For 30 years now, extending back to the days when I was a full-time theorist, I have consistently maintained that while some forms of democratic discussion might be better than others, especially in certain settings, there’s probably no such thing as bad democratic discussion. If a conversation merits the labels “discussion” and “democratic”, it’s likely to do some good.
At the same time, democratic discussion comes in a bewildering variety of forms, both in the academic literature and among practitioners. The biggest divide is among those forms of discussion whose purpose to explore issues, concerns, and possibilities and those whose goal is to sort through them and come to a decision. The more exploratory form of discussion is often called “dialogue”, while the decisional form is frequently termed “deliberation.” But the neat distinction between the terms isn’t always honored, and sometimes “discussion” is used to encompass both of them (as we at EnCiv tend to do). Additionally, there are multiple variants of both basic types. To confuse things still more, there are dozens of hybrids of these basic forms.
But have no fear. When we use these terms we’ll try to be very clear what we mean by them–as we hope we were in our post of December 29, 2018 in describing our recent Chicago municipal election discussion project (in which “discussion” ended up signifying a particular variant of exploratory discussion). And for anyone interested in learning more about the taxonomy of discussion, great resources are at your fingertips. I highly recommend the one put together by the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (there are those terms again!), whose title–“Engagement Streams Framework“–is vague but whose contents are a model of clarity. And worthy of discussion.
