Routinizing Deliberation: How National Governments Can Promote Deliberation in People’s Everyday Lives

Deliberation requires participants to step out of their day-to-day routines in order to consider issues of common concern on the basis of equality and mutual respect. As Shawn Rosenberg and others in the field of political psychology have indicated, for many people this makes it an unappealing and cognitively costly activity. Nonetheless, relatively small changes in people’s everyday lives may turn deliberation into a more habitual exercise. In conjunction with the notion of a ‘deliberative system’ put forward most prominently by Jane Mansbridge and John Parkinson, this brings to the fore the potential of small alterations in people’s daily lives making a significant contribution to the deliberative capacity of the system as a whole. In the context of contemporary nation-states, this suggests that deliberative democrats should not only examine the potential of large-scale change of national political institutions but also that of small-scale changes in people’s everyday environments. The latter approach may prove to be less costly to bring about as well as normatively desirable when considering the recent criticism of the systemic approach voiced by David Owen and Graham Smith. That is, the emphasis on people’s everyday lives implies a concern with the deliberative capacity of all constitutive parts of the system rather than only with the system as a whole, the latter of which may result in a normatively unacceptable neglect of the deliberative capacity of some parts of the system. Applying the above to today’s nation-states, the paper addresses the question how and to what degree citizen deliberation can be promoted in everyday settings. Relying on research in the fields of civic engagement and business and management, it points out options for reform and shows how national governments can (1) integrate deliberation into the day-to-day operations of public educational institutions and (2) provide the private sector with incentives to do the same.