Power in Deliberative Participation at High Stakes: Operationalising an Unwelcome Factor

To date, deliberative citizen participation with high stakes, where citizens take policy-relevant decisions in their every-day environment, has hardly been studied. This paper explores the exercise of power in deliberative citizen participation along the case of a participatory neighbourhood fund in Berlin (Germany) where neighbourhood projects apply for public funding and decide over its distribution in citizen assemblies (Kiezkasse Treptow-Köpenick). Participants have thus money for their project and reputation in their every-day environment at stake. How do participants come to decisions in this context? Are certain actors dominating the process? Which actors carry through their claims and how? One approach to answer these questions is the analysis of interaction during the assemblies based on video recordings following an ethnomethodological approach. To do so, an operationalisation of power is needed that captures the term in a relational and comprehensive manner. As deliberation theory focuses on the coercive aspect of power and its incompatibility with deliberation standards, an analysis based on this understanding would neglect the creative side of power and moments of empowerment. By turning to linguistic studies of power, I claim that deliberative democracy’s power concept can be extended in a way that allows understanding what kinds of power play a role in decision making. Moreover, linguistic studies provide a large range of terms and techniques that make power relations and power exercise tangible for analysis. Operationalising power as a coercive as well as an enabling relation between interactants provides the possibility of analysing the exercise of power in real-world settings where the researcher cannot (or doesn’t want to) influence the decision-making procedure and needs to rely on observation for data collection. The paper will present the analytical framework drawn from deliberation studies, linguistics and group psychology and test it against a piece of collected data material.