Prioritizing Together: Agenda Building in Democratically Structured Deliberation

Raymond Pingree
Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin

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     Last modified: May 1, 2005

Abstract
This paper presents and tests a novel form of online deliberation in which the organizing structure simultaneously emerges from and structures the discussion. This organizing structure consists of more specific relationships between messages than traditional reply-based discussion structures. Messages are related in ways that mirror the relationships between sub-decisions specific to the group’s decision goals. In our experiment these goals consisted of deciding on the most important problems facing the nation and deciding what should be done about each of them. Therefore the relationships between messages were things like “solution to a problem,” “reason why a problem is important,” and “reason why a reason isn’t applicable.”

To the extent that this attempted correspondence in structure is successful in a particular case, it is expected to assist a group in dividing the cognitive labor of making complex decisions that involve many sub-decisions and in organizing and keeping track of the many lines of reasoning related to such complex decisions. Whether and how such a beneficial division of labor takes place was tested using an experimental study. The overall pattern of findings provides support for our expectations of collectively systematic processing. This form of deliberation seems capable of increasing in collective intelligence and depth of reasoning as group size grows, resulting in a much higher capacity for efficient and democratic large-scale deliberation than existing forms of discussion.