PARTICIPATORY POLICYMAKING ACROSS CULTURAL COGNITIVE DIVIDES: TWO TESTS OF CULTURAL BIASING IN PUBLIC FORUM DESIGN AND DELIBERATION
| Author | JOHN GASTIL,DAN KAHAN,DON BRAMAN,KATHERINE R. KNOBLOCH |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12255 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12255
PARTICIPATORY POLICYMAKING ACROSS CULTURAL
COGNITIVE DIVIDES: TWO TESTS OF CULTURAL
BIASING IN PUBLIC FORUM DESIGN AND
DELIBERATION
JOHN GASTIL, KATHERINE R. KNOBLOCH, DAN KAHAN AND DON BRAMAN
Deliberative theorists posit that highly structured face-to-face policy discussions can transcend ide-
ological differences. By contrast, cultural cognitive theorists argue that people’s cultural orientations
constrain policy-relevant information processing and forestall the public’s ability to reach consen-
sus. Two studies examine whether deliberative processes can span divergent cultural orientations.
The rst assesses a prominent deliberative forum programme’s capacity to frame policy solutions
across the quadrants of a two-dimensional cultural grid. The second study examines whether delib-
eration generates policy recommendations that transcend biases to yield cross-cultural agreement.
Results show that public deliberation can encompass multiple cultural orientations and encourage
participants to look beyond their biases to discover common ground. When it comes to framing and
implementing deliberative public forums, cultural orientations appear to be surmountable obstacles.
INTRODUCTION
The past two decades of scholarship on public policy and governance have ushered in a
wave of theory and research on the public’s role in policymaking. Participatory policy pro-
cesses are partly a response to more elite-based and technical processes (Steelman 2001),
and they aim to transcend the more simplistic public engagement processes used in con-
ventional policymaking (Renn et al. 1995; Van den Hove 2000; Papadopoulos and Warin
2007; Michels and De Graaf 2010).
One prominent (and promising) version of participatory innovation advocates delib-
erative democratic policymaking (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Dryzek 2010; Kies and
Nanz 2013). Deliberative democratic models contrast with adversarial and interest-based
political debate and policymaking (Mansbridge 1983; Chambers 2003; Leighninger 2006;
Fishkin 2009). The differences between these approaches are so vast that one might worry
that the critical yardstick of deliberative democracy is less useful as an evaluation tool and
better suited for giving a sharp spank to the hindquarters of actual governing systems
(Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012; Gutmann and Thompson 2014).
Nevertheless, experiments in public deliberation suggest that the public has the capacity
for thoughtful discussion, and public institutions have the exibility to incorporate such
discourse (Nabatchi et al. 2012; Grönlund et al. 2014). The success of the jury system in the
United States and other countries (Vidmar 2000) suggests that even divided societies can
incorporate citizen deliberation. The lack of deliberation in modern institutions reects
historical patterns toward corrosive discourse, not inevitabilities (Bessette 1994). Indeed,
systematic studies of modern legislatures nd considerable variation in their deliberative
quality, which in turn explains their ability to reach consensus (Bächtiger et al. 2005).
John Gastil is at the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences, Pennsylvania State University,USA. Katherine R.
Knobloch is at the Department of Communication, Colorado State University,USA. Dan Kahan is at the Yale Law School,
USA. Don Braman is at the George WashingtonUniversity Law School, USA.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (970–987)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
CULTURAL COGNTIVE DIVIDES 971
As deliberative democratic theory has become more empirical (Thompson 2008; Jacobs
et al. 2009; Neblo et al. 2010), it requires testing alongside equally strong but divergenttheo-
retical perspectives. Cultural cognitive theory provides such a juxtaposition. This perspec-
tive emerged out of a broader cultural account, which posits that the nature of our relations
within existing social and institutional arrangements shapes how we approach the world
(Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Swedlow 2011). As Swedlow (2014, p. 468) explains, ‘dif-
ferent types of social and political relations are accompanied by values and beliefs …that
allow people to justify these relationships to each other’.
Change occurs within cultural groups when something that is ‘anomalous from one cul-
tural perspective’ can be ‘better explained or understood from another’ (Swedlow 2014,
p. 470). People have the capacity to reect on their social conditions and beliefs, even
across lines of cultural difference. They can potentially adapt their policy views or even
converge (Rayner 1992; Bellamy et al. 2014), particularly when placed in a well-structured
deliberative social setting that engenders trust in the process (Ney and Verweij 2014).
The more narrow focus here is a variant from that theory. This ‘cultural cognition’
perspective draws inspiration from cultural theory by placing people on a conceptually
related two-dimensional grid, but it departs in at least three ways: cultural theory species
the worldviews within that grid differently (e.g. eschewing the concept of ‘fatalism’); it
more commonly views the grid’s dimensions as continuous, rather than as quadrants;
and it alters the labels of the grid’s dimensions, which in cultural cognition range from
hierarchical to egalitarian and from individualistic to collectivistic (e.g. Kahan et al. 2007,
2010; see Ripberger et al. 2015). Even within cultural theory, however, labels have varied
across theorists, as noted by Tansey and O’Riordan (1999).
Substantive differences in the interpretations of the cultural quadrants lead to
different emphases about the primary cultural conicts. In cultural theory, the ‘sta-
ble diagonal’ that generates cultural clash stretches from low-grid/low-group to
high-grid/high-group – that is, between individualism and hierarchy (Tansey and
O’Riordan 1999; Grendstad 2003). In cultural cognition, the more common conict lies
between hierarchical-individualists and egalitarian-collectivists (e.g. Gastil et al. 2011).
Another major departure is the conviction that one’s cultural orientation remains rela-
tively static within individuals’ belief systems. Once formed, a cultural orientation gener-
ates a worldview resistant to alternative value propositions and different conceptions of
reality. Modern pluralistic societies feature a conict among rival orientations to the world
and the public policy problems people face (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Kahan 2012).
Though the content of cultural belief systems can change in response to elite cues (Kahan
et al. 2010), when those cues are static within each cultural group, it is unclear whether
cross-cultural policy deliberation is even possible.
In this article, we draw on the cultural cognitive approach in studying the potential
for structuring participatory policy deliberation that engages people of diverse cultural
orientations. To addresstwo distinct questions, we look at two cases – the National Issues
Forums (Melville et al. 2005) and the 2010 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (Knobloch
et al. 2013).
The rst case permits us to answer the question: is it possible to frame policy issues in a
way that spans the full variety of cultural orientations? Biased issue framing is a common
concern in deliberative designs (Calvert and Warren2014; Lee 2014). Deliberation itself can
appear to have a liberal or egalitarian bias in its emphasis on procedural fairness (Gastil
et al. 2010; Weiksner et al. 2012), though deliberation’s restraint of revolutionary impulses
provides a countervailing conservative bias (Levine and Nierras 2007; Lee et al. 2015). Our
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (970–987)
© 2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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