Design State: A weblog about government web design

If you’re interested in academic analysis of eGovernment design and its possibilities, Peter Muhlberger’s GeoCities page has a PDFs of his papers available for download. Most of them are fairly tangential to (information) design, specifically, but two of most topical in the list are:

• Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]
• Online Communication and Democratic Citizenship [doc]

I’ll be writing about the former of the two in this post.

The Issue

While the papers are written in the verbose academic vernacular, Muhlberger’s thoughts on the psychology of citizen-involvement offer some interesting ways to think about future design implementations for government websites. The basic thesis Muhlberger pushes against is the concept of stealth government which he sums up in the introduction (emphasis mine):

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse [9] find that 93.5% of a representative survey sample of the American public agree with one or more of three statements describing what they call “stealth democracy” beliefs. These are statements that express intense impatience with debate and compromise among political leaders and a desire to have government run by successful business leaders or unelected independent experts.

In addition, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse shape their various findings into a book-length argument against prescriptions to engage the public more deeply in politics, particularly prescriptions for deliberative involvement. Their “stealth democracy” thesis holds that much of the public is uninterested in politics, dislikes conflict, and believes that there is wide consensus on political goals. Because the public believes there is wide consensus, it does not see the point of disagreement and conflict in politics. The authors maintain that more deeply involving such a public in political life is a prescription for frustration, distrust, and delegitimization of the political system.

Peter Muhlberger, Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]

Muhlberger’s counter-thesis (emphasis mine):

This paper proposes a different interpretation of the finding that Americans embrace stealth democracy beliefs. It stipulates that these beliefs are rooted in a “parochial citizen worldview” involving a set of socially problematic views and orientations and that this syndrome can be ameliorated by involving people in online political deliberation. The views and orientations include false consensus beliefs, fear of conflict, strong pro-authority attitudes, incapacity for social perspective taking, and dispositions to cognitive lethargy.

Peter Muhlberger, Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]

So it appears that Muhlberger, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse all agree that citizens essentially don’t have what it takes to be involved in the government processes. Their difference: Hibbing and Theiss-Morse want to keep citizens from having anything to do with government and Muhlberger wants to educate and allow these citizens to engage in meaningful ways with government processes; to change their orientation.

The Solution

At first I thought that Muhlberger’s solution was on the order of “throw some freeware bulletin boards up and see what happens”, but after corresponding with him, he pointed me to his current project, Deliberative E-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation Project (DEER). His current work is building on the papers linked above and is aimed at developing software that will help citizens have meaningful and informed online discussions for the public comment periods required for most rule-making legislative activities. The software will also produce summaries of the key points and areas of interest for law-makers to review. The goal is to alter the:

…current rulemaking comment process [which] faces a number of social and organizational problems including poorly informed and distrustful participants, lack of dialog among participants that could sharpen their reasoning, and problems of scale such as the large number of comments generated. Researchers believe that most rulemaking comments are low in quality or redundant?a [sic] product of form letters used by public interest groups.

Deliberative E-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation Project (DEER)

If this ends up becoming a valuable tool, it could be used as a bridge between bureaucracy and citizenship in many more areas than rule-making.