Associate Professor

Dept. of Communication
University of Washington

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Nearly all of my research has derived from the core concept of deliberative democracy. A deliberative democracy includes all of these elements: face-to-face deliberation among citizens in public institutions, a deliberative mass media and electoral process, and a larger set of cultural norms promoting deliberation as an essential mode of discourse. Citizen deliberation on public policy issues is the heart of the democratic process because it develops the public's political skills, discourse, and viewpoints. Without deliberation, democracy is simply a relatively fair means of aggregating uninformed policy preferences. Democratic systems, both large and small, also need deliberation to maintain their legitimacy and vitality. Many modern political scientists, political philosophers, and communication scholars have turned their attention to the role of deliberation in democratic institutions.

In The Deliberative Democracy Handbook, Peter Levine and I showed how the idea of deliberation has ebbed and flowed in the United States.1 After reviewing the larger social, political, and economic forces that cause these upturns and downturns in the fortunes of deliberative democracy, we cautioned readers not to take for granted the current interest in open public discussion.2 In the final Handbook chapter, Peter Levine, Archon Fung and I suggested that deliberative practices will face their greatest challenges when they seek to be institutionalized. At this stage, they become high-stakes political reforms that could become compromised by public agencies, captured by special interests, or rendered irrelevant by intractable cultural conflicts.3

The most in-depth conceptual work I have written on deliberation thus far is the article I published with two graduate students in Communication Theory.4 This essay laid out the most comprehensive definition of face-to-face public deliberation to date,5 and it advanced an empirical model of how deliberation sustains itself. We hypothesized that deliberation’s effects on participants can reinforce the attitudes, dispositions, and perceptions that promote future deliberation. For instance, deliberation can reinforce a person’s sense of shared civic identity with fellow deliberations; when future opportunities for deliberation arise, that person is then more likely to perceive a potential for common ground, one of the predictors of successful deliberation.6

Citations:

• Gastil, J. The deliberative vision: Political communication and the democratic ideal (in progress)
• Levine, P., Fung, A, & Gastil, J. (2005). Future directions for public deliberation. In J. Gastil & P. Levine (Eds.), The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 271-288). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Gastil, J. (2005). Communication as deliberation. In Shepherd, G. J., St. John, J., & Striphas, T. (eds.) Communication As . . . : Stances on Theory (pp. 164-173). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Gastil, J., & Keith, W. (2005). A nation that (sometimes) likes to talk: A brief history of public deliberation in the United States. In J. Gastil & P. Levine (Eds.), The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 1-19). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• The self-reinforcing model of public deliberation. Communication Theory (2002)

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1 Gastil, J., & Levine, P. (Eds.) (2005). The deliberative democracy handbook: Strategies for effective civic engagement in the twenty-first century. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

2 Gastil & Keith, “A nation that (sometimes) likes to talk: A brief history of public deliberation in the United States” (2005).

3 Levine, Fung, & Gastil, “Future directions for public deliberation” (2005).

4 Burkhalter, Gastil, & Kelshaw, “A conceptual definition and theoretical model of public deliberation in small face-to-face groups” (2002).

5 Though designed for face-to-face groups, it extends easily to online groups; see Gastil, “Face-to-face citizen deliberation: A luxury or necessity?” (2000).

6 My current book project, The Deliberative Vision: Political Communication and the Democratic Ideal (under contract with SAGE), draws together diverse conceptions of deliberation. Building on the definition advanced in the Communication Theory article, I argue that the same conceptual framework can encompass deliberation at many levels of analysis—from small discussion groups, to legislatures, to electoral systems, to entire societies. Using this common framework, I pull together the diverse theories and findings from the discipline of political communication and show how they flow out of the deliberative critique of existing communication practices.