Darrin Hicks

The Influence of Collaboration on Program Outcomes: The Colorado Nurse--Family Partnership.

Though collaboration is often required in community initiatives, little evidence documents relationships between collaboration and program success. The authors contend that clarification of the construct collaboration is necessary for investigating its contribution to the success of community initiatives. After respecifying collaboration, they present a study of a multisite program that involved varying degrees of collaboration in the 16 communities adopting a nurse home visitation program. The authors employ hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to test the predictive power of individual participant characteristics and examine the increased accuracy of predictions from a second level model of site qualities—specifically, features of the collaborative process associated with different sites. The first-level model predicted approximately 10% of the variance in attrition, or dropout, of program clients. The second-level model accounted for an additional 28% of the variance in attrition. A theory of commitment transfer is offered as a first explanation of this result.

Lost convictions : Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens

This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides – having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution – in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for ‘decision by debate’ prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and re-articulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy.

Regulating Disagreement, Constituting Participants: A Critique of Proceduralist Theories of Democracy

In his keynote address at the 1995 Ontario Society for the Study ofArgumentation conference, Frans van Eemeren contended that ‘[a]rgu-mentative discussion is the main tool for managing democratic processes’and therefore, ‘argumentation should be valued as the elixir of life of par-ticipatory democracy’ (1995, p. 145). Because we agree that argumenta-tion is the lifeblood of democratic governance, we believe that it is crucialto explicate the relationship between argumentation and democracy. Thisrelationship is complex, and the lack of a single account of argumentativeactivity or a unitary conception of democracy makes its analysis difficult.Joseph Wenzel (1990) identifies three distinct perspectives from whichto theorize argumentation: –a logical perspective focuses on relevancy, sufficiency, and acceptabilityof the arguments made by individuals to justify their convictions;–a rhetorical perspective focuses on the process by which argumentativediscourse simultaneously appeals to and creates the communal identi-ties and norms that serve as the bases for persuasion (cf. Greene, 1997);and –a dialectical perspective finds in communicative interaction the resourcesfor developing a set of principled procedures for resolving differencesof opinion.Correlatively, we propose, Jurgen Habermas (1994, 1996a) identifies threenormative conceptions of democracy:–a liberal conception understands the role of government as mediatingbetween the conflicting private interests of individuals;–a republican conception understands the purpose of politics as thearticulation of a common good embodied in the ethical life of a com-munity; and–a procedural conception claims democratic legitimacy cannot be guar-anteed by either the administrative capacities of the state/ market orthe virtues of ethical communities, but instead is grounded in the very

The New Citizen

Contemporary political struggles are often framed as a conflict between liberaltolerance and moral conviction, such as the contests over sexual freedom or the clashof religious convictions animating the so-called war on terror. But this frame ismisleading. The choice confronting citizens engaged in these controversies is notbetween genuine moral commitment or an amoral self-indulgence*because, asJudith Shklar argues, liberal tolerance itself entails a rigorous ethical commitment:‘‘Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult andconstraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure the risks of freedom.’’

Managed Convictions: Debate and the Limits of Electoral Politics

In response to Kathleen Hall Jamiesons proposed agenda for future Presidential debate research, we recall the troubled relation between debate and conviction, which has fueled disciplinary and public controversy throughout the last century. Following a brief genealogy of three such controversies, we describe four models of debate as a cultural technology for managing the economy of moral conviction: debate as critical deliberation, debate as civic virtue, debate as social justice, and debate as game. We claim that reading Jamiesons proposal in light of these technologies reveals a potentially disturbing fault line: if we fail to distance the aims and methods of Presidential debate research from the game-like status of contemporary electoral politics, her research proposal will be subsumed by the professionalized communication apparatus of managed democracy.