Category Archives: research

Registration Open for August 5th Confab with Matt Leighninger & Tina Nabatchi

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Join us on Wednesday, August 5th for NCDD’s next “Confab Call.” We’ll be talking with NCDD Members Matt Leighninger and Tina Nabatchi about their new book, Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy. The confab will take place from 2-3pm Eastern (11am-12pm Pacific). Register today to secure your spot!

PP421CDPublic Participation for 21st Century Democracy is an exciting new book that aims to help people improve the infrastructure of public participation, the regular opportunities for citizens to take part in making decisions, solving problems, and strengthening community. It provides real-life examples and practical suggestions for renovating and creating new arenas for participation, as well as utilizing the skills and ideas of citizens.

On this confab, Matt & Tina will provide an overview and some highlights of the book, and share some of their learnings in putting this book together. They welcome your contributions to help improve and expand upon the book, so if you get a chance, check it out before the confab (here’s the link to Amazon)!

Matt Leighninger is the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, an alliance of organizations and leading scholars in the field of deliberation and public participation. With twenty years in the field, he has worked with public engagement efforts in over 100 communities, forty states, and four Canadian provinces.

Tina Nabatchi is an associate professor of public administration and international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. The author of several book chapters, monographs, research reports, and white papers, her research focuses on citizen participation, collaborative governance, and conflict resolution.

Our confabs (interactive conference calls) are free and open to all NCDD members and potential members. Register today if you’d like to join us!

More about the book…

Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decision-making and problem-solving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin, and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book explores the use of participation in various arenas, including education, health, land use, and state and federal government. It offers a practical framework for thinking about how to engage citizens effectively, and clear explanations of participation scenarios, tactics, and designs. Finally, the book provides a sensible approach for reshaping our participation infrastructure to meet the needs of public officials and citizens.

The book is filled with illustrative examples of innovative participatory activities, and numerous sources for more information. This important text puts the spotlight on the need for long-term, cross-sector, participation planning, and provides guidance for leaders, citizens, activists, and others who are determined to improve the ways that participation and democracy function.

About NCDD’s Confab Calls…

NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members (and potential Confab bubble imagemembers) of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing, and to connect with fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Register today if you’d like to join us.

ILG Seeks Input on California Public Engagement Survey

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We want to make sure that our NCDD members, especially those of you based in California, have a chance to hear about a key public engagement survey being conducted by the folks with the Institute for Local Government, one of NCDD’s member organizations.

ILG logoILG is looking for input from public officials and staff to help them and we encourage you to share the survey with folks in your network who they need to hear from.

Here’s how ILG describes the survey:

Does your community experience public engagement challenges? The Institute for Local Government (ILG) Public Engagement program provides information and resources to help local officials with the design, delivery and assessment of their public engagement processes. ILG has launched a survey and is seeking input from local officials and staff at all levels. The results of the survey will help ILG understand the community engagement experiences and needs of California communities.

This survey is part of a reflection, evaluation, and planning project funded by the James Irvine Foundation. ILG is seeking feedback from local elected officials and staff to better understand the impact of ILG resources and assistance, to help plan for the future.

Participants can enter to win one of ten $25 Visa gift cards. This survey will be open until July 31st. Please take the survey now!

We hope you’ll help ILG continue improving local public engagement by taking the survey yourself if you’re in the target audience or sharing it with those who are!

You can find the survey directly by visiting http://cacities.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe1/form/SV_bqI6PmKvsj7VBB3.

UN Hosts History’s Largest Global Climate Deliberation

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Last month, the team with the Jefferson Center, an NCDD member organization, hosted one of 96 day-long deliberations that occurred around the world where average citizens discussed what should be done about climate change. It was the largest ever such consultation, and the results from Minnesota and abroad are fascinating. We encourage you to read the Jefferson Center’s piece about the process and the results below, or find the original here.

JeffersonCenterLogoWorld Wide Views in the Twin Cities

This past Saturday, we hosted 70 Twin Cities metro area residents at the Science Museum in Saint Paul to discuss climate and energy issues as part of a global day of public deliberation. Organized by the World Wide Views Alliance, 75 countries around the world conducted World Wide Views on Climate and Energy forums in the largest ever global citizen consultation on climate change. The goal was to gather quantifiable public opinion to inform decision makers at every level, but particularly negotiators at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21).

Each of the 96 host sites followed the same agenda and addressed the same questions. The resulting data is credible and consistent, making the results an important asset to both researchers and politicians. Every site, including ours in St. Paul, provided participants with the same informational materials on current international climate policy issues. Participants were asked to discuss and vote on a series of questions designed to reflect controversies that might arise at the COP21 talks in Paris this December. Voting results were uploaded in real time.

67% of the Minnesota participants identified as “very concerned” about climate change, and 79% felt that the UN climate negotiations over the past twenty years had not done enough to tackle climate change. National and global percentages were very similar. 97% of Minnesota participants (along with 95% of US participants) agreed that our country should take some measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions even if other countries do not take action.

Minnesotans were slightly in favor of a carbon tax for all countries (with gradually increasing costs for countries that do not reduce their emissions), although a significant portion of the room also completely opposed a carbon tax, much more so than the global average. On the other hand, Minnesotans – in agreement with 59% of the United States participants – were more enthusiastic about cutting fossil fuel subsidies than the rest of the world, and slightly more in favor of stopping fossil fuel exploration than the global average.

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Twin Cities residents tended to agree with the rest of the world about international policy. 77% of Minnesota participants were in favor of a legally binding treaty in Paris, either for all countries or at least for developed and emerging nations. 97% of Minnesotan participants also agreed with the overwhelming national and global consensus that countries should update their climate commitments every five years after Paris.

Twin Cities participants were nearly unanimous (96%) in agreeing that all countries should report their emissions and report on the progress of their contribution to lower emissions, but were more divided about whether the UN should have the authority to conduct reviews for each country (55%) or only for global combined efforts (38%). These responses roughly reflect the average national and global data trends, but stand in stark contrast to the 70% of developed country participants in favor of the UN reviewing individual countries.

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Similarly controversial: the lengths different groups of people were willing to go in order to stop climate change. 71% of developed country participants thought that the world should do “whatever it takes to limit temperatures exceeding 2 degrees Celsius of warming,” but only 54% of Minnesotans agreed.

Participants from the seven county metro area were selected to, as near as possible, reflect the racial, gender, age, and educational diversity of the Twin Cities, in order to elevate the opinions representative of all metro area residents. The results from all World Wide Views sites will be shared with the delegates attending the COP21 meetings, both ahead of and during the negotiations in Paris. Compare results yourself at the World Wide Views results page.

Stay tuned for more posts as we continue to unpack World Wide Views results.

Public Agenda Launches Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment

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We were excited to hear a recent announcement from the team at Public Agenda – one of our great NCDD organizational members – about the creation of the new Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment, and we encourage you to join us in congratulating PA and its co-founder, Dr. Daniel Yankelovich, on the accomplishment!

PublicAgenda-logoThe Center’s official inauguration took place at PA’s celebration of both its 40th anniversary and Dan’s 90th birthday, which you can read more about here. The Yankelovich Center was made possible with the generous support of another wonderful NCDD member organization, the Kettering Foundation, and Kettering has committed to a robust program of joint research through the Center. Kettering’s president David Mathews created a video to commemorate the occasion, which you can see here.

Here’s some of what PA said about the new Center:

…Public Agenda is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment. The Center will develop, disseminate and apply Dan Yankelovich’s seminal ideas about democracy, including how the public comes to judgment, the public’s critical role in the functioning of a just and effective democracy and the conditions that help the public to play that role. We surprised Dan with an announcement of the Center during Public Agenda’s 40th anniversary celebration, which coincided with Dan’s 90th birthday.

The Yankelovich Center will  conduct original research, create tools, convene practitioners and thought leaders and join public conversations relevant to its mission. Its audiences will include public officials, public engagement practitioners, community leaders, and the fields of public participation, deliberative democracy, civic education and governance….

The Yankelovich Center explores questions including:

  • How do our increasingly fragmented news media, highly polarized national politics, fast-changing information and communications technologies and changing demographics affect the public’s ability to engage issues productively and come to public judgment?
  • What are the prime obstacles and enablers of public judgment in communities on community problems and nationally on national and international problems?
  • How does public judgment affect important changes in public policy or community life?
  • What are the best ways to cultivate public judgment and civic engagement among millennials, groups with low voting and political participation rates, or among and across people from very different cultural backgrounds?
  • What can be done to encourage a broader understanding of the concept of public judgment among elected officials and the media? How can existing institutions better support a more active, engaged and informed public and what are the most promising new institutions, tools and strategies?
  • What role should the ideas and practices of public judgment and civic engagement play in K-12 and higher education?

Along with the new Yakelovich Center, the Public Agenda team also announced their new Restoring Opportunity initiative, a 10-year commitment to tackling the issues surrounding the decline of educational, economic, and civic opportunities in America.

We can’t wait to start seeing some of the work that Public Agenda is gearing up for, and we congratulate them and Dan on their wonderful history and bright future!

You can find more information from Public Agenda on the Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment at www.publicagenda.org/pages/yankelovich-center-for-public-judgment#sthash.mf5Z8rhs.dpuf.

Call for Papers for New Journal of Dialogue Studies

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We are happy to share the announcement below from Elena Liedig of the Dialogue Society. Elena’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Call for Papers for Journal of Dialogue Studies
Autumn 2015, Volume 3, Number 2
Dialogue and Democracy

Paper submission deadline: 07/11/2015

This is a call for papers for the Journal of Dialogue Studies, a multidisciplinary, blind-peer-reviewed academic journal published twice a year. The Journal seeks to bring together a body of original scholarship on the theory and practice of dialogue that can be critically appraised and discussed. It aims to contribute towards establishing ‘dialogue studies’ as a distinct academic field (or perhaps even emerging discipline). It is hoped that this will be directly useful not only to scholars and students but also to professionals and practitioners working in different contexts at various cultural interfaces.

The Editors would like to call for papers providing ‘dialogue and democracy’ for the forthcoming issue. However, authors are also welcome to submit papers that address the topic of the previous issues, namely ‘social scientific and historical analysis of dialogue practice’, ‘dialogue ethics’, ‘critiquing dialogue theories’, or indeed any other paper that comes within the remit of the Journal as described below. All papers, regardless of their particular theme, will be considered so long as they are in line with the aims and focus of the Journal. Please see below for more information.

For the Journal’s Editorial Team, Editorial Board, article submission guideline, style-guide and past issues please click here or visit: www.DialogueStudies.org.

Papers within General Remit of Journal

The Journal publishes conceptual, research, and/or case-based works on both theory and practice, and papers that discuss wider social, cultural or political issues as these relate to the practice and evaluation of dialogue. Dialogue is understood provisionally as: meaningful interaction and exchange between individuals and/or people of different groups (social, cultural, political and religious) who come together through various kinds of conversations or activities with a view to increased understanding.

Some scholars will want to question that description of dialogue, and others may be sceptical of the effectiveness of dialogue as a mechanism to produce increased understanding. The Editors of course welcome vigorous discussion and debate on these and other fundamental questions.

The Editors do not have any preference as regards the general disciplinary background of the work. Indeed contributions will be welcome from a variety of disciplines which may, for example, include sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, the study of religion, politics, international relations or law.

Papers on ‘Dialogue and Democracy’

The Editors invite papers on dialogue and democracy, including papers critically appraising the following areas:

  • What is the relationship between dialogue and democracy?
  • How is dialogue espoused by different practitioners of democracy, from leaders to the general public?
  • The positive and negative impact dialogue can have on democracy.
  • What can democracy learn from dialogue?
  • Are politics and/or power structures within the context of a democratic system compatible with dialogue values and processes?
  • What role if any can dialogue play in supporting the processes that produce and develop government policies?
  • Are political ambitions and dialogic aspirations mutually exclusive?

Papers on ‘Social Scientific and Historical Analysis of Dialogue Practice’

  • Where do dialogue practices come from, sociologically and intellectually?
  • How has dialogue practice changed/developed over time in a particular place, religious/interreligious context and/or post conflict context?
  • How have dialogue practices been shaped by overlapping areas of theory, policy and practice?
  • How have dialogue practices themselves impacted upon societal issues or discourse?
  • Mapping the existing field of practice and study.
  • Sociological and historical analysis of the perception of the need for ‘dialogue’ given its current status as a preferred means of community engagement or management of community/intergroup tensions or conflict.
    (See Fern Elsdon-Baker, JDS 1:1)

Papers on ‘Dialogue Ethics’

The Editors invite papers with a focus on dialogue and ethics, including papers critically exploring the following areas:

  • Dialogic ethics as conceived by dialogue theorists such as Buber, Gadamer, Freire (and developed by others)
  • Ethics espoused and/or enacted by leaders of/participants in dialogue
  • Dialogue as a process of ethics formation/refinement
  • Underlying and perhaps unstated values in dialogue:
    • What kind of interaction is seen valid or as meaningful? What are the criteria? Who decides? (Fern Eldson-Baker, JDS 1:1)
    • Where building understanding is conceived as goal of dialogue, ‘what understandings are valued and how [are] such understandings… defined’? (Michael Atkinson, JDS 1:1)
  • Ethical pitfalls in the practice of dialogue

Papers on ‘Critiquing Dialogue Theories’

By dialogue ‘theories’ is meant developed, significant understandings or principles of dialogue. The Editors are open to papers exploring theories extrapolated by the author from the significant and distinctive practice of a dialogue practitioner who has perhaps not elaborated his/her ideas in writing. They invite papers which address critical/evaluative questions such as the following:

  • Which dialogue theories are/have been most influential in practice?
  • Do dialogue theories make sense in relation to relevant bodies of research and established theories?
  • Do dialogue theories sufficiently take account of power imbalances?
  • How far are dialogue theories relevant/useful to dialogue in practice?
  • Do normative dialogue theories have anything to offer in challenging contexts in which circumstances often suggested as preconditions for dialogue (for example, equality, empathetic listening, the bringing of assumption into the open, safety) simply do not obtain?

The Editors welcome papers which address these questions in relation to one or more than one specified dialogue theories. They also welcome critical case studies of the application of specified dialogue theories in practice.

In all papers submitted, a concern with the theory or practice of dialogue should be in the foreground.

While the Editors do not wish to be prescriptive about the definition of dialogue, they do specify that papers should have a clear bearing on ‘live’ dialogue – actual interaction between human beings; papers which analyse written, fictional dialogue without relating this clearly and convincingly to ‘live’ dialogue are not suitable for the Journal.

Case studies should include a high level of critical evaluation of the practice in question, and/or apply dialogue theory in a way that advances understanding or critique of that theory and/or its application.

Papers should be submitted by email attachment to: journal[at]dialoguesociety[dot]org and must be received by July 11th, 2015 in order to allow sufficient time for peer review. Manuscripts should be presented in a form that meets the requirements set out in Journal’s Article Submission Guidelines, provided here, and Style Guide, provided here. The running order for Volume 3, Number 2, listing the papers to be published in that issue, will be announced by the beginning of September 2015. For further information please click here.

Please send any queries to the Editorial Team via journal[at]dialoguesociety[dot]org.

Three New Papers (and a presentation) on Civic Tech

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This blog has been slow lately, but as I mentioned before, it is for a good cause. With some great colleagues I’ve been working on a series of papers (and a book) on civic technology. The first three of these papers are out. There is much more to come, but in the meantime, you can find below the abstracts and link to each of the papers. I also add the link to a presentation which highlights some other issues that we are looking at.

  • Effects of the Internet on Participation: Study of a Public Policy Referendum in Brazil.

Does online voting mobilize citizens who otherwise would not participate? During the annual participatory budgeting vote in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil – the world’s largest – Internet voters were asked whether they would have participated had there not been an online voting option (i-voting). The study documents an 8.2 percent increase in total turnout with the introduction of i-voting. In support of the mobilization hypothesis, unique survey data show that i-voting is mainly used by new participants rather than just for convenience by those who were already mobilized. The study also finds that age, gender, income, education, and social media usage are significant predictors of being online-only voters. Technology appears more likely to engage people who are younger, male, of higher income and educational attainment, and more frequent social media users.

Read more here.

  • The Effect of Government Responsiveness on Future Political Participation.

What effect does government responsiveness have on political participation? Since the 1940s political scientists have used attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy to explain participation. More recent work has focused on underlying genetic factors that condition citizen engagement. We develop a ‘Calculus of Participation’ that incorporates objective efficacy – the extent to which an individual’s participation actually has an impact – and test the model against behavioral data from FixMyStreet.com (n=399,364). We find that a successful first experience using FixMyStreet.com (e.g. reporting a pothole and having it fixed) is associated with a 54 percent increase in the probability of an individual submitting a second report. We also show that the experience of government responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of government responsiveness for fostering an active citizenry, while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory behavior at the individual level.

Read more here.

  • Do Mobile Phone Surveys Work in Poor Countries? 

In this project, we analyzed whether mobile phone-based surveys are a feasible and cost-effective approach for gathering statistically representative information in four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe). Specifically, we focused on three primary research questions. First, can the mobile phone survey platform reach a nationally representative sample? Second, to what extent does linguistic fractionalization affect the ability to produce a representative sample? Third, how effectively does monetary compensation impact survey completion patterns? We find that samples from countries with higher mobile penetration rates more closely resembled the actual population. After weighting on demographic variables, sample imprecision was a challenge in the two lower feasibility countries (Ethiopia and Mozambique) with a sampling error of /- 5 to 7 percent, while Zimbabwe’s estimates were more precise (sampling error of /- 2.8 percent). Surveys performed reasonably well in reaching poor demographics, especially in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Rural women were consistently under-represented in the country samples, especially in Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Countries’ linguistic fractionalization may influence the ability to obtain nationally representative samples, although a material effect was difficult to discern through penetration rates and market composition. Although the experimentation design of the incentive compensation plan was compromised in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, it seems that offering compensation for survey completion mitigated attrition rates in several of the pilot countries while not reducing overall costs. These effects varied across countries and cultural settings.

Read more here.

  • The haves and the have nots: is civic tech impacting the people who need it most? (presentation) 

Read more here.


NPR Covers Deliberative Polling Efforts in Tanzania

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We recently read a fascinating article from NPR on the cutting edge work being done by NCDD member James Fishkin of the Center for Deliberative Democracy when he shared a link to the article a few days ago on our NCDD Discussion Listserv. It’s a story that we think would interest many of our NCDDers, especially those doing D&D work across cultures.

James and the CDD have been advancing the technique and process of deliberative polling for years. They have recently been experimenting with deliberative polling in Tanzania around questions of how to spend the African nation’s forthcoming natural gas income, and the process has been filled with expected and unexpected challenges, which the article explores.

Here’s how the article starts:

It’s Not A Come-On From A Cult. It’s A New Kind Of Poll!

You get a visit by someone you’ve never met before. You’re invited on an all-expense paid trip to your country’s biggest city for a two-day meeting on natural gas policy.

Oh, and if you show up you get a free cellphone!

It might sound sketchy. But it’s actually an innovative strategy that is being tested by researchers at a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank, the Center for Global Development, or CGD, to help the African nation of Tanzania decide how to spend its expected windfall from new discoveries of natural gas.

Participants listened, they asked questions and then they went home, where they’ll be polled on their views.

The approach was actually first developed in the late 1980s by James Fishkin, a professor at Stanford University. Fishkin has devoted his career to persuading leaders to consult their citizens before making difficult policy decisions. But he says you can’t just do a poll.

“If you have ordinary polls people usually are not well-informed. You don’t want to follow public opinion when the public just has a vague impression of sound-bites and headlines.”

So Fishkin created what he calls a “deliberative poll.” You gather a representative sample of a population for a one- or two-day meeting. You give them tutorials on the issue and a chance to question experts from all sides. Then, you send them home and poll them…

The article gets much more interesting from there as it goes into the challenges of literacy and low education rates in Tanzania as well as some of the unusual cultural hurdles that James and his team had to overcome in getting rural Tanzanians to participate.

We encourage you to read the full article, or you can listen to the radio version of the story by clicking here.

You can find the original NPR story by visiting www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/18/406462789/its-not-a-come-on-from-a-satanic-cult-its-a-new-kind-of-poll.