did all of this make? There are four demonstrable outcomes in the work we did that if the--you could take the advocates--the special interest advocates, and if you have them on a panel, they would say exactly what I'm about to say. That could be Cato Institute. That could be Brookings, in terms of taking the liberal conservative. Americans discussed Social Security, and the way we did citizen engagement and did our polling changed the debate on the revenue side of the options in Social Security. Before we started in '98, there was no proposal on the table that had any revenue enhancements in it--none. Democrats wouldn't touch it because of the way Republicans own tax cuts.

By the time we finished our work--and very quickly, about 11 weeks in, we had an insight. Almost 70 percent of the American public supports raising the cap on the taxable wage base, and that is as true of Americans over $100,000 as it is--conventional wisdom in Washington. I was naive. When I first went to present this to Senate Finance and House and Ways, I got my head handed to me. They, `Oh, right, that's a soak the witch--rich strategy. Poor people want rich people to do that.' Not true. It is across the board in income.

Second impact we had was we set a different standard for the kind of polling that was done. We all know the game in Washington. News media are some of the worst offenders of this. They ask s--really, really irresponsible questions to get a quick read. We set a standard of push questions that were asked on Social Security, and frankly, some of the advocacy groups just stopped doing polling and used our question--used our polls, because people understood they were neutral.

I should--one of the most important lessons out of this, if we're going to do this on a national level, is whoever sponsors these dialogues, both from the citizens' point of view and from the Congress' point of view, has to be an honest neutral broker. There probably was a day in American democracy when government was the honest neutral broker who could pull all the parties to the table, but that day is gone.

So wh--whether it was Congress or citizens, one of the lessons out of this is absolute neutrality. ADSS said from the beginning, `We will never take a position on this issue.' It was a huge risk on our part. Didn't know if anyone in Congress would listen. Turned out to be our largest asset.

The other impact I want to describe that's like M--Mary was just saying, because we often use the wrong standards to evaluate this. One of the impacts that will probably get no visibility, but I personally think is the most imp--one of the most important things we did, 22 members of Congress took what we did seriously enough that they will never run a town hall meeting again the way they had been trained to run them. The way they'd been trained to run them is all experts up front, auditorium style, two mics; just like we're going to do to you today, panel takes 80 percent of the time, audience gets 20 percent of the time, and at best, what they get is a little Q&A.

Again, we upended the design, the architecture, room level playing field, round tables, citizens; congressman travels from table to table, has trained facilitators, listens to the input and then gives his or her summary and reaction rather than broadcasting at citizens. I think that's an incredibly important outcome.

JAY: You have to wind it up.

Ms. LUKENSMEYER: There's some others if they come up in questions. The key learnings, beyond the couple that I said. A couple myths that I think ca--can just so easily have been exploded, and if you listened carefully, Martha and Mary both said this already, but I'll say it again. It is nonsense that American citizens are apathy--apathetic about the policy issues that impact their daily lives. They're not invited in, in a way that means anything in their judgment. We did 50,000 people. I mean, think about that. And it was just a broad outreach to communities, and it wasn't busloads of people from AARP or busloads of people from labor. It was average Americans who cared about the issue. So it is--we are--any time we excuse ourselves by saying, `This isn't happening in America because Americans are apathetic,' we're putting the challenge on the wrong side of the agenda. We are not designing, we are not structuring, and we are not linking to the institutional fabric that makes the decision.

I've segued into second: Don't start these dialogues unless they have respect and link to the people who make the decisions at the front end. We've gone so far in America around the cynicism and skepticism that we do people a disservice to once more invite them to the table to talk unless there's a link to people who can do something about it. So one of the huge challenges here--and I hope this becomes part of the public talk--is increasing the readiness in our institutional fabric--its universities, its corporations, its the--institutional church--to take seriously citizen voice. And that is as much true as it is government and the media.

I look at Kathleen. A real surprising learning to me out of this process of listening to literally tens of thousands of citizens for 18 months, citizens at this moment in time in this country feel more disempowered about the media than they feel disempowered about government. And that--there's a depth to that. When you listen to them carefully, that is very important to help retrain them; that you can call your local television station, you can put demands on a--the way the newspaper covers school issues. They do not believe that, and they do not believe that even more than they believe it about government.

JAY: OK.

Ms. LUKENSMEYER: One other lesson and then I know I have to...

JAY: You have to wind it up.

Ms. LUKENSMEYER: O--one other lesson. Another what I would call myth is that good dialogue does not make good television. It doesn't make plot. It'll never be commercial. It'll never be entertainment. But I can give you the case studies in at least five states that have sophisticated television networks. Wash--WTV in the state of Washington's the most impressive. They did our 750-person event, six hours live, all day long. In our e-mail and voice-mail, we had 1,000 requests for information as a result of people who watched television that day. There is a way to do it. It takes a real combination of excellent live work that has a human element to it and good produced television in coordination, but it can be done. Thank you.

JAY: Thank you, Carolyn. Bob McKenzie.

Mr. ROBERT McKENZIE: Thank you, Jay. I want to say amen, amen, amen. There are some differences of emphasis in our work, some points where one of us is a little ahead of the other, perhaps, i--in what we're thinking about along the same scheme, but basically everything's been said, I have nothing to say but amen.

Let me say some things that maybe take a little bit different--give u--give us something else to think about. I need to say this about the Kettering Foundation that I work for. We are a research foundation, and our single research question is: What does it take to make democracy work? All of our effort is engaged on that.

Let me say just a little bit about what deliberation is. We talk generally about political discourse, but I use the term's in--specific meaning. Deliberation is a mode of discourse that is necessary to deal with differences of conviction, not mere differences of interest. It is a mode of discourse for making a decision together. I use the word `dialogue' to mean a mode of discourse for increasing understanding, but not necessarily making a decision, and I think that's a point you need to catch. And the difference between what Jane was talking about and what Martha and Carolyn and I a--tend to talk about, most of our research is focused on deliberation, although we're learning more and more that there are areas where dialogue is what you really need to--to be aimed at, and--and the principle that Jane enunciated needs to be kept in mind.

I am going to, as I go through these quick remarks, give you the download links to the material at the back. I'll just hold up something that you can go back there and get and get more information, but you can get this for more information about the Kettering Foundation; this, too, for more information about the Kettering Foundation. For NIF, there's a little-bitty pamphlet. There are some examples of issue books for display only if you want to look at those.

Now let me say a word about the public policy institutes, because we--we think that is our effort to address a concern the PNC had in the advance reading material about the need for aggressive development of convenient moderating skills. And the points that Carolyn, Jane and Martha made are absolutely right on about ne--neutrality and structure and--and all of that and the context and the architecture of the room and all of that kind of thing. If you want to know more about the public policy institutes, pick up this publication. Most of the tw--current 27 are on campuses of institutions of higher education, but not all of them. One of them is right across the street, Harris Sokoloff at UPenn doing some amazing work. I was over there talking with him this morning about the next step in their Citizens Agenda work with The Inquirer and framing of issues.

OK. What did we learn? There are some things that--that we just have to keep reminding ourselves. These are not new learnings, but they're important to keep in your mind as you do this work. What does it take to make democracy work as it should? It takes citizens who know how to make hard choices together. That's mo--mostly what we've been talking about here. It takes a strong civil society. It takes, within that civil society, institutions that have the trust and respect of the citizens, and--and that's a real work problem. That's where Jay and I have come together i--our acquaintance has been around that question as it relates to the--to the journalism profession.

We have to recognize and keep reminding ourselves in our work that deliberative democracy is a recessive gene in the political makeup. It is easily overpowered by other ways of thinking about politics. But it's vital to our overall enduring political health, and those of us who are in this work stay at it even though we know we're swimming upstream.

Citizens--another thing we have to remember is that citizens, as a public in a democracy, have responsibilities that can be delegated to no one else. Y'all all recognize that as political science theory, but it's important to remember democracy requires citizens, and we have to build citizens. We also need to remember that deliberation is a natural act. We do it all the time, to make decisions as individuals and in small groups about choices. If we all decided we want to go out to eat together to--this afternoon--this evening, we would work through the pulls and tugs among things we value in life: cost, access and quality, which happen to be the same things you have to struggle with on health care. So it's--it's there, it's natural, we can do it, but we tend to forget that we know how to do that when we get into--into what we think is politics.

Now what have we learned? Anyone can deliberate. It doesn't depend upon level of factual expertise, which is something we academics need to remember. We're talking about facts, plus knowledge here; the--the meaning of facts in the context of what people hold valuable, and people are experts on what they hold valuable. Part of the framing is getting into that and tapping into--into that connection. Deliberation can occur at multiple scales. Most of the forums and study circles that--that I know of are less than 50 people, as David points out in his research, but I've been in a number of forums up into the hundreds. And communities can have numerous overlapping forums that involve larger numbers of the population, so it's not just a small group dynamic.

And the only distinction between what Martha and--not the only, but probably the major distinction between what Martha and I do is that she's emphasizing study circles, repetitive getting together. When I use the word `forums,' we're talking about one-time events, but we also have people who... (technical difficulties) ...agree with one another. Unless you work hard at what Martha works hard at, it's keeping that open and keeping it connected. Forums, if--if developed well, can have an impressive demographic range in people coming together, and--and you were giving examples of that. Of course, y'all di--y'all structured that somewhat.

And--OK, deliberation builds an engaged public, and there are kinds of issues that require an engaged pudgic--public. The issues that bedevil us--poverty, racism, educational failure, crime, the wad of concerns around environment land use, economic development, health in its broadest context--issues of that sort are systemic. They are not one time. They are not one jurisdiction. They are multiple locusts of--of--of--of trying to deal with them. Some of the literature in t--in--refers to them as wicked problems, not in the moral sense, but in the sense that y--that you can't know when you solve that. I mean, getting to the moon is a complex problem, but we know when we got there. Poverty, racism and crime are different, and--and they are different in that the very definition of the problem is part of the problem. Is poverty, for example, caused by failure of moral character, or is it h--environmental factors or what is it? It's--it's the assumption you make about the problem going in that's part of the problem to be discussed.

There is a logic of deliberative democracy can--that can address these kinds of issues. That is laid out in--in this publication. Very simply, it's: In order to act together, people have to choose together. There are powerful educational implications in that--in that simple sentence. In order to choose together, they have to think together. In order to think together, they have to talk together. And in order to talk together about differences of conviction, they have to deliberate. In order to deliberate, we've learned that they have to have certain things, and I may throw in a couple of things that have already been said. But they have to have public space, not only physical space but emotional and intellectual space to do their work. They have to have issues framed in terms relative to what they consider valuable, and that's the point Carolyn made.

And I think in our work, that may be where we're a little ahead of some of the other efforts in this, because we've put a lot of thought into what--how do you frame the issue? That's the quintessential political act, and that's what Harris is working on across the street. That's what a lot of our public policy institutes work with. It means framing issues in terms relative to what the people consider valuable, and that's not in a polarized fashion, and it's not in an ideological fashion. We think that is addressing the point that was brought up yesterday morning about the hole in framing the middle ground. Jay made that point, but we are doing more and more work in that area.

And they need guidelines for deliberation that allow people to learn together about all perspectives on a problem so that they can weigh strengths, weaknesses, cost and tradeoffs, and--and there's an art and a science to that. Here's a publication on convening and moderating, emphasizing neutrality and the other things.

Another thing we've learned is that deliberation produces public knowledge that can be obtained in no other way. I'm going to use our language here, and maybe we'll have time to develop it, but it--it reveals what people are thinking, not just what they think. It reveals the struggle among the tradeoffs, not just where I am on this question, that question, this question. And we've learned that public knowledge of that sort is particularly valuable to officeholders at critical points. And we're on--on the--in a nationwide search for officeholders who have some way of seeing the public a little differently than most do to see whether there's some connection there that we can work on.

At its best--I'm not saying the NIF does this all the time or that every forum or study circle does this, but at its best, NIF makes--and I'm quoting you--"national conversation localized, less abstract and more relevant. NIF makes service learning, both academic and civic." I could tell you s--stories about that. "NIF opens up a classroom and makes it a discourse community." I can tell you a lot of stories about that from my teaching days. Now we're exploring: What can it do for a campus? And here's a publication you might want to look at. Here's another publication you might want to look at back there.

What difference does it make? The--the summaries of the--what we've learned each year go into something called NIF Reports, which is a publication that tries to pull it together. We, too, are invited up to the Hill and--and to--to comment on--on what we're seeing about what the public is thinking. NIF makes relationship building part of decision-making. Those are not a step one, step two kind of thing. If you could experience the dynamics of what goes on in a forum or a good study circle or in the work Jane, Carolyn and I do, I think you can see both of those things happening. As people work toward a decision, they are building relationships with one another. And our moderators are taught to move the conversation toward a decision, and that is the common task concern that y'all had.

JAY: Bob, we have to wind it up.

Mr. McKENZIE: OK. I've got one last point. And--and I want to make it last because I want you to remember it. You know, the mind is a wonderful thing. It can be anywhere, but I'm hoping our minds and bodies are in the same place at this point. It's the political assumption you make about the work, and I've learned to ask people--they probably won't answer me honestly, but I say, `How do you view the public? Do you view the public as something that has to be educated or, even with the best of intentions, manipulated? Or do you see the public as a source of vital information for addressing an issue that requires public engagement, and do you see them as the primary actors in how that's going to be done?' I mean, who's going to solve poverty, racism and educational failure, crime and so forth? Thank you, Jay.

JAY: Thank you, Bob. Well, there you have it, the base of the triangle; meaning people, while working on the ground with citizens, trying to create better public discourse, and then somehow they are moving not only in their programs, but in their thought upward toward the general claim for deliberation and citizen engagement that we can make as philosophers and writers and academics.

So the heart of what we heard in their lessons are certain midrange principles that get you from a generalized desire for better public discourse down to what actually happens at communities and in real live citizen conversations? They have a set of midrange principles for us from that work, and I think they're extremely important for that reason.

David, on the far right of--of the table, looked at what they did in the context of the commission's work overall, which is what his 1999 paper is about and why it's been referred to so often here. So I want to just ask him to reflect on what he heard for the work of the commission based on the attempt to sketch an architecture d--in your paper.

Mr. DAVID RYFE: Thank you. I'll just take a very few minutes because these people are the experts. They've been doing this for a very long time, and you should have an opportunity to have a conversation with them. So I'll just take a--a couple of minutes.

But one thing I would say at the outset, in response, again, to Steve's presentation yesterday, is that the commission doesn't have to create a movement. A movement already exists. It exists in Jay's public journalism initiative. It exists in Fishkin's deliberative polling. It exists in all the range of activities that the panel is participating in. It's happening already. Perhaps the commission might be better served, instead of trying to create a movement, to facilitate one that's already being developed, to catalyze, perhaps provide some structure to what is often--may w--several of these people, all of whom have been doing the same kinds of work, haven't met one another before--bringing people together.

And I would also--i--i--if the commission's work is going to be rooted in the university, you might think about what kinds of unique resources a university has, particularly the research of its faculty, which, after all, a research one university--that's what it does. It produces research--what kinds of resources it has to add value to what these individuals are doing. So that--that's an initial comment.

One of the things I heard here and I hope that you heard is a kind of commonsense convin--common sense about public discourse that we often ignore, at least academics who study public discourse ignore, and that is different kinds of discourse will be effective in different contexts. Now, of course, that implies that we know something about what kinds of discourse will work in what contexts, and, unfortunately, we don't know much about that because there hasn't been a rigorous evaluation of these efforts.

The NIF's, as far as I know, are one of the oldest continuing discourse programs in the country. They've been going on since 1982. Most of these other initiatives have been going on only since the 1990s. So there really hasn't been--and they've become very successful in that time period, but there really hasn't been a movement, especially within the academy, to take a look at these programs and to see what they're actually doing.

There has been a few studies, and most of those studies are attitudinal studies. They give a survey at the beginning of a conversation. What do you think about these issues? And then they give a survey of the participants at the end of this conversation. What do you think of these issues? And if they can measure some change, they publicize that. The conversation must have had some effect in their attitudes. And that's certainly one issue that we'd like to think about, but I think that there are a lot of other issues that can be investigated, and this--in some ways, I hesitate to broadcast this, but this is a wide-open field, and I kind of want to keep it to myself now that I've discovered it. But--but, really, evaluation is a re--a wide-open field. There hasn't been a lot of work in this area, and--and there needs to be.

Now let me continue on with that thought by thinking through one hypothesis that might be--that might be investigated. One of the things I noticed in my observations about these programs, in relation to the principles of public discourse that I outlined in--in the literary review that you read last year, was that relational sorts of public discourse principles--by that, I mean things like moderation, reciprocity, speaking from one's own individual experience--these kinds of principles seem to be most appropriate or most used in smaller groups--sometimes very small groups, five people--and also groups that tend to be interested in the goal of educating their members or resolving some conflict, in Mary's case. They don't tend to be used so much or at least tend to be stressed so much in groups that are larger and in groups that are--that tend to be oriented to taking some action.

And, of course, the group that best epitomizes that is Congress. Congress is a very large group. It's dedicated to taking action. That's the one place in this country where you will not find good principles of public discourse. On the other hand, larger groups and groups oriented to action tend to express rational kinds of principles. They want reasoned arguments. They want policy statements. They want substantive kinds of deliberations. There's an assumption in these groups that pe--participants share enough already among themselves as a kind of community that they can skip over or go lightly over that aspect of community building or relationship building. So there's not much effort in these kinds of groups to do that kind of thing.

Now there seems to be an implicit assumption among these groups that larger groups tend to have faci--promote these kind of pri--principles and smaller groups tend to have these kinds of principles attached to them. And my question is: Is that true? Is it true that larger groups couldn't be better served by doing some very intensive relationship-building exercises? Is it true that smaller groups couldn't be served by providing more of a substantive rationally-oriented or reason-oriented kind of engagement?

One of the ironies here I hope you catch or at least that I caught is that the more people are required to take action, the less they tend to embrace the kinds of principles of good public discourse currently being promoted in the scholarly literature. Right? So the kinds of principles scholars are promoting are not the kinds of principles which appear to be used most by groups oriented to taking some kind of action.

So I can imagine an evaluative study, for instance--and these kinds of distinctions can't be grasped, I think, in a--in a--in a survey kind of study, but I could see a comparative ethnography, for instance, where we go into a study circle's resource center and live there for a while, and we go into a National Issues Forum and live there for a while and see not only what people think, i--in your terms, Bob, but how they're thinking. You know, that kind of subtlety requires that kind of detailed field work. Of course, we don't have anything like that. And, in fact, I think the study circles is doing something like that right now, the fi--the only program that I found that's doing something like that. But something like that could be done.

We could do discursive analyses of interactions to find out, well, you know, our goals are these. Are those goals being fostered within the structure of the forum itself? That kind of research could be done. So that's all I'll say about evaluation. It needs to be done, and there are lots of different ways of doing it.

Let me just make a couple of other points for you to think about. One is one of the things that I also learned in studying these groups is that, by and large--and this is something that came up in our last conversation in December--most of these groups do not reach that--and you can choose your number--20 percent to 40 percent of the population which are very apathetic toward public life, which simply refuse to participate in public life, refuse to vote, refuse to go to libraries or public institutions; really have no access to the institutions of public life.

What they are included--generally they're included in the form of a representative sample. You have to physically go out there and find these people. And Fishkin has a great story in his book where he describes having to take someone from their home, drive them to the airport, fly them to Texas to be involved in this forum because, otherwise, she would never have gone to this deliberative poll because she'd never been on an airplane.

Unfortunately, most of this quarter of the population which is apathetic tends to be working class, tends to be poor. A heavy proportion of these people are people of color. And it's a problem. If we think deliberation is--at least one aspect of deliberation is inclusion, we're not including a quarter of the population, even with these heroic efforts that are being done in this--in this field.

JAY: Give us one more point, David, and we'll try and talk a little.

Mr. RYFE: Yeah. Yeah. OK. And--and one thing--one final thing is don't underestimate the problem of reconciling deliberation with the represen--representative system. I think that there's actually two different logics at work there. Deliberation assumes that people will come together in a reasoned conversation or at least a conversation and come to some judgment about an issue and that action will be taken on that issue. Representational--representational politics is not deliberative politics. It's coalitional politics. It's group building. People get elected in national politics by cobbling together different constituencies and serving those constituencies when they get into office. They don't get into office by being able to deliberate very well, right?

So Social Security reform--and so likely what happens on Social Security is going to be an outcome of group politics, not deliberative politics. So there's a real big disconnect between the two kinds of logics, and i--I--I don't for a minute want to--want you to think that that disconnect can't be overcome, but I--I do want you to be aware that it is a problem. And I think they've all addressed this problem in various ways, and it's something the commission should think about in trying to formulate new kinds of forums or new expressions of this linkage between the two logics. OK. I'll end there. Thank you.

JAY: Thank you. Just one second. Here's what I think we heard. Our question is: How do you create more robust public discourse? Their answer is, create counterfactual conditions for public discourse: a study circle, a common ground forum, a National Issues Forum, an America speaks forum; create counterfactical--factual conditions for public discourse and draw people to them. Draw people to them. Whatever it takes to hold those people and give them an authentic democratic experience is what you need to create more robust public discourse. That's how they operate. It's pragmatism, classic pragmatism, and the learning involved in creating better public discourse. That's why what--their experience matters.

Now you have questions about why it matters. Kathleen, why don't we start with you?

Ms. KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I just wanted to add something to--to Robert's discussion of the Philadelphia compact process that Harra So--Harris Sokoloff worked with that was called Citizen Voices, because we--we did do an evaluation of that process, and I think it was instructive. That process had The Inquirer drawing in an elite population through its op-ed page. We drew together a random sample of Philadelphians to deliberate with the elite population. We measured their capacity to deliberate across three different deliberative moments. In the first moment, we noticed--we noticed s--really serious differences between what the two groups were doing, and the first--the--the elite group was giving arguments with evidence, was acknowledging the other side, was counterarguing.

By the third meeting in which these groups are deliberating, there is no difference on those three measures between the two groups. You cannot distinguish the elites from the random sample controlling for education and controlling for income. And what we saw that at--as was evidence that the norm of deliberation is strong enough that, given the opportunity to be part of it, people, regardless of their educational capacity, educational backgrounds, have the capacity to deliberate, and I think Robert's making a very important point when he makes that point.

Secondly, when--when we talk about Congress as not an institution that has strong deliberative norms, I worry that what we are doing is, in fact, representing our view of Congress as we see it through the press instead of Congress as we would see it if we watched Congress. I think that what Congress has done is put in place, largely because of Thomas Jefferson's manuals, almost a--an ideal set of rules that we could all use in deliberating. I mean, they--they are rules that are set up to minimize the likelihood that you engage in what they call personalities, what we would call attacking the person instead of attacking the position.

There's almost a ballet that--that is the institutional structure for the taking-down process, which is a s--a set of strategic moves designed to de-escalate and to move toward conciliation. And the rules over time have developed very clear standards that say that you may not impugn the integrity of another person. Indeed, it yields an automatic taking-down process. And I think if--if we took those rules, what we would find is that all of these groups have basically reproduced those rules. But Congress reproduced them earlier because Congress has been around longer.

JAY: Thank you for that, Kathleen. Bob.

Mr. ROBERT WIEBE: Although I--I may not be talking to Mary's point, I think, even implicitly, what I have to say deals with her also. But, otherwise, all the participants, it seems to me, are working with a need that nobody expresses, and that is a radical--and I mean radical--decentralization of decision-making. Until it is that need for the people entering political life, to know that what they do has some bearing on an outcome, that is that critical first step. They won't come in if there isn't a payoff in outcome.

Well, for most of the issues that we deal with, the outcome is determined, or the framework within which that outcome can be made, is so tightly constrained well beyond where they're operating that unless you--and I mean radically--unless you radically decentralize decisions, I'm not quite sure h--what--you know, I g--yes, I--I want to hear from--from you because I believe what you say, but I also believe in that radical decentralization of institutions other than the governing institutions, and that's where it seems to me what Mary says applies, too; that organizations operate in that same fashion. And without that decentralization, then the participants won't feel they can even affect their organizations.

JAY: All right. Let me ask you, Carolyn, how much decentralization of decision-making and power is involved for the model of the bottom-up conversation to work?

Ms. LUKENSMEYER: I want to do two tracks. I--this was a--it's very interesting to me. Most times in sessions like this when I present, people jump to a conclusion that, therefore, this work all will let--lead toward direct democracy. And, therefore, a version of that is radical decentralization.

In my experience of listening carefully in this process for five years now, most Americans still fundamentally believe in our system enough that they're not demanding a total change in structure in order to participate, but they have to see an impact or an influence of their work. So--and I agree with you wholeheartedly that many, many public policy issues you can't make that connection, which is why I said if you're going to do this nationally, you should be very careful which issues you pick.

But I don't--I think this connecting Citizen Voice from the bottom up to the way Congress--because that's the venue we're in in this conversation--works, people will suspend their disbelief if they see that Bill Archer, the chairman of House Ways and Means, is gonna actually take in this data and use it; if they see that the same is gonna happen to the Senate Finance Committee. So there's still that much--it's a leap of faith they make past a certain point.

But there's a second track and I--this comes back to something Tom Luce said this morning; it comes back to something Mary said and, Judith, you expressed a great interest in. When we started our work, we actually did worldwide research in terms of what our new mediating mechanisms that have come on the scene in the last decades that will deal with decision-making made at a different level. And there are two I want to share the story with, and then I'll quit.

I found only one in the United States. It's called the North Dakota Consensus Council. It's now being repre--rep--replicated in Montana, and a couple of other states are looking at it. The governor of North Dakota, at a certain point, recognized that in the tough land-use environmental water-rights issues, there was no way the government leadership could come to a meaningful--whether it was coalition politics, consensus--they just couldn't do it. He convinced the speaker and the Senate leaders to create this other standing entity, which they have a formula then for how you are pointed to this, and that body now stands that any entity--a citizen, a corporation, a government agency--can bring the issue to the Consensus Council. They're using all range of deliberative techniques: alternative dispute resolution, consensus deliberation. And the parties that bring it sign a contract when they bring it that they will fully participate in the designed process and they will abide by the outcome.

Now--and I--I--I'm right where Tom Luce is. This country--I believe nationally that we're going to have to find some other mechanisms like this that create an intervening level of where decisions get made.

The other one, I'll just say it briefly, but this body should know about it, is something called the Danish Technology Board. It's a very oddly named entity. But the Danish Parliament actually has given this body a role, and the method they use is like citizen juries that Ned Crosby established in this country at the Jefferson Center in Minnesota. The one I observed closely, personally was biogenetic engineering. So this is not--this is not taking on a small issues. The parliament had done some deliberation about it. They'd had all kinds of expert panel input into committees. They then did one of these citizen panels, and the parliament commits that when they ask a panel to operate--and it's just ordinary citizens picked to represent the Danish population--when it deliberates, the answer that comes out is then taken into the Danish Parliament for another round of open public deliberation in the parliament.

Now that--we're not--we don't have any mechanism like that. What I've heard citizens ask for--that I think gets at your question--is: Why couldn't we--to me this is one very practical suggestion--why we couldn't take on a four-year presidential election cycle, let the public select the issue, whatever it might be? In 1992, it definitely would have been health care, OK? I don't know what it would be in 2000. Let the public pick one issue that they want Congress and the executive branch to work on, but they want an ahead-of-time agreement that it's not done in the bipartisan committee structure; that it is in some way done on a track that is a collaborative effort between both parties and a collaborative effort between the executive branch and the Congress differently than we've come to lose confidence in the rancor that now does exist in Congress despite their civil rules.

JAY: Well, we have to go on...

Ms. LUKENSMEYER: Sorry.

JAY: ...but that is a fairly utopian idea that would be interesting to develop. Edna.

Unidentified Man: Martha was...

JAY: Oh, I'm sorry, Martha.

MARTHA: Yeah. I just want to add one thing to that. I think that, Bob, part of what we're dealing with here is the--the assessment that people know that they can really make some change at the local level. And even that can be very radical when there's bias, as Carolyn sug--suggested, from local leadership in the very beginning in sponsoring this in a commitment to living up to what people deliberate on at the local level. It can make a real difference. And it's not to suggest that national policy doesn't set a lot of constraints on that, but I think it's a beginning. And I also think it's a connection between the volunteerism that people have been talking about and the strengthening of represent--representative institutions people have been trying to do. This is a sort of medium ground of trying to strengthen deliberative democracy at the local level as a step toward strengthening national deliberative democracy.

JAY: I think we have time for one more question. Edna.

EDNA: Yeah. Let--let me first preface by saying that while the morning session was fascinating, this I find really gratifying. And I'm very thankful to--to all the members, panelists, who--who--who described their work to us. I'm really--I'm very impressed and--and touched by a lot of what I hear.

I want to focus on Mary's work because she deals with a divisive issue and maybe the most divisive issue in this country. And I come from a society which is extremely divided; I come from Israel. And we've had for at least 30 years now a--one big divisive issue that just tears the country apart. And problems of bridging that or dealing with that are very much a daily problem for every citizen in this country.

Now I f--I have for a while thought: Why is American politics different, and is there anything comparable to our problem about the territories? And the only one I could come up with was this abortion debate that maybe comes closest to being as divisive. Now there is this book by Dworkin that you may be familiar with, "Life's Dominion," where he actually tackles that. And he--his solution there or the way he sees it is we have two opposing positions and maybe there is a middle ground, and he finds the middle ground in the concept that he calls sanctity of life. And he wants to say each side of the divide believes in the sanctity of life, but interprets it differently. Once people see that there is some principle that they both adhere to, maybe the division will grow--will dissipate or grow less.

And I d--don't think it works. I think maybe it's a--it's a very interesting theoretical book and theoretical work. I doubt that it has any kind of practical working. And I can find, frankly, a kind of common principle that both those--that the people who wants to return territories, those on the left in Israel, and those who want to retain the territories, those on the right, can agree that they both are thinking in terms of the--securing the future of Israeli or something like, you know, Israel's future existence. Both of them are concerned with that, and each side to the divide believes that their way of doing it is the only way to secure that principle. So having a common principle that both sides can agree to sounds nice, but it doesn't solve the problem of the division.

And, frankly, I--I want to draw you out to a little bit more about the point of your dialogue, because I wasn't sure I was getting it. Is it that people come to your table, that they change their view? Is it the idea that they will change their initial view on abortion? Is it only that they will learn not to demonize the other side, just to recognize that there is this other position and it's really people who are holding it and we don't want necessarily to kill them for that? Or what is it that--when you are dealing with these dialogues, what is the end result, and--and can you try to draw some kind of an analogy or a lesson to, you know, a society like ours w--with such a divisive issue?

Ms. JACKSTEIT: The fir--the part that's easy to answer is, no, it isn't about changing your position on abortion. I think the qu--the easiest way to answer it is that what it's about is building--is community building or community sustaining or community resurrecting, in a sense. How do you live in community which may be your town, your state or your nation in the presence of an irresolvable conflict? That's really what it's about, if you ask me, because at the core of the issue is an irresolvable conflict.

Now around it are many things that are resolvable. How do you reduce the incident? How do you reduce the--the--the situations that call for abortion? How do you reduce teen-age pregnancy? How do you reduce the tension between work and family? And there's all kinds of things around that you can parse out that are things that can be worked on and solved and deliberated and problem solved around. But at the core, there's an irreduc--ducible core of conflict.

How do you live together with that? I mean, that--that--essentially, it's to enable people to--to see a way of living with that conflict. That does not mean they never talk about anything. They never work o--with each other about anything. They disrupt each other's deliberative processes. You hold things hostage, like in Congress where you attach abortion, you know, provisions to unrelated bills that might be important, like the UN dues or whatever. You know, how do you--how do you co-exist with this conflict? How do you not dehumanize people? How do you--which can lead to violence, but then also lead to election cycles where the abortion issue is used as a club?

I mean, it--the discussion about how Governor Bush de--de--in a sense, defused the abortion issue by co--by acknowledging the complexity of it instead of treating it simplistically. It's how do you live with an--with an irreducible conflict in--in your society where to polarize--to allow it to polarize and--and, in a sense, warp your democratic process? You may feel that's unacceptable.

The fact that the activity about it is in local communities more than nationally is for a very good reason. In local communities, people live with their adversaries. I mean, two famous Common Grounders had their children on the same soccer team. She ran a big clinic. He was a big pro-life lawyer. But they saw each other. They were much more aware of the actual cost of their being e--being enemies. They can't work together on, you know, another job. They couldn't work together on refugees because, you know, they hate each other about abortion. So it's how you live with an irreducible conflict, how do you build sustained community in a democratic process when you can't resolve one key part of it.

Now how you extrapolate that to--to Israel, I don't know, though Search for Common Ground is one of the few organizations where, you know, the abortion r--the--the abortion conflict project is right next to the Middle East project, so we talk about that. But part of it is co-existence, and there's a part of the Middle East project that is called Images of the Other, which has to do with breaking down the--the polarized and stereotype images between Palestinians and Israelis. So the similar--there are similarities about just the--here's the reality, folks. You live in the same place. That's what I say to pro-life people. Yeah.

JAY: Unfortunately, we're out of time.

Ms. JACKSTEIT: I'm sorry.

JAY: Thank you, Mary. Well, I think we saw that the upside-down triangle worked. We provided a very different perspective from the ground up toward better public discourse. There's no way to understand what our participants have said to us if we think of it as a solution to the problem. It could only be understood if--if we're willing to call it an experiment, which is a different way of thinking and a different way of knowing.

Similarly, there's no way of understanding what they're trying to do within the tradition of realism and political science and social thought that's come down to us in the university in the 20th century. It's not an exercise in that discourse. It's pragmatic. It's pragmatic. It's about experimenting with different solutions to an endemic and long-term problem and trying to learn from there, some of which involve creating ideal conditions for discourse in order to learn how to make them real. That's not realism. It's a different intellectual impulse. Or the realism comes second, right?

Unidentified Man: It's a...

JAY: What you experiment with. So that--to me as a scholar, that's what's exciting about this. For me, as somebody in the civic renewal movement myself, it's great 'cause I know these people--I--I just met Mary. I--I've known the others for many years, and I see them in many different settings talking about their work. And I know how important it is.

In fact, just last summer Martha and Carolyn and I were together at Aspen at a very similar conference talking about similar issues. And while, Judith, Philadelphia is wonderful, it--it's not Aspen. So if there's a renewal of this great group after we've created more robust public discourse, it ought to be at Aspen.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Unidentified Man: Thank you. Thank you, Jay. I--I think the combination of scholarship and pragmatism there is the appropriate note for the commission's formal session to end on as we transition from scholarship to pragmatism. And I invite you all to join us for a very pragmatic lunch in the Regents Room where we'll have one or two...

Unidentified Woman: A brief one, right?

Unidentified Man: ...and a brief one, for a final repast.

JAY: Oh, I'm sorry, Joyce...

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