Making public deliberation: A study of moderator episode work at National Issues Forums.

摘要

National Issues Forums (NIFs) are the most established of an increasing number of local and national initiatives aimed at improving democracy by involving citizens in public deliberation around important social issues. Research has largely ignored the communication patterns that make up the discussions at the heart of these public deliberation initiatives, especially those of the moderators charged with making these discussions deliberative. To address this void in the literature and improve understanding of the nature of public deliberation and how it is facilitated, this dissertation documents a study of communication patterns evidenced in video recordings of five NIF groups. It focuses specifically on the moderators and how they worked to make the forum episodes deliberative. The study is grounded in the social constructionist Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory of communication, and informed by discursive psychology and frame analysis.;This dissertation is centered on a thick description of NIF moderators' communication patterns in each of the three stages of the forums. The description shows multilevel discourse analyses focusing on what the moderators did with their speech acts, how these were accomplished, and how they worked to shape the episodes the moderators were working to construct. The description reveals complex interactive practices at multiple levels. At a big picture level, the moderators skillfully managed the dilemma of working toward two contrasting types of episodes: they were powerful actors controlling the forum episodes, while at the same time they worked to encourage the participants to engage in self-regulated episodes of deliberative conversation. At more detailed levels, the moderators' work involved various moves, types of talk, and discursive strategies to construct these two very different types of episodes and manage the tension of working simultaneously toward both.;The findings of this study offer an enriched vocabulary for describing and critically interpreting NIFs and similar discussion-based meetings. This vocabulary contributes to both research and practice. The moderator dilemma identified in the study has broad implications for theory and for various practices involved in the design and implementation of public deliberation initiatives and other facilitated participatory processes.;KEY WORDS: communication as social construction, small group facilitation, discourse analysis, Coordinated Management of Meaning, deliberative democracy