Deliberative Civic Culture: Assessing the Prevalence of Deliberative Conversational Norms
| Author | Katrin Uba,Julia Jennstål,PerOla Öberg |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719899036 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719899036
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(2) 366 –389
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032321719899036
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Deliberative Civic Culture:
Assessing the Prevalence of
Deliberative Conversational
Norms
Julia Jennstål, Katrin Uba and
PerOla Öberg
Abstract
Citizens’ adherence to deliberative civic values fulfils a vital function in deliberative democratic
systems. We propose a way to measure the prevalence and variations of such values as a first step
to better understanding how this works. Based on survey data, we demonstrate that, in Sweden,
adherence to the values of reasoning and listening is stronger than adherence to the strategic
rhetorical, non-deliberative values. This may have important implications for our understanding
of how deliberation and democracy work in this particular context. There are also, however,
important individual-level variations of adherence to deliberative civic values related to age,
education, gender and Swedish background. Taken together, this opens up for a new research
agenda where comparative analyses of deliberative civic values and how it relates to political
behaviour are particularly encouraged.
Keywords
deliberative norms, political culture, deliberative systems, civic values, deliberation
Accepted: 15 December 2019
Introduction
Deliberative democratic theory has gone through a ‘systemic turn’ where increased atten-
tion is given to the interplay of various institutions, locations and actors and how they are
‘connected in such a way as to form a complex whole’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 4). This
has led scholars to call for the ‘mapping’ and ‘measuring’ of deliberative systems to work
out the details of how democratic deliberative systems work (Bächtiger and Parkinson,
2019). We contribute to this discussion by turning attention to the function of deliberative
civic values, which parallels research on the broader concept of democratic civic culture
(Almond and Verba, 2015).
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Corresponding author:
PerOla Öberg, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Box 514, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.
Email: perola.oberg@statsvet.uu.se
899036PSX0010.1177/0032321719899036Political StudiesJennstål et al.
research-article2020
Article
Jennstål et al. 367
Democracy scholars have demonstrated how democratic civic culture, which denotes
the widespread acknowledgement of values such as individual liberty, political tolerance
and political trust (Gibson et al., 1992: 332), is related to thriving democracy (Almond
and Verba, 2015). Likewise, important deliberative studies stress situational and contex-
tual explanations to citizens’ deliberative conduct (Neblo et al., 2010), which indicates
the potential of surrounding civic values to influence citizens’ political understanding.
However, previous studies on deliberative culture have mainly been concerned with the
universality of deliberation and cultural interpretations of deliberative practices focused
on small-scale events (He, 2014; Sass and Dryzek, 2014), and only scant attention has
been given to civic values as a contextual condition. In accordance with other civic val-
ues, it is likely that people adhere to deliberative civic values to different degrees, and
therefore it is important to develop tools to understand those variations.
In this article, we aim to develop and calibrate an instrument that can be used to meas-
ure the presence of deliberative civic values. Based on deliberative conversational rules,
we develop deliberative civic values indexes and examine the extent to which citizens
recognize the significance of these values in political interactions. To contrast our find-
ings, we also include a set of questions intended to capture the prevalence of non-deliber-
ative values where political discussions are thought of as a ‘rhetorical battleground’,
where politics is more about strategic then communicative action (Risse, 2000).
We apply our instrument on data from a survey with a representative sample of 1207
respondents living in Sweden (the survey was distributed to 5000 persons, and the
response rate was 29.4%). The results demonstrate that deliberative values form two dis-
tinct dimensions of reasoning and listening. The reasoning aspect of deliberation appears
more uniform and highly accepted by the respondents, while the listening aspect of delib-
eration is more demanding, varies more among the citizens and is more likely to be found
among people with higher education. The results also demonstrate that non-deliberative
values, which we argue should be understood as strategic rhetorical values, are associated
with a third underlying dimension.
We show that deliberative conversational values are fairly widespread in Sweden.
Respondents embrace deliberative civic values to a significant degree, while at the same
time they support strategic rhetorical values to a much lesser degree. This indicates
favourable conditions for a relatively vital deliberative culture in Sweden, which may
have important implications for democracy as well as for the design of deliberative inno-
vations (Grönlund et al., 2014). We also find that recognition of deliberative values varies
depending on the respondents’ socio-economic, cultural and psychological background,
similar to how these are shown to relate to citizens’ deliberative skills and capacities (e.g.
Gerber et al., 2018).
We proceed by first outlining the main arguments for why it is important to study
deliberative civic values. Next we introduce the deliberative civic values index together
with the items used to empirically assess each value. Finally, the results are presented
where we first draw attention to underlying dimensions of deliberative values and then
discuss possible explanations for variations in citizens’ adherence to deliberative civic
values.
Why Study Deliberative Civic Values?
Pivotal work in social research has demonstrated that a vital civic culture is related to
democracy and participation (e.g. Almond and Verba, 2015; Inglehart, 2000). While these
To continue reading
Request your trial