(Page 2 of 36) - Deliberation and Difference: The Contributions of Civic Dialogue authored by Walsh, Katherine.

policy ends (Habermas 1979; Cohen 1989) or means; or identify common ground such as a
shared membership in a “new” or “expanded” social category (Bohman 1996, 60-61) or collective
identity (Habermas 2001), shared values or principles (Rawls 1996; Bohman 1996, 59), or forge
these things through the process itself (Barber 1984). Indeed, some observers conclude that a
focus on consensus is the feature that distinguishes deliberative democracy from other forms of
democratic governance (Gardner 1996)

However, a daunting challenge to deliberative democracy is the worry that when

deliberation does connect members of a polity, it does so by ignoring dissent, and further
silencing already marginalized voices. Some theorists counter this argument by saying that
deliberation need not and should not focus on consensus or shared notions of the common good
(Benhabib 1990, 1996; Bohman 1995; Gould 1988, pp. 124-127, 1996; Mansbridge 1999, 226;
Dryzek 2000, esp. chap. 3). But others wonder whether deliberation is bound to perpetuate power
imbalances, inequality, and the marginalization of some concerns, because in order to be heard
during debate, people must conform to mainstream arguments and modes of arguing (Sanders
1997; Young 1996, 2001; Williams 2000).

In this paper, I take this debate within political theory as my starting point and turn to the

actual practice of a particular form of deliberation to ask whether people who have turned to civic
intergroup dialogue programs to improve race and ethnic relations use it to forge unity. These
programs are volunteer programs that have been sponsored by nonprofit organizations and local
governments in over 400 cities in over 46 states and the District of Columbia,

and in various

countries around the world (e.g. Varshney 2002, 293-295). They have been implemented to
address public problems ranging from city growth, education, youth violence, criminal justice and
controversies over abortion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The most common focus is on
race and ethnic relations. Typically, these programs bring together small groups of diverse
volunteers to engage in facilitator-led discussion over several weeks or months. These programs
have grown in recent decades,

just as have civic deliberative programs, which I define as

shorter-term programs designed to reach policy solutions or decisions.

Civic dialogue is one form of communication within the overall “deliberative system,” or

the range of acts of communication that collectively comprise deliberative democracy

See appendix A for details on how these figures were calculated.

The proliferation of civic dialogue programs in the past 15 years has been spurred in part by national

umbrella organizations such as the Study Circles Resource Center (SCRC), the Hope in the Cities
program, the YWCA, the National Conference for Communities and Justice, the National League of
Cities, and President William Jefferson Clinton’s Initiative on Race and the National Endowment for
the Humanities “National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity”(One America 1998;
Oskamp and Jones, 2000; Leighninger and McCoy, 1998; Reichler and Dredge, 1997, chap. 2; Sirianni
and Friedland, 2001, chap. 6; Merelman, Streich and Martin 1998; Merelman 1998). See Schoem and
Hurtado for information on intergroup dialogue in schools, colleges, workplaces as well as
communities. Civic dialogue programs were used to reconcile racial tension in Los Angeles following
the Rodney King verdict (Jones-Correa 2000), and implemented in many cities to address intergroup
tensions following this event and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Several organizations of
activists, communications practitioners, and academics have contributed to the growth of civic
dialogue as well. These organizations include the Public Dialogue Consortium (Pearce and Littlejohn,
1997, chap. 8;

http://www.publicdialogue.org/index.html

); the National Coalition for Dialogue and

Deliberation (

http://thataway.org/news/archives/cat_c_deliberative_democracy.html

); and the Deliberative

Democracy Consortium (http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/).

Examples of specifically deliberative programs include National Issues Forums

(

http://www.nifi.org/index.html

; Gastil and Dillard 1999), Deliberative Opinion Polls (Fishkin 1995), and

the technology-assisted deliberations of AmericaSpeaks programs that was used by residents of New York
City to debate the future of the site of the former World Trade Towers (http://www.americaspeaks.org/).
For additional overviews of the variety of civic programs currently conducted in the deliberative system,
see Button and Mattson 1999; Gastil 2000; Ryfe 2002; Delli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs 2004.