Potential Solutions to Public Deliberation Problems: Structured Deliberations and Polarization Cascades

Some deliberative theorists advocate for increased public participation to improve the health and vitality of democracy, but skeptics warn that public deliberation may fall prey to multiple decision-making pathologies. We describe a research program based on structured public deliberations about science and technology policies that was designed to explore the validity of critics' worst fears. In this research, we specifically test the complaint that group deliberations often bias toward the original majority preferences because of cognitive and affective errors in decision making, such as deference to the numerical majority opinion held within a group. Our results, based on data collected from a set of small-group public deliberations about nanotechnology, offer weak support to the polarization hypothesis. We explain this finding as the likely consequence of manipulating two key variables of deliberations: task facilitation and the quality of the argument pool. As a result, we argue that it is possible to structure public deliberations about policy to mitigate known decision-making problems. We conclude by also warning scholars of the dangers in assuming that opinion change consistent with polarization effects is inherently the result of undesirable decision-making qualities.