▪ Abstract Many theorists have long extolled the virtues of public deliberation as a crucial component of a responsive and responsible democracy. Building on these theories, in recent years practitioners—from government officials to citizen groups, nonprofits, and foundations—have increasingly devoted time and resources to strengthening citizen engagement through deliberative forums. Although empirical research has lagged behind theory and practice, a body of literature has emerged that tests the presumed individual and collective benefits of public discourse on citizen engagement. We begin our review of this research by defining “public deliberation”; we place it in the context of other forms of what we call “discursive participation” while distinguishing it from other ways in which citizens can voice their individual and collective views on public issues. We then discuss the expectations, drawn from deliberative democratic theory, regarding the benefits (and, for some, pitfalls) assumed to derive from p...

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Public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature

Conflicts of interest can lead experts to give biased and corrupt advice. Although disclosure is often proposed as a potential solution to these problems, we show that it can have perverse effects. First, people generally do not discount advice from biased advisors as much as they should, even when advisors’ conflicts of interest are disclosed. Second, disclosure can increase the bias in advice because it leads advisors to feel morally licensed and strategically encouraged to exaggerate their advice even further. As a result, disclosure may fail to solve the problems created by conflicts of interest and may sometimes even make matters worse.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426699

The Dirt on Coming Clean: Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest

Should citizens be encouraged to deliberate about matters of politics? A review of several literatures about group discussion yields a mixed prognosis for citizen deliberation. Group discussion sometimes meets the expectations of deliberative theorists, other times falls short. Deliberators can, as theorists wish, conduct themselves with empathy for others, equality, and open-mindedness. But attempts to deliberate can also back­ fire. Social dynamics can often account for both discussions that appear deliberative and for those that clearly fail to meet deliberative criteria. In the beginning was the group. This is the fundamental truth about human nature and politics, and neither modem nor contemporary political theory has yet come to tenns with it (Alford. 1994, p. 1).

/pdf/the-deliberative-citizen-theory-and-evidence-4cobwan6xh.pdf

The deliberative citizen: theory and evidence

This quantitative review of 130 comparisons of interindividual and intergroup interactions in the context of mixed-motive situations reveals that intergroup interactions are generally more competitive than interindividual interactions. The authors identify 4 moderators of this interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect, each based on the theoretical perspective that the discontinuity effect flows from greater fear and greed in intergroup relative to interindividual interactions. Results reveal that each moderator shares a unique association with the magnitude of the discontinuity effect. The discontinuity effect is larger when (a) participants interact with an opponent whose behavior is unconstrained by the experimenter or constrained by the experimenter to be cooperative rather than constrained by the experimenter to be reciprocal, (b) group members make a group decision rather than individual decisions, (c) unconstrained communication between participants is present rather than absent, and (d) conflict of interest is severe rather than mild.

Beyond the group mind: a quantitative review of the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect

Intergroup conflicts generally involve conflicts of interests within the competing groups as well. This article outlines a taxonomy of games, called team games, which incorporates the intragroup and intergroup levels of conflict. Its aims are to provide a coherent framework for analyzing the prototypical problems of cooperation and competition that arise within and between groups, and to review an extensive research program that has used this framework to study individual and group behavior in the laboratory. Depending on the game's payoff structure, contradictions or conflicts are created among the rational choices at the individual, group, and collective levels-a generalization of the contradiction between individual and collective rationality occurring in the traditional mixed-motive games. These contradictions are studied so as to identify the theoretical and behavioral conditions that determine which level of rationality prevails.

Intergroup conflict: individual, group, and collective interests

The present research was designed to explore the role of communication on interindividual-intergroup discontinuity in the context of the PDG-Alt matrix. (The PDG-Alt matrix is a prisoner's dilemma game matrix that adds a third withdrawal choice to the usual cooperative and uncooperative choices of the PDG matrix, and interindividual-intergroup discontinuity is the tendency of intergroup relations to be more competitive and less cooperative than interindividual relations.) Several predictions implied by the fear and greed explanations of interindividual-intergroup discontinuity were tested. One prediction, an implication of the fear hypothesis, is that communication should produce a larger increase in the cooperation of individuals than of groups. This prediction is based partially on the assumption that the outgroup schema, which leads to more fear of groups than of individuals, should reduce the credibility of between group communication. Given, however, that without communication individuals may not coo...

The Role of Communication in Interindividual-Intergroup Discontinuity

The present research involved an examination of interindividual-intergroup discontinuity in the context of three different generalizations of the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG). (Interindividual-int...

Garry Bornstein

Papers

The Role of Communication in Interindividual-Intergroup Discontinuity

Interindividual-Intergroup Discontinuity in the Prisoner's Dilemma Game