Did They Deliberate? Applying an Evaluative Model of Democratic Deliberation to the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review

Abstract

As deliberative forums proliferate, scholars and practitioners need to establish a shared evaluative framework grounded in a theoretical definition of deliberation, applicable across contexts, and capable of yielding results comprehensible to public officials and key stakeholders. We present such a framework and illustrate its utility by evaluating the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR), a public event that serves as both a critical case study and an important practical innovation in its own right. Our analysis shows that the CIR met a reasonable standard for democratic deliberation, and we pinpoint CIR features that both aided and detracted from its overall quality. We also show how we summarized these results to communicate our evaluation efficiently to the Oregon State Legislature. We conclude by making recommendations for future applications of our theoretical model and evaluative framework and offer practical suggestions for future deliberative forums.

Keywords:

• Deliberation
• Democratic Theory
• Evaluation
• Group Communication
• Initiative Elections
• Political Communication
• Public Forums

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this report was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences' Political Science Program (Award No. 0961774) and the University of Washington (UW) Royalty Research Fund. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or UW. This essay is adapted from an unpublished report to the Oregon legislature (Gastil & Knobloch, 2010) and the first author's doctoral dissertation. For assistance with our research, we are grateful to Mark Henkels, Jacqueline Mount, Victoria Pontrantolfi, Vera Potapenko, and Rory Raabe.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine R. Knobloch

Katherine R. Knobloch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

John Gastil

John Gastil is a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Justin Reedy

Justin Reedy is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Katherine Cramer Walsh

Katherine Cramer Walsh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA