What are Citizens Saying? Analysis of Deliberative Democracy Forums

This paper reports on an experiment in three stages using the results of citizens' deliberation in forums concerning health care costs of citizens. First, forums are analyzed to reveal citizens' struggles in the formative stages of policy construction when making trade-offs among policy choices. Second, an experiment ("mock court room exercise") with presenting forum results to policy makers is described. Third, the final focus is on how combining the themes from forums from all over the country add to a more robust understanding of citizens' concerns about health care. Both the sense-making dialogue of the issue definition stage and the problem solving dialogue are discussed. Although the importance of meaning-generation is not sufficiently accounted for in current participation theories and models, studying what citizens say in deliberation can enhance our understanding of the framing of issues. Thus, three forums on health care costs were analyzed from forums conducted as part of a nationwide series of forums sponsored by the National Issues Forum, a nonpartisan, nationwide network of locally sponsored public forums for the consideration of public policy issues (http://www.nifi.org) and the Kettering Foundation, a nonpartisan and nonpolitical research organization. The forums were analyzed individually in terms of the types of arguments and the types of alternatives that emerged. However, understanding what citizens are saying is more valuable to the policy process if we can ask policy makers if information from forums is useful to them. Thus, the second stage of the experiment reports on using a "court room" design to inform policy makers on the citizens' understanding of issues. Finally, the third stage explains how the results from forums held in 40 states and D. C. were collected and analyzed and disseminated to policy makers.