Judging Technical Claims in Democratic Deliberation: A Rhetorical Analysis of Two Citizens’ Initiative Review Panels in Oregon

Abstract

Average citizens face difficulty evaluating competing expert claims in the public sphere, and the complexity of policy issues threatens citizens’ autonomy in democratic governance. This study examines how participants in a rigorous deliberative setting judge technical claims, analyzing audio and transcripts from two intensive mini-public deliberations in the Citizens’ Initiative Review in Oregon. The results show how lay participants in these meetings rhetorically co-construct a standard of verifiability to evaluate expert claims. The study then reflects on what this emergent standard of judgment reveals about the potentials and pitfalls of lay deliberation concerning technical policy issues.

Keywords:

• Citizens’ Initiative Review
• Democratic Deliberation
• Expertise
• Mini-Publics
• Rhetorical Analysis

Acknowledgments

Thank you to John Gastil for bringing me onto the CIR research team in 2016 and for guiding me in doing this analysis. I also want to thank other members of the CIR research team, especially those who helped collect data from the 2012 CIR panels that were used in this study, including Katherine Knobloch, Robert Richards, and Traci Feller. I am also grateful to the reviewers for providing valuable feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Manuscript History/Grant Information

A version of this paper was presented virtually to the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance Seminar at the University of Canberra on May 5, 2020. The 2012 CIR research team was supported by the Kettering Foundation and by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences’ Political Science Program (Award No. 0961774)

Notes

1. I observed two different CIRs firsthand in 2016 and 2018 in Oregon and Massachusetts, respectively. Unfortunately, we did not get full audio from those events, so I have opted to use data sources from 2012 meetings.

2. The two panels I use are among the few that we have full audio from. Others, such as the pilot projects in Colorado and Massachusetts, only have partial video.

3. For exceptions, see (Carlin, Schill, Levasseur, & King, 2005; Levasseur & Carlin, 2001).

4. The 2012 data was collected prior to my joining the CIR research team in 2016. The team is led by John Gastil and Katherine R. Knobloch, and it includes a large group of research collaborators.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kettering Foundation; National Science Foundation [1357276/1357444]; The Democracy Fund.