Professor Dr. Katherine R. Knobloch, Professor Dr. John Gastil, Justin Reedy, and Professor Dr. Katherine Cramer-Walsh, have published Did They Deliberate? Applying an Evaluative Model of Democratic Deliberation to the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, forthcoming in Journal of Applied Communication Research.
Here is the abstract:
As deliberative forums proliferate, scholars and practitioners need to establish a shared evaluative framework grounded in a theoretical definition of deliberation, applicable across contexts, and capable of yielding results comprehensible to public officials and key stakeholders. We present such a framework and illustrate its utility by evaluating the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR), a public event that serves as both a critical case study and an important practical innovation in its own right. Our analysis shows that the CIR met a reasonable standard for democratic deliberation, and we pinpoint CIR features that both aided and detracted from its overall quality. We also show how we summarized these results to communicate our evaluation efficiently to the Oregon State Legislature. We conclude by making recommendations for future applications of our theoretical model and evaluative framework and offer practical suggestions for future deliberative forums.
Tags: Ballot initiatives, Citizens' Initiative Review, Citizens' legal communication about ballot initiative, Citizens' participation in initiative process, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Citizens' participation in legislative process, Deliberative democracy, Democratic deliberation, Direct democracy communication systems, Direct democracy information systems, John Gastil, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Justin Reedy, Katherine Cramer Walsh, Katherine Knobloch, Legal deliberation, Legislative communication, Legislative deliberation, Legislative information systems, Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review
