Deliberative practices to advance equity and support for underserved communities
Response to OMB RFI “Methods and Leading Practices for Advancing Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through Government”
Docket Number: OMB_FRDOC_0001-0291
This post was excerpted in the POPVOX Foundation’s joint response to the above OMB Equity RFI on July 6th, 2021.
Deliberation is the "mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interest regarding matters of common concern." Deliberative democracy takes the ideals of deliberation and puts them into the context of democratic values and governance. It promotes discussion as a meaningful form of democratic participation in hopes that these discussions can make decision-making processes in government more democratic.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), identified over 300 deliberations at the local, state, and federal levels across the world. These instances include deliberative polls, citizen juries, participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, and town-hall meetings.
In Canada, large citizens’ assemblies have been institutionalized on a provincial level to promote citizen engagement in government. A sample of British Columbia residents was selected using randomized selection with representative gender, age, and geographical distribution to propose changes to the provincial electoral system. The proposals for the electoral reform developed by this citizens’ assembly led to province-wide referendums.
In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly consisting of 99 randomly selected Irish citizens debated issues such as abortion, fixed-term representation, and climate change. The Irish government officially responded to each of the assembly’s topic deliberations.
In Brazil, participatory budgeting platforms have shaped Porto Alegre's budgets, inspiring other cities across Latin America, North America, and Europe to initiate participatory budgeting structures in their budgeting practices.
Research into the feasibility of deliberative practices for the U.S. Congress is also underway. The Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA) at the Ohio State University has tested deliberative town halls for over 15 Representatives and Senators over the past several years. In these town halls, Members of Congress discuss single policy topics with a random representative sample of their constituents. One of the lead researchers of this project, Dr.Michael Neblo, has testified before Congress to discuss the value of deliberative systems within the Federal Government. In addition to these online town halls, we conducted deliberative experiments with Members of Congress, using online asynchronous forums as platforms for representative-constituent deliberations. This work was done as part of the author’s dissertation research.
Lastly, Congress is experimenting with deliberative processes within committees. As part of their efforts to include more people in the law-making process, the current session of the House Committee on Natural Resources in Congress established the Environmental Justice Working Group. This working group is a collection of environmental justice leaders and activists heavily involved in the rule-making process. The Committee and working group convene in-person and online so organizations could play a prominent and inclusive role in developing the ideas and language within the Environmental Justice For All Act.
Traits of Deliberative Democracy
Not all deliberative engagements look the same, but there are fundamental values within deliberative democracy that transcend most deliberative spaces, and such values can drive the enhancement of equity in government.
Diversity and Representativeness
Deliberative democracy proponents believe that participation in deliberative engagements should be diverse and representative of the impacted population group. Many deliberative organizers use random sampling techniques to recruit a population based on the demographics of the population of interest. Some deliberations over-sample for groups with a higher stake in the policy outcomes. These practices keep those that are the most impacted at the forefront of decision-making. Overall, representative and random sampling bring people who are usually not represented in politics but are highly impacted by its outcomes to the forefront of policy decisions.
Equitable and Inclusive Efforts
Deliberative processes also need inclusive practices of engagement. People should be able to participate in any relevant deliberation - or any engagement with the government - without prior knowledge of the topic or means of engagement. Deliberative processes often provide easy-to-read, balanced, factual, and accessible instructional material and policy descriptions to everyone participating before the event. Some deliberative processes invite experts to explain the material to participants.
Deliberative processes increase equity by paying careful attention to minority and disempowered groups (i.e., groups that are more difficult to organize, articulate, mobilize, and integrate into policy discussions). There is some evidence that having enclave deliberations, where disempowered groups deliberate on their own before engaging with majority groups, can increase equity by creating more engagement from those groups. Efforts towards increasing deliberation and equity are central to deliberative processes.
Some deliberative processes use neutral 3rd-party groups to host and moderate deliberative events between people and governing institutions. In the studies referenced above on the U.S. Congress, academic institutions moderate the deliberative town halls to ensure elected officials go beyond answering softball questions and address challenging and meaningful topics. These neutral third parties offer an extra form of trust to the conversations.
Equity Benefits
The long-term and far-reaching benefits of deliberative environments could be substantial for equity. First, instances of political participation have an educative effect on citizens, and these deliberative environments increase civic education about the government and its processes. This civic education can help increase the equity of political knowledge transmission that shapes collective opinion and action.
Second, participation begets participation. Inviting people to decision-making increases their political knowledge and translates knowledge into political participation, making them want to participate more in political activities in the future. The first step to this participation is recruitment. According to political scientist Katerina Vráblíková, "recruitment is probably the single most important mechanism explaining how political discussion increases political activism in non-electoral politics." Proactive recruitment methods used within deliberative settings can offer a substantial step towards improving equity.
Lastly, deliberative engagements attract underserved communities. Political scientist Dr. Jonathan E. Collins found that people of low socioeconomic backgrounds and members of historically marginalized racial-and-ethnic groups are more likely to attend public engagement events, specifically local public school meetings, if those events were deliberative. Exposure to deliberative environments in Dr.Collins’ experiment also led to increased trust in the government. Thus, deliberative engagements have the potential to improve equity through increased participation and trust from disempowered groups.
Area 5: Stakeholder and community engagement:
"What processes should agencies have in place to engage proactively with the underserved individuals and communities that will be most affected by agency programs, policies, rules, processes, or operations? How can agencies design and implement community engagement practices that are accessible to underserved communities? How might affected communities be engaged pro-actively and early to shape agency policy priorities and strategies?"
Recommendation 1: Incorporate Deliberative Sessions
Agencies should establish deliberative-style engagements with the people. For example, Executive-branch agencies could create citizens’ assemblies to weigh in on regulatory decisions, host deliberative forums on essential topics within the agencies, or establish participatory budgeting practices. The OECD provides an excellent introductory set of practices and principles for these deliberative forms of engagement, and we highly recommend agencies look into their resources.
OMB may wish to consider the establishment of a citizen panel for requests in this RFI. After responses are received, the agency could invite a representative sample of people, potentially oversampling minority groups or underserved communities, to help the agency decide which recommendations to prioritize. Agencies could ensure that the recommendations made by the group of deliberative participants are upheld and prioritized by the OMB.
Recommendation 2: Introduce wider participation strategies
Practices within deliberative engagements can also work outside deliberations. For example, agencies could establish minimum thresholds of recruitment, proactively inviting and over-sampling for minority and stakeholder group involvement in their forms of outreach.
Agencies could also improve language to widen participation—the average American reads at an 8th-grade level. A simple test of the reading level of information given to the public can determine its equity. 18F has already identified that "Digital literacy, access, and language fluency are challenges for many people who interact with the government's services." They have provided an Inclusive Language Guide For Government. The Plain Language Association International (PLAIN) also provides great resources for adopting plain language. Agencies could increase their efforts to integrate these guidelines into every form of public engagement.
Lastly, agencies should do more to advertise and invite people to public engagement events. Our team at the POPVOX Foundation discovered this RFI through a post on Twitter. It is unclear if we would have discovered this RFI through the Federal Register or other formal means. More work should be done to adequately notify communities that matter most to these public processes.
Recommendation 3: Compensate people for their time
Too often, governments trade on a spirit of civic altruism or civic piety where people are expected to do the hard work for their communities and governments for free, consigning civic engagement to the "voluntary sector" of civic life. The value of people's time and engagement is substantial; it is an essential form of civic labor that should be rewarded. These rewards help keep people motivated to participate, especially when the return on investment is slow-going and hard to see. Financial incentives also make it easier for underserved groups to participate, thus advancing the equity of each participatory process. It may feel impossible given the budgeting constraints of each agency, but we highly encourage agencies to consider paying people for their time and expertise in these public engagement practices - as they can offer tremendous benefits towards equity.
“How might affected communities be engaged pro-actively and early to shape agency policy priorities and strategies?” and “What tools and best practices might agencies deploy to establish advisory boards, task forces, and commissions that are inclusive of underserved communities?”
Recommendation 4: Learn from experiments underway in the U.S. Congress
The current session of the House Committee on Natural Resources in Congress offers a great example of what it means to be inclusive of diverse stakeholder communities by putting them at the forefront of policy discussions. The executive government should learn from this working group and consider establishing one similar to the Committee based on directories of public interest groups.
For example, the EPA could establish similar working groups around environmental topics, potentially using the same groups as the Committee to ensure a life-cycle of input and evaluation into the policy and regulation process. The EPA already has an agency-focused working group called the Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJ IWG). This working group could be expanded to include outside organizations.
As another example, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could establish a working group of experts in homelessness based on their list of public interest groups located on their website. Such working groups can bring equity to the policy-making process by bringing stakeholders closer to the places of decision-making.