Is Telling Stories Good for Democracy? Rhetoric in Public Deliberation after 9/11:

TLDR: In this article, a sociological perspective on the rhetorical conditions for good public deliberation is developed, which is a topic of longstanding interest to scholars of the public sphere, and the authors appraise this argument by way of a systematic comparison of personal storytelling and reason-giving, and conclude that storytelling helped deliberators to identify their own preferences, demonstrate their appreciation of competing pref...

Abstract: This article develops a sociological perspective on the rhetorical conditions for good public deliberation, a topic of longstanding interest to scholars of the public sphere. The authors argue that the capacity of reason-giving, storytelling, and other rhetorical genres to foster deliberation depends on social conventions of the genre's use and popular beliefs about its credibility relative to other genres. Such beliefs are structured but contingently so: concerns about the generalizability of personal stories or the abstraction of logical arguments come into play on some occasions and not others. The authors appraise this argument by way of a systematic comparison of personal storytelling and reason-giving in public deliberation, the first such empirical study. Drawing upon an analysis of 1,415 claims made by 263 people in 12 discussion groups, the authors show that ordinary conventions of storytelling helped deliberators to identify their own preferences, demonstrate their appreciation of competing pref...