Flashcards
Public Deliberation
Cards in this deck (26)
- 1Why is public deliberation used?Experts by themselves cannot tell us what we should be valuing - need public input on trade-offs regarding competing values (e.g., biobanks - value of science vs. value of privacy)
When we make large society level decisions we come across these tradeoff - no obvious answer
Public input is one required component to make decision - 2Why do public deliberation compared rather than a survey?- May have knowledge about topic (e.g., biobanks)
- Even if we do provide background info to explain topic - these topics are complex and need to have thoughtful input
Public deliberation used because we want proper, carefully considered public input - 3Public deliberation comes from deliberative democracy, meaning what? What is public deliberation being used for?A public theory. If you want a truly democrative society, we need more than just a vote every year - need more avenues where we can influence, talk through and consider & affect the decisions that, intern, affect us
Being applied more and more to areas of science, technology & health - in particular making decisions regarding policy. Additional input to making decisions - 4What is deliberation (what is it about, who is it done by) ?• Fundamentally, it’s about talking - about having a conversation about difficult issues
• The talking is done by ‘ordinary citizens’ rather than stakeholders or experts - 5What are the criteria to deliberation?• Argumentation is welcomed and part of a free exchange of ideas - not idea that you have one person defending position A & person defending position B - rather is about genuinely attempting to coming to best possible solution to all concerned
• Requires individuals to weigh carefully the
consequences of various options for action (e.g., if tissue samples are anonymized in biobanks it would be good for privacy but mean that we could not do return of results with incidental genetic findings)
• Deliberation occurs when claims are advanced, evidence is presented, and counterfactuals are considered - need to support your claims; why you think something
• Individuals work collectively towards common ground
– Consensus - 6How are deliberative forums conducted?Invite citizens to certain place/time where they are given opportunity to:
– to learn about a topic,
– engage with others in debate about the topic,
– and then come to a collective decision on what policy on the topic should entail. - 7What are the guidelines underlying deliberation?– respectful engagement between participants
– positions taken by participants being justified and challenged by others, and
– conclusions that represent the deliberating groups’ efforts to find common ground - 8How is deliberation similar or different than community based participation in health?– Similar to public deliberation, usually concerned with involving community members as equal partners; improving quality & effectiveness of interventions, etc
– Different in that focus is generally connected to some form of research (vs governance) - 9How is deliberation similar or different than public consultation?– Increasingly mandated by diff government bodies
– Capture public opinion about issue; rather than incorporating ‘considered’ judgments - 10How is public deliberation different that other form of participatory approaches in general?Public deliberation does not tend to involve specific, existing communities - while other approaches to; operate on more broader societal level
- 11Advocates of public deliberation, suggest it leads to what?1) Better decisions on issues:
– On policy level (e.g., deciding how to design biobank) - we make better policies when we do public deliberation because we get more & better input by wide variety of people
– Individual also make better decisions – process goes on for number of days; individuals who go through this increase knowledge & make better decisions regarding the issues
2) Better citizens
– Encourage political engagement - some evidence of this
– Increase social capital - in general, people who are better off in society have better health; groups who are less well of financially, generally have less social capital ; engaging in these processes you increase capacity to advocate for self by learning more about how these processes work - 12What do critics of public deliberation say?• Unattainable - all "pie in the sky" ; idealized version of how people can have respectable communication; but evidence shows that it is attainable
• Unnecessary - Citizens already arrive at efficient political
judgments; do not need to go through public deliberation; evidence does not support this - find that people become more engaged and are better able to integrate with others rather than just form own decisions for selves
• Privileges dominant voices; find that people who are dominant in other parts of lives, will again be dominant in that forum - for ex in biobanks will still get Big Pharma interests most represented, people who are financially better off being able to sway others --> well designed public deliberation may be able to overcome these kinds of problems --> important criticisms because it highlights how need to be careful & make sure everyone is getting voice & equal playing field - 13What do critics of public deliberation say regarding biases?• Decision-making biases exaggerated through deliberation
– Attitudinal consistency
– Polarisation
However, the psychological literature about group biases is a) not about deliberation, more bout small group discussions that normally last about 1h or 2h in experiments settings not about complex situations we have in deliberation b) all factors known to contribute to negative decision outcomes are factors that you try not to have present in deliberation anyway (e.g., group think more likely to occur if people talking about very homogenous - deliberation tries to make sure group is anything but this - as diverse as possible) - 14When should you use public deliberation (Solomon et al.)- complex topics
- value-laden topics
- controversial issues, sensitive or high stakes
- issues regarding democratic legitimacy - 15Solomon et al. say you should use public deliberation for complex topics. Why is this?– Need a lot of time to work through issues
- Might require decisions involving hybrid mix of expertise (scientific, legal, political, economic & real-world knowledge) - when you have diverse set of knowledge req'd
– Involves expert knowledge, but decision requires moving beyond expertise (e.g., value trade-off with biobanks requires more than expertise knowledge)
– Preclude surveys and public polls - situation where those won't give you info you need
– Requires detailed background knowledge - 16Muhlberger suggests public deliberation should be used for value-laden topics. Why?– Competing values, or ‘facts don’t speak for themselves’ - facts do not speak for selves; always contextual & always embedded in value system
– Experts may know the facts but do not have special qualifications to make value judgments
– Public knows too little, expectations too inflated to help make decisions without education on the issue
– E.g., how do we allocate medical resources?
have a lot of research on cancer drugs; cancers are very different genetically --> drugs are becoming highly tailored but that means they only work for some people and are very expensive --> - 17Public deliberation, according to Solomon et al., should be used for controversial issues. Why?– Policy makers reserved to make decisions, worry about consulting public owing to extreme views
– E.g., vaccines
– Situations that shift from ‘what I want/should do’ to ‘what we should do’ - 18Public deliberation, according to Solomon et al., should be used for issues requiring ‘democratic legitimacy’. Why?– E.g., GM foods; MMR vaccines and autism
– Allowing for thoughtful public reflection, increase trust in expert opinion and government accountability - 19What are the issues regarding biobanks that make it a good candidate for public deliberation?• Fundamental value trade-offs:
– Privacy versus research facilitation
– Individual control versus community decisions
• Complexity
– Issue not well known to public
• Democratic deficit
– Issue affects general public and specific groups, but decision making lies mainly with ‘experts’
reasons why we have rules we have are influenced by experts/stakeholders - means we have democratic deficit because we don't have input from key people or groups that are affected by the rules - 20If we want to design a public deliberation engagement we have to ask what 3 questions?1. Who?
– Recruitment (how/who do we recruit)
– Conceptualisation of the public (how do we conceive "public" - every person in town? province? need to operationalize this definition in requirement process)
2. How?
– Information provision
– Number and timing of meetings
– Structure of discussions
3. What do we do with the answers?
– Connection with institutional/policy frameworks - 21How was the 'who' question answered in the case study presented in the BC biobank study?• Defining “the public”
• Statistically representative sample of population of BC would need several
hundred people, but can't do this because of financial and practical reasons
• Concept of “mini public” – possible to have meaningful and legitimate policy input from relatively small group
of people, providing the sample has sufficient diversity - can talk about representation about meaningful way if it is diverse, even if not statistically representative (e.g., differences in backgrounds, education, gender to represent different values)
• Recruit for diversity of life experience:
– Basic commitments, relative values, discursive styles
• 25 residents of BC, random selection, demographic stratification - 22How was the "how" question answered in the BC bio bank study?1. Structure of deliberation
– 4 days of meetings (2 weekends)
– Small and large group discussion
– Documenting of conclusions of forum
2. Information provision
– Need to inform participants sufficiently to be able to conduct meaningful deliberation
– Avoid framing discussions from the start
– Types of information:
• Experts and stakeholders - make sure they have different positions (e.g., biobankers - why they are good thing; privacy lawyer ); don't expect them to be neutral, but make sure there are different positions represented and leave up to people to think think through/debate issues themselves
• Reading material - go through research literature & condense it so it's not overwhelming
• Online forum - where people can communicate with each other, even in between meetings
also a model was made by masters student - 23Why is it important to make sure that deliberation process is not biased & how do you do this?when you design process want to try to design it in such a way were you have good justification to say that it was not biased (incase pharma argues it is) - did this by identifying different societal positions that people have taken in regards to biobanks & trying to represent all those positions; because those are different value positions
- 24What were the results of the BC biobank deliberations?• Informed, deliberative engagement on a
complex topic is possible - possible to get lay public together to talk about a complex topic and come up with meaningful solutions
• Strong support for biobanks and research
– No support for avoiding; concern to be practical
• Primary concern over unethical use - how to ensure this
– Some want “graduated” consent for subsequent research
– Others emphasized trustworthy oversight - 25BC biolibrary are simply an institution funded by public money, so therefore policy was easier to influence. What happened after the Biobank deliberation?The BC Biolibrary implemented some of these findings. Most notably, findings on how to introduce people to biobanks
- 26What were other results from the BC biobanks study?Model was also used in other public deliberations in other countries and other issues (e.g., colorectal screenings)
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- Psychology (Health) Flashcards on Public Deliberation, created by Tijana Blagovcanin on 16/04/2017.
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- Tijana Blagovcanin
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