Affinity Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity

Journal of Public Deliberation, Oct 2016

There is growing appreciation for the value of holding enclave dialogue and deliberation among marginalized peoples in their own affinity groups, as one stage in a larger conversation with the broader public or with public officials. These enclaves may be disempowered by enduring political inequalities, or in relation to a particular issue under discussion, or by the act of deliberation itself. Recent research and practice has demonstrated that well-structured dialogue and deliberation in enclaves can increase the inclusion, participation, and influence of members of society who have been excluded from public discourse, while avoiding the dangers of coercion, sectarianism, conformism, error, and illegitimacy. We review normative arguments and empirical evidence for the judicious use of affinity group enclaves to advance equity. We show multiple ways in which enclaves can be incorporated into democratic projects and processes that also include discussion among more representative samples of the public and with government. We offer design principles for affinity group discussion, which are illustrated by a recent series of dialogues on Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation, organized in the U.S. by Everyday Democracy. Finally, we discuss conditions in which enclave deliberation is most likely to be needed to create equity and suggest an agenda for future research.

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Affinity Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity

Journal of Public Deliberation Afinit y Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity Carolyne Abdullah Everyday Democracy 0 1 2 0 1 2 0 Christopher F. Karpowitz Brigham Young University 1 Part of the Political The ory Commons, Public Administration Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Public Policy Commons, and the Social Influence and Political Communication Commons 2 Chad Raphael Santa Clara University Follow this and additional works at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd - Organizers of dialogue and deliberation employ several common strategies aimed at achieving equal inclusion, participation, and influence in civic forums. In forums that are open to all who want to join, each participant typically has an equal opportunity to attend, speak, and, if applicable, an equal vote. Forums that restrict participation to a sample of the public take further steps to practice equality. To achieve proportional representation of members of marginalized groups, organizers often recruit random samples or quasi-representative microcosms of the public, or recruit participants in part through networks of social service or civil society organizations (Leighninger, 2012). Some forums subsidize the costs of participation – including information acquisition, time, and money – by providing background materials about the issues, translation services, paying stipends to participants, and the like (Lee, 2011). To create conditions for equal participation and influence, facilitators set ground rules that encourage sharing of speaking time, respect for participants regardless of status or identity, and openness to a broad range of communication styles (Gastil & Levine, 2005). Each of these strategies seeks inclusion of the disempowered on more equal discursive terms than are often found in traditional public meetings, which can be dominated by more privileged citizens, or by officials or policy experts, and which are not designed to engender cooperative talk between community members as equals (Gastil, 2008). While these are important strategies, they can be insufficient. Even forums that most aim to create representative microcosms of a community are hard pressed to include proportional numbers of community members who are disadvantaged by their education, income, race, gender, age, and political interest (Jacobs, Cook, & Delli Carpini 2009; Ryfe & Stalsburg 2012). Research often finds that despite organizers’ best efforts, more privileged participants – white, male, highly educated, and professional – speak and influence decisions more than other participants (for summaries, see Black, 2012; Karpowitz & Mendel berg, 2014 ; Karpowitz & Raphael, 2014). Information, issues, and choices are often framed from the perspective of the powerful, even when presented as neutral or in terms of the “common good” (Young, 2000; Christiano, 2012). In this article, we argue that incorporating stages of enclave discussion among disempowered people within larger political forums or processes can help move us beyond formal equality to achieve more substantively equitable dialogue and deliberation.1 Democratic theorists have long recognized that members of less privileged groups need to confer among themselves in civil society associations in order to contribute autonomously and effectively to discussion in the wider public 1 We adapt our arguments for enclave deliberation from prior research in Karpowitz and Raphael (2014), while our discussion of design principles for effective enclaves is original to this article. sphere (Fraser, 1992; Mansbridge, 1996; Sunstein, 2000) . We extend this insight to civic forums, processes, and institutions that aim to engage the whole community, maintaining that it would be better for equity, and ultimately for the quality of deliberation, to integrate opportunities for discussion among the least powerful. We argue that enclaves can counteract background inequalities among participants, the difficult dynamics of small group discussion among people of different statuses, and the dominance of associations and ideas of the privileged in the wider political system. And we believe these benefits of enclaves can be realized not just in advocacy groups or social movements, but in the institutions of democratic deliberation that have been developed over the past few decades, from innovative government-led methods of public consultation and stakeholder engagement to forums such as Deliberative Polls, Consensus Conferences, Citizens Assemblies, and the like. In this light, enclave discussion is not necessarily an inferior version of crosscutting talk among a microcosm of the public, which is often the dominant ideal in deliberative democratic theory and practice. Indeed, enclaves are a feature of the traditional political institutions from which many contemporary civic forums draw metaphorical legitimacy and some design features. Consider the role of enclaves in the namesake institutions of our “21st Century Town Me (...truncated)


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Carolyne Abdullah, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Chad Raphael. Affinity Groups, Enclave Deliberation, and Equity, Journal of Public Deliberation, 2016, Volume 12, Issue 2,