Public Administration and Public Deliberation: An Interpretive Essay

What is good public deliberation?

March-April 2012 When assigned the task of describing and updating essential health benefits for qualified health plans in the Affordable Care Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services turned to the Institute of Medicine for advice. An IOM committee recommended that “structured public deliberative processes be established to identify the values and priorities of those citizens eligible to...

Public Finance: Essay for the Encyclopedia of Public Choice

Spatial Annotation Technology for Public Deliberation

Many public policies and decisions deal with geospatially expressed problems that are complex and controversial in nature. Broad participation of all interested parties in the form of deliberative dialogues is crucial to making trustworthy decisions. However, supporting deliberative dialogues on spatial problems places unique requirements for technology mediation that go beyond the current stat...

Information Technology in Support of Public Deliberation

Increased citizen-to-citizen discussion and deliberation is an important potential of digital government initiatives. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal study of such outcomes using household survey data, focus groups and one-on-one interviews from a mature community network the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) in Blacksburg, Virginia, and surrounding Montgomery County. It addr...

Just Talk: Public Deliberation After 9/11

Critics of public deliberation as conventionally practiced have charged that it is “just talk” in the sense both that it substitutes sociable conversation for practical deliberation and that it substitutes political talk for political action. I argue that both criticisms rest on unnecessarily restrictive models of talk and politics. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with eighty ...