In Voice and Judgment: The Practice of Public Politics, Robert Kingston,
senior associate of the Kettering Foundation, provides a comprehensive
analysis of the continuing public deliberations carried out, nationwide,
over the past 30-some years, under the auspices of the National Issues
Forums and other organizations. The task of publicly "talking through" a
national or community problem is not always easy. Nor has an answer (or
an agreement) always been found--or universally shared! But what
regularly does emerge, when people deliberate, is a kind of shared
understanding. At best, it is the sense of a shared public will. More
important yet, such public deliberations suggest something of what it
may take to make democracy work as it should. And, after several decades
of deliberation, some of us have come to suspect that at the core of our
democracy may be less the right to vote than the opportunity to
deliberate. This study responds to critical and controversial domestic
and multinational issues that have challenged--and sometimes still do
challenge--citizens' relations to each other and their degrees of trust
in their elective government. Many such issues remain continuing
problems for the American public and its leadership; but the public
discussion of each reveals, in compelling ways, not merely the need for,
but also the extraordinary promise of public deliberation as a means of
moving tensely conflicting issues toward the kind of shared
understanding from which viable public policies may grow--or to an
increasingly shared understanding even of issues that, at points, have
seemed to bear irreconcilable expectations. The public voice is seldom
the voice that the establishment--the political, corporate, and press
establishments--is anxious to hear. And unless we are prepared to
present and explain the dilemmas that the public acknowledges and is
preparing to cope with--rather than primarily the opinions that people
in their uncertainty express--we might as well leave the public voice at
home. The continuing practice of public deliberation itself reveals, in
this book, the slow-paced movement that translates the idea of change
into the conceptualizing of public action.
About the Kettering Foundation
The Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating
foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research.
Kettering's primary research question is: What does it take to make
democracy work as it should? Kettering's research is distinctive because
it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what
people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives,
their communities, and their nation. For more information about
Kettering research and publications, see the Kettering Foundation's
website at www.kettering.org.
