Gastil on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review 2012

Professor Dr. John Gastil of Penn State University has posted The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, at the Democracy Fund Blog.

The post summarizes the results of the 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, “which convene[d] a group of average citizens together to evaluate ballot measures and share their recommendations with the voting public.”

Key findings:

• A majority of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR.
• Roughly two-thirds of those who read the CIR Statements found them helpful when deciding how to vote.
• Those who read a CIR Statement learned more about the ballot measures than those who read other portions of the official Voter’s Guide. [...]

The complete evaluation report described in the post is: Katherine R. Knobloch, John Gastil, Robert Richards, and Traci Feller. (2012). Evaluation Report on the 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Reviews for the Oregon CIR Commission. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University.

For more details, please see Professor Gastil’s complete post.

Click here for more information on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, at Participedia.

Disclosure: Professor Gastil is my Ph.D. advisor, and I contributed to the evaluation report on the 2012 Oregon CIR and the voter survey discussed in the post, and to the Participedia article on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review linked above.

HT @jgastil

Knobloch, Gastil, et al.: Applying an Evaluative Model of Democratic Deliberation to the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

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.

Legal Communication Papers @ NCA 2012

Many papers on legal communication were presented at NCA 2012: The 98th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association, held November 15-18, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, USA. Here is a list of those I could identify. For abstracts and full text, please contact the authors. (If you know of other papers on legal communication presented at NCA 2012, please feel free to identify them in the comments to this post. Click here for the complete NCA 2012 program.)

• Daniel Bergan and Richard T. Cole, Michigan State University: Call Your Legislator: The Impact of Citizen Contacts on Legislative Voting
• Mike Bergmaier, Penn State University: From Miscegenation to Contemporary Marriage Equality: Marriage as a Function of Ideological State Apparatuses
• Lacey Brown, University of West Florida, Chair: Panel: Trayvon Martin and COMMunity: Exploring the Interpretive Frames of the “Stand Your Ground” Law in Shaping 21st Century American Communities
• Kathryn A. Cady and Kerith M. Woodyard, Northern Illinois University: All the Working Woman’s Friends: Protective Labor Legislation and the Early ERA Controversy
• Peter Odell Campbell, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: The Abject of Community: The Majoritarian ‘Fourth Persona’ in U.S. Equality Rhetoric
• Kelly Carr, University of Baltimore: Inventing Continuity While Enacting Change: The Supreme Court Opinion Writing Process
• Michael S. Chouinard, Florida State University: Judge or Activist? Vaughn Walker and the Overturning of Proposition 8
• Hayley Jeanne Cole, Univ of Missouri, Columbia: Same Sex Marriage Ads: Don’t Mention It: A Content Analysis of the No on Prop 8 Ads
• Josh Compton and Paul Klaas, Dartmouth College: Oh, the Places Legal Rhetoric can Go: Prosecuting and Defending Characters of Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck
• Christopher R. Darr, Indiana Univ, Kokomo, and Harry C. Strine IV, Bloomsburg University: Partisanship, Ideology and Advice and Consent: A Content Analysis of Incivility in Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings
• Daniel Emery, University of Oklahoma: Property Crimes: Castle Laws, the 2008 Mortgage Crisis, and Privatization of Public Space
• Jerri Faris, Purdue University: Celebrating COMMunity with Ex-prisoners: Engaged Communication Scholarship in a Reentry Court
• Ryan P. Fuller, Univ of California, Santa Barbara: Agenda Denial Strategies in Regulating Vertical Integration: The Case of California SB 1765
• Joshua Gonzalez, University of Iowa: Undignified: Poverty and Personhood in the 1996 Welfare Reform Debates
• Nichola Gutgold, Penn State Univ, Lehigh Valley: The Enactment Rhetoric of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Leslie J. Harris, Univ of Wisconsin, Milwaukee: Spousal Correction or Spousal Cruelty? The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Domestic Violence
• Amy Hasinoff, McGill University: Social Media and Sexuality: The Missing Discourse of Consent in New Sexting Legislation
• Erik Jimenez, California State University, Los Angeles: Are You a Mexican? Investigating the Devastating Implications of Alabama’s Hammon-Beason (HB) 56
• Katherine R. Knobloch, University of Washington, and John W. Gastil, Penn State University: Civic (Re)Socialization: The Educative Effects of Deliberative Participation
• Jeff Kurr, Baylor University: President Obama’s Rhetorical Pivot in Avoiding the Detainment of Deliberation over Closing the Detention Facilities at Guantanamo Bay
• Derek Lackaff, Elon University: Open Governance Experiments in the Icelandic Context
• Owen H. Lynch, Southern Methodist University: Lowering the Bar or the Important Role of Humor in The Legal Community
• Carol L. Mammel, University of the Fraser Valley: The Osoyoos Indian Band, Canadian Wildlife Service, and the Species at Risk Act: Lack of consultation, and perpetuation of underdevelopment on reserves
• Bryan J. McCann, Wayne State Univ: Between Thugs and Innocents: Racialized Violence and the Perogative of ‘Self Defense’ in the Trayvon Martin Case
• Robert Mills, Northwestern University: The Harmonious Vocalics of Judicial Unanimity: Authorship and Legitimacy in Cooper v. Aaron
• Jay Reynolds Patterson, Georgia State University: Contemporary Legal Discourse and the Graeco-Roman Tradition: The 2009 OJ Simpson Kidnapping Trial
• Carlo A. Pedrioli, Barry University: Constructing Modern-day U.S. Legal Education through Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, and the Scholar Model of the Law Professor Persona
• Preconference: Reading the Rhetoric of Civil Rights Sit-Ins
• Alessandra Renzi, Ryerson University: Get Out of My Park: Occupying Discourse on Public Use
• Robert Richards, Penn State University: Legal Narrative in the Citizens’ Panel: Identifying Theories to Explain Storytelling in a Small Group Deliberation about Ballot Initiatives
• Brandi Dale Rogers, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Science, Law, and the Argumentative Antecedents of Fetal Personhood: A Rhetorical Analysis of Early Prenatal Torts
• Clarke Rountree, University of Alabama, Huntsville: Reversing Course: Supreme Court Overruling in an Early Admiralty Case
• Clariza Ruiz De Castilla, University of Texas, Austin: Citizenship in the Sunshine State: Florida News Coverage on Arizona’s SB 1070
• Kristina Ruiz-Mesa, Univ of Colorado, Boulder: COMMunities of Practice and Discourses of a DREAM: How Congress and Fox News Represent ‘Others’ within the DREAM Act
• Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University: Forget about It! The Ironic Effects of Instructions to Disregard Perry, Ben, Gil, and Ducky
• Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University: Toward a Causal Explanation of ‘The CSI Effect’: Self-efficacy as Mediator between Fictional Crime-TV Exposure and Verdict Certainty
• Joseph Sery, University of San Francisco: ‘Fruit from the Poisonous Tree’: The Rhetorical Strategy behind Mapp v. Ohio
• Rohini Singh, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Turning the Tables: Refutation by Reversal in Clarence Darrow’s Plea for Leopold and Loeb
• Jeff Swift, North Carolina State University: The Invisible Hand of the Speech Marketplace: The Supreme Court’s Currency Manipulation
• Elycia M. Taylor, Catherine Knight Steele, and Emilie Lucchesi, University of Illinois, Chicago: Protective or Oppressive? Analyzing Death Penalty Framing
• Dave Tell, University of Kansas, and Eric C. Miller, Penn State University: Rhetoric and Judicial Activism: The Case of Hillary Goodridge v. Department of Public Health
• Mary Lynn L. Veden, Univ of Arkansas, Fayetteville: The Alchemy and Antirrhetic of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish
• Rachel Avon A. Whidden, Lake Forest College: Proving Science in Court: Vaccine Injury Payouts and the Legitimization of the MMR-Autism Connection

Legislation by Amateurs: The Role of Legal Details and Knowledge in Initiative Deliberation

[Note: This paper has been accepted for presentation at NCA 2013, the 99th annual convention of the National Communication Association, to be held 21-24 November 2013 in Washington, DC.]

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences and I have posted a working paper entitled Legislation by Amateurs: The Role of Legal Details and Knowledge in Initiative Deliberation (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Citizens’ deliberations about the legal nature and effects of ballot measures were examined through a qualitative content analysis of transcripts from the 2010 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, the Citizens’ Review Statements produced by that review, and official state explanatory statements describing ballot measures. [The Citizens' Review Statements and explanatory statements for Measures 73 and 74 are available in the official 2010 Oregon Voters' Pamphlet.] Deliberations and statements were coded for law-related topics, functions, uses of narrative, and motivations for narration. Citizens’ deliberations and Citizens’ Review Statements were found to emphasize the policy objectives and unintended or adverse consequences of ballot measures, as well as the application of legal rules to multiple factual scenarios. By contrast, official state explanatory statements describing ballot measures made no mention of policy objectives or unintentional or adverse consequences. Results suggest that citizens’ approach to assessing ballot measures may have both strategic/instrumental and realistic dimensions and that rule-application may play a key role in enabling citizens’ understanding of the legal aspects of ballot measures.

Nabatchi, Gastil, et al. on Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement

Professor Dr. Tina Nabatchi of the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, and colleagues, have edited a new book entitled Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Full text of some portions of the book are available on Google Books.

Several of the chapters discuss evaluation of law-related deliberation, particularly regarding ballot initiatives, and at times with reference to empirical research on jury deliberations.

Here is an excerpt from the publisher’s description:

Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood.

Here is the table of contents:

1. Introduction to Deliberative Civic Engagement / Tina Nabatchi
2. Mapping Deliberative Civic Engagement: Pictures From a (R)evolution / Matt Leighninger
3. Who Deliberates? Recruitment and Participation in Deliberative Civic Engagement / David Ryfe and Brittany Stalsburg
4. How People Communicate During Deliberative Events / Laura Black
5. Deliberative Inclusion in Multicultural Societies / Alice Siu and Dragan M. Stanisevski
6. Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence / Todd Davies and Reid Chandler
7. Does Deliberation Make Better Citizens? / Heather Pincock
8. Deliberation’s Contribution to Community Capacity-Building / Bo I. Kinney
9. Assessing the Policy Impacts of Deliberative Civic Engagement / Gregory Barrett, Miriam Wyman, and Vera Schattan P. Coehlo
10. Evaluating Deliberative Public Events and Projects / John Gastil, Katie Knobloch, and Meghan B. Kelly
11. Listening and Responding to Critics of Deliberative Civic Engagement
    / Loren Collingwood and Justin Reedy
12. Advancing the Theory and Practice of Deliberative Civic Engagement: A Secular Hymnal / Michael Weiksner, John Gastil, Tina Nabatchi, and Matt Leighninger

2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review Statements Available

The two Citizens’ Statements from the 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review are now available, at the Healthy Democracy Blog:

• Citizens’ Statement on Measure 82
• Interim Final Report on 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review on Measure 85, including Citizens’ Statement on Measure 85

A Citizens’ Initiative Review is a means of allowing citizens to publicly deliberate about ballot initiatives before an election. Oregon has instituted a Citizens’ Initiative Review — called the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review — as part of its statewide ballot initiative process.

I am part of a research team — led by Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences — that is studying the 2010 and 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Reviews.

Gastil in NYT on Political Attitude Change and the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences was quoted regarding how individuals change their political attitudes, particularly in connection with the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, in Maggie Koerth-Baker, The Mind of a Flip-Flopper, at New York Times Magazine 19 August 2012.

In this article Professor Gastil describes his and Katherine Knobloch’s 2010 National Science Foundation-funded study showing how citizens’ attitudes about a ballot measure changed after reading a statement about the measure issued by the the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (Oregon CIR), an innovative small-group deliberation process in which a random sample of Oregon citizens devotes five days to studying a ballot measure in-depth.

Professor Gastil explains:

The [CIR] panelists felt obligated to consider the measure more carefully than they otherwise would have, Gastil says, so they noted the high costs and thought about people who might be unfairly punished. Only a minority of voters knew the panel existed, so the measure still passed — though by a smaller margin than expected. In a study he performed on the public response to Measure 73, Gastil found that the panel’s opinion significantly changed the minds of those people who read its findings.

Disclosure: I am a member of a research team led by Professor Gastil that is studying the 2010 and 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Reviews.

Gastil on Cultural Cognition and the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences has posted Cultural Cognition and the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, at Cultural Cognition Blog.

In this post Professor Gastil describes the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (Oregon CIR), an innovative small-group deliberation process in which a random sample of Oregon citizens devotes five days to studying a ballot measure in-depth. The citizens then write an evaluation of the measure that will appear in the official Oregon Voters’ Pamphlet, so that voters can learn from the citizens’ evaluation.

Professor Gastil explains how, through participation in the Oregon CIR process, citizens move beyond ideologically based political positions to a better informed and more sophisticated understanding of the issues.

Cultural cognition means:

the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.

Dr. Gastil summarizes the lessons learned from the Oregon CIR so far:

There are many successful public deliberation processes, and the Oregon CIR represents a newer kind that aims to use small group deliberation to inform the discretion of a mass public. [...] So far, the evidence is encouraging: With enough care and resources, one can create an intensive deliberative process that appears to get lay citizens past both crude heuristics and more elaborate, but ideologically-motivated reasoning.

Those who work in political communication professionally are right to be concerned that processes like the CIR operate beyond their control. This year, as in 2010, I suspect we will see capable advocates and opponents make their case to the citizen panelists, but the outcome will hinge not on the balance of ideological bias (which is roughly even in Oregon) but on the quality of argument, reasoning, and evidence presented.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for more information on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review process.

Click here for more information on the 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review.

Click here for more information on Cultural Cognition.

Disclosure: I am a member of a research team led by Professor Gastil that is studying the 2010 and 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Reviews.

Gastil on the Impact of the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the Penn State University Department of Communication Arts and Sciences has published an op-ed entitled Citizens’ Initiative Review does help voters, study shows, OregonLive, 7 August 2012.

In this op-ed, Professor Gastil responds to assertions questioning the effects of the 2010 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) — a public deliberation about ballot initiatives, involving 24 randomly selected Oregon citizens.

Professor Gastil’s response summarizes the NSF-funded research report about the 2010 Oregon CIR — co-authored by him and Katherine Knobloch — which found that the 2010 Oregon CIR did have a substantial effect on Oregon voters.

The 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review is currently underway. Click here for details on the measures being considered during the 2012 process.

For more information, please see Professor Gastil’s complete op-ed.

Disclosure: I am a member of a research team led by Professor Gastil that is studying the 2010 and 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Reviews.

Parkinson and Mansbridge, eds.: Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale

Professor Dr. John Parkinson of the University of Warwick Faculty of Politics and International Studies, and Professor Dr. Jane J. Mansbridge of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, have co-edited Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Here is the publisher’s description of the book:

‘Deliberative democracy’ is often dismissed as a set of small-scale, academic experiments. This volume seeks to demonstrate how the deliberative ideal can work as a theory of democracy on a larger scale. It provides a new way of thinking about democratic engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation states, and from local networks to transnational, even global systems. Written by a team of the world’s leading deliberative theorists, Deliberative Systems explains the principles of this new approach, which seeks ways of ensuring that a division of deliberative labour in a system nonetheless meets both deliberative and democratic norms. Rather than simply elaborating the theory, the contributors examine the problems of implementation in a real world of competing norms, competing institutions and competing powerful interests. [...]

Here is the table of contents:

1. A systemic approach to deliberative democracy / Jane Mansbridge, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson and Mark E. Warren
2. Rational deliberation among experts and citizens / Thomas Christiano
3. Deliberation and mass democracy / Simone Chambers
4. Representation in the deliberative system / James Bohman
5. Two trust-based uses of minipublics in democratic systems / Michael K. MacKenzie and Mark E. Warren
6. On the embeddedness of deliberative systems: why elitist innovations matter more / Yannis Papadopoulos
7. Democratizing deliberative systems / John Parkinson

The book includes discussion of democratic deliberation about legal matters, including citizens’ participation in jury deliberations, constitutional drafting, the legislative process, and ballot measures, including by such processes as the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review.