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
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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)