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Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberative democracy? We address this question, but expand it to ask if the effects of descriptive representation depend on the deliberating group's decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions that randomizes the group's gender composition and decision rule, includes many groups, and links individuals' pre-deliberation attitudes to their speech and to post-deliberation outcomes. We find that low descriptive representation does produce low substantive representation, but primarily under majority rule. Under those conditions, women are less likely to voice women's distinctive concerns about children, family, the poor and the needy, and more likely to voice men's distinctive concerns. Men's references shift similarly. These effects lead in turn to less generosity to the poor. Unanimous rule protects women in the numerical minority, mitigating some of the negative effects of low descriptive representation. Descriptive representation matters, but in interaction with the decision rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use an experimental approach to examine how the content of group discussion about income redistribution changes as other group-level features, including the group's decision rule and gender composition, change. In previous studies, we reported that these group-level features affect the level of participation by men and women. In this paper we further report that in the same conditions where women speak more, women are also more likely to speak a distinctive language. Not only do they speak less when they are minorities under majority rule; they speak less to the concerns women tend to raise in one-on-one interviews for national surveys, such as children, the family, and the poor. Unanimous rule dampens this effect of minority status for women. Relative to majority rule, under unanimous rule, numerical minority women are more likely to articulate women's distinctive topics. Unanimous rule in addition generally produces linguistic forms that tend to characterize women's distinctive speech patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others'. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most Americans, having a formal say about politics on the local level likely means appearing before an elected body of decision-makers, such as a school board or town council, and expressing an opinion intended to persuade the decision-makers one way or another. Because political scientists have generally paid little attention to what is actually said at these meetings, we know almost nothing about what sort of rhetoric ordinary citizens choose to employ and whether such formal occasions at which citizens can have their say meet any of the goals deliberative theorists have for public, democratic talk. To this point, no systematic data about the nature of public discourse at such meetings has been collected. This paper aims to remedy this oversight by presenting initial results from a content analysis of public discourse at town council meetings about the merits of Wal-Mart development held in 8 communities around the country, ranging from tiny Knightdale, North Carolina to the large city of San Diego, California. We examine differences in the nature of the discourse across various political and social contexts and the extent to which local discourse meets goals deliberative theorists have articulated for effective public talk. Understanding the nature and dynamics of ordinary citizens' formal public talk in such settings is, we assert, critical to diagnosing the health of democracy generally in the contemporary United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between deliberative reform efforts and existing political institutions that allow for some form of public talk. From the perspective of deliberative theory, public hearings has many shortcomings. However, it does provide a venue for citizens and public officials to meet and hear conflicting points of view and, thus, deliberate on reform efforts. Any deliberative reform effort must advance the principles of political participation, decision-making, and power.

This paper explores how our collective choices about local political boundaries affect the quality of deliberation at local public meetings. How the characteristics of our polities - such as their size or their level of diversity - affect democratic life has been an important issue for Americans at least since the debate between the Federalist and Anti-Federalists. The key insight of this paper is that the characteristics of the metropolitan areas where most Americans live are the result of our own collective political decisions. Size and diversity are not exogenous shocks to our political system; they are, instead, determined by citizens and politicians making decisions about their political communities. In other words, the political boundaries that determine the borders of our communities are functions of the democratic system itself. I contend that the way we draw our political boundaries - and especially the ways in which we attempt to carve out and preserve small places in the midst of growing metropolitan regions - has meaningful effects for the nature of the deliberation that occurs in public meetings across the United States. Though they may reflect some of the genius of federalism, fragmented metropolitan regions composed of many smaller localities create a deep challenge for civic participation at institutions like town council meetings. Smaller jurisdictions may mean higher rates of participation, but they may also frustrate key democratic aims, such as allowing citizens to fully confront and contest the differing interests and perspectives across the metropolitan region. Town council meetings in small, fragmented places may have an increased quantity of participation, but the quality of their democracy may be lower, especially from the perspective of deliberative goals. To explore these hypotheses, I employ survey data from a variety of different sources, including both national-level surveys merged with place-level data as well as surveys collected systematically in cities and towns across the country. These data include self-reports of attendance at public meetings along with respondents' attitudes about the issues under consideration. With the help of these data, I find that the challenge for effective deliberation at local public meetings is not the citizens who do show up, but the political boundaries that separate citizens from each other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morris Fiorina has recently argued that local public meetings are increasingly likely to attract only extremists who are unrepresentative of the larger, non-attending public. In this sense, he says, participants in local public meetings represent the “dark side” of civic engagement, frustrating democracy by hijacking the process and the discourse from level-headed moderates who are not motivated enough to attend meetings. In this paper, I argue that while a worrisome dark side of civic engagement surely exists, local public meetings are not the best place to find it. When it comes to ideology, the pattern of predicted attendance at public meetings is curvilinear, with moderates just as likely – and sometimes slightly more likely – to attend public meetings than those who label themselves “extremely conservative” or “extremely liberal.” In contrast, those who engage in protests or attend political rallies are significantly more likely to be found at the ideological extremes. If extremism is measured in terms of preferences about specific issues, those who attend meetings about town and school affairs do not seem dramatically different from their neighbors who do not show up at such gatherings. Meeting attenders are, however, more opinionated than non-attenders, scoring significantly higher on what social psychologists call the “need to evaluate” scale. Among participants at local meetings, this higher level of opinionation does not translate into more extreme attitudes – having an opinion, even a strong one, does not mean having an opinion that ideologically unusual. Nor are the highly opinionated who turn out at local meetings necessarily less thoughtful, less knowledgeable, or more rigid than non-attenders. Local public meetings are, for the most part, likely to be sites of good citizenship – places where citizens who show up have formed strong opinions about issues, not places where the talk is dictated by those with extreme or unusual attitudes. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]