John Boswell

Why and how Narrative Matters in Deliberative Systems

Narrative has become a fashionable concept in the everyday practice and analysis of democratic politics. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, activists and commentators all talk about the importance of constructing and controlling narratives in democratic debate. Yet astonishingly, the pre-eminent way of thinking about public debate in democratic theory – deliberative democracy – has almost nothing to say about narrative. Drawing on the substantial bodies of literature on narrative in general, and on its relationship to public debate in particular, this article argues that narrative is in fact a crucial aspect of democratic deliberation. In light of the ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative theory, which sees deliberation as occurring across a range of differentiated but interconnected spaces, it suggests that narrative is a crucial device by which people talk and think about complex and contested issues. It argues that deliberative democrats must come to terms with narrative because its pervasive influence can affect deliberative systems in important ways. The article outlines these potential impacts – both those that reinforce deliberative ideals and those that conflict with them. It concludes by looking at the broader implications for the practice, theory and study of deliberative democracy.

Who speaks, and in what voice? The challenge of engaging ‘the public’ in health policy decision-making

Abstract Despite widespread calls for greater public involvement in governance, especially in relation to health policy, significant challenges remain in identifying any such legitimate ‘public’ voice. This research investigates this problem through a case study. It examines how actors experienced and interpreted a government-commissioned citizen’s jury on health spending prioritization in relation to the work of the local health care consumers’ organization. The analysis highlights an unproductive tension around this encounter, and points to more complementary ways in which such top–down and bottom–up efforts might be coordinated. It, therefore, contributes significantly to efforts to strengthen the public voice in contemporary health governance.

Studying public deliberation after the systemic turn: the crucial role for interpretive research

The recent shift towards a deliberative systems approach suggests understanding public deliberation as a communicative activity occurring in a diversity of spaces. While theoretically attractive, the deliberative systems approach raises a number of methodological questions for empirical social scientists. For example, how to identify multiple communicative sites within a deliberative system, how to study connections between different sites, and how to assess the impact of the broader context on deliberative forums and systems? Drawing on multiple case studies, this article argues that interpretive research methods are well-suited to studying the ambiguities, dynamics and politics of complex deliberative systems.

Stoic Democrats? Anti-politics, élite cynicism and the policy process

ABSTRACT Disenchantment with politics appears to be proliferating throughout contemporary liberal democracies, as outlined in the growing literature on anti-politics. Overwhelmingly, this literature has focused on the disaffection citizens express towards the policy process. Here, using policy-making on the issue of obesity in Australia and Britain as a case study, we show that disenchantment is not limited to citizen outsiders; the élite policy actors at the core of the process are cynical, too. Indeed, we unveil an élite cast of ‘stoic democrats’ who see little reward for their continual efforts. We also point to the limits of stoicism highlighted by this ‘extreme’ case, as some élites begin to challenge the legitimacy of formal policy processes, subvert their norms, or ignore them altogether, all in search of more direct impact. We conclude that the literature on anti-politics would benefit from paying greater attention to the potential challenge élite cynicism presents to democratic governance.

Julia Gillard's Citizens' Assembly Proposal for Australia: A Deliberative Democratic Analysis

Many governments have embraced the rhetoric of inclusive citizen engagement. Greater public involvement promises to strengthen democratic institutions and improve the quality of policy decisions and services. How do these aspirations sit alongside the reality of Australian federal politics? This article investigates the responses of elite policy actors to the Gillard governments proposal to conduct a citizens’ assembly on climate change in 2010. Drawing on over 200 media articles, the authors identify a series of procedural, institutional and political objections raised by elite commentators against the citizens’ assembly proposal. Many of these objections have little basis in the experience of deliberative designs in practice. Some, however, reflect the challenge of realising inclusive, deliberative governance in highly politicised contexts. 很多政府对公民广泛参与的说辞爱不释手。更大程度上的公共参与有助于强化民主体制，改善政策及服务的质量。这种渴望与澳大利亚联邦政治的现实相处如何呢？本文考察了政策精英对杰拉德政府倡议在2010年召开的气候变化公民大会的反应。本文浏览了200多篇媒体文章，发现了这些人从程序、体制、政治等等方面反对公民大会的倡议。不少反对意见在精心设计的实践经验中并没多少基础。但有些却反映了高度政治化的语境中正在实现的广泛参与所构成的挑战。

Embracing impressionism: revealing the brush strokes of interpretive research

For its most prominent proponents, interpretive research is emphatically a ‘systematic’ craft; though iterative and creative, if practiced expertly it enables the researcher to progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive and convincing interpretation of both the political phenomenon under investigation and its scholarly significance. We argue that this process is neither as systematic in nature nor as satisfying in execution as such a characterization implies. Instead, drawing on our own experiences of conducting this sort of research, we argue that the craft is inherently an ‘impressionistic’ one; it entails the deliberate and at times painful creation of a stylized and simplified account. By necessity, doing interpretation means glossing over complexity or presenting a partial representation in order to say something meaningful to academic and practitioner audiences. We argue that instead of shying away from the impressionistic nature of their work, interpretive researchers like us should embrace it, and that doing so will buttress this type of research from criticism, enhance its connection to the policy world, and strengthen its appeal from within.

Deliberating downstream: countering democratic distortions in the policy process

Key theorists and scholars of democracy have focused on understanding and enhancing the institutions and practices that shape decision-making. Indeed, the most influential contemporary normative account—the deliberative version—though increasingly adapted to the complex realities of contemporary politics, retains a tight focus on the conditions of legitimate will formation. This remains the core underpinning the normative the impetus for innovation and reform in contemporary democratic politics. Yet missing from even the adapted deliberative account is detailed consideration of what happens after will formation. In this paper, I turn to the policy and administration literature to show how the inescapably attritional and opaque policy process can magnify asymmetries that theorists and scholars of contemporary democracy, chief among them deliberative democrats, ought to be much better attuned to. I argue that in failing to consider these problems adequately, contemporary democratic thinkers, scholars and reformers risk lending legitimacy to institutions and practices that might sustain the very biases they are mobilized against. As such, I identify institutional innovations and governing practices that can embed aspects of democratic deliberation ‘downstream’ in the policy process in order to counter distortions and rebalance asymmetries. I conclude by calling for theorists, researchers and reformers to explore the value of these institutions and practices, and expand the repertoire of governing mechanisms available to counter the distortions that occur through the policy process.

An Antipodean History of Interpretation

Elsewhere, especially in Europe and North America, the interpretive approach to political research has emerged as a counter identity. Key figures like Dvora Yanow and Frank Fischer have typically defined and defended interpretivism in opposition to the positivist paradigm they see as dominant in the North American and European contexts. In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism’s core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these researchers echoes key tenets of interpretivism, especially through an interest in subjective beliefs and experiences, a desire to uncover and bring to life richly contextualised detail, and a commitment to the abductive linking of theory and practice. As such, we suggest that the spread of this counter identity to interpretive researchers in Australia risks manufacturing a sense of methodological antipathy, marginalising the work of interpretivists from mainstream political scholarship

Message received? Examining transmission in deliberative systems

ABSTRACT With the systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory, there is renewed and broadened emphasis on the inclusion of all affected by a political decision in the making of those decisions. The key enabler of inclusion at a system level is transmission: theoretically, a deliberative system is more democratic if it can foster the transmission of claims and ideas across different sites, especially between informal sites of public deliberation and the more formal institutions of political decision-making. Yet little is known about the mechanisms of transmission in deliberative systems. How, and to what effect, is transmission facilitated in practice? This paper draws on case studies of three promising mechanisms of deliberative transmission: institutional, innovative and discursive. We discuss the key factors that enable or hinder different forms of transmission, and reflect on the ways in which they might be strengthened in deliberative systems. Our analysis suggests that the systemic turn in deliberative democracy should go hand-in-hand with a nuanced understanding of how transmission occurs across different sites. As such, our discussion has important implications for deliberative scholars and practitioners as they go about conceptualizing, studying and steering deliberative democracy at the large scale.

The performance of political narratives: how Australia and Britain's 'fat bombs' fizzled out

Although narrative has become an important concept in political analysis, the empirical focus has largely been limited to narrative as text. This article puts equal emphasis on narration as act. Drawing on tools and techniques associated with performativity, I analyse how actors perform a critical counternarrative on obesity as a policy issue across democratic settings in Australia and the United Kingdom. I show that this political narrative is watered down, muted and confused the closer it gets to formal governing institutions; this avowedly ‘cohesive narrative’ becomes fuzzy, inconsistent and overlapping, such that the ticking ‘fat bomb’ described in open public debate fizzles out before it even approaches these institutions. In concluding, I argue that these findings add considerable nuance to our understanding of how and to what effect narrative manifests in political affairs.