The DCI Blog

By Kyle Broxton, DCI Fellow

On Tuesday, March 30, the Davidson College Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement and North Mecklenburg Economic Mobility Collaborative, hosted an expert panel and deliberative forum on pressing issues related to housing in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region. Members from Davidson College and the broader community were invited to first hear from a panel of five stakeholders and experts on a variety of challenges to housing, including affordability, gentrification, and segregation. Following the panel, participants engaged in small-group deliberations during which they shared their own ideas about addressing the housing challenges facing the community.

The panelists included the Town of Davidson’s Housing and Equity Director, Eugene Bradley, CEO of A Roof Above, Liz Clasen-Kelly, Associate Professor of Geography at UNC Charlotte, Elizabeth Delmelle, Affordable Housing and Community Development Professional, Willie Jones, and Senior Analyst in Regulatory Studies and Research Editor at John Lock Foundation, Jon Sanders. Each of these panelists brought a unique perspective to best contextualize the issues related to housing throughout the first hour of the event.

The expert panel was immediately followed by a deliberative forum in which participants were divided up into small groups and tasked to deliberate on the issue themselves. Having been given some background by the expert panel on a wide array of issues that relate to housing, the groups were prepared to engage in deliberations of their own. Similar to the panel of stakeholders and experts from the first hour, my group was composed of participants with a diverse range of perspectives on the issue. They each brought meaningful insights to the conversation.

My group adopted an open-minded approach in identifying the needs and goals of housing. While favorable to the idea of increasing the supply of housing, we all remained aware of the costs that result from achieving this supply. Furthermore, we acknowledged the drawbacks that would ultimately manifest with each goal that was posited. By the time we were considering solutions to accomplish the goals of housing we had discussed, my sense was that a negative and pessimistic view of the topic had been adopted by most of the participants of my group.

At that point, one of the participants asked a question that I believe made for an excellent way to close out the latter half of the event. Instead of suggesting a solution to address the housing challenges, the participant simply asked if there were any housing victories the group had seen in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region in recent years. Initially, the other participants denied any victories existed. However, after a brief pause, one participant corrected herself, recalling an instance when her community convinced a developer to construct affordable living spaces where more luxurious housing was originally planned. Following her, another participant expressed her appreciation for the recent work of one of the panelists, Willie Jones. Another noted the benefits that would result from bringing more voices to the development phase of housing through development dividends. In that moment, I recognized the significant effect that the question had on our small group.

Simply asking the group what housing victories they had seen in recent years seemed to motivate the participants to adopt a slightly more positive and optimistic view of the topic. By noting what has worked in the past, the participants were far more motivated to suggest what we should do for the future. While the drawbacks and challenges related to housing were still acknowledged by the group, we closed out feeling more motivated than we were before the forum.

This experience revealed to me the value of striking a balance between realism and idealism in deliberative contexts. Too much of the former can be discouraging and depressing, while too much of the latter can be ungrounded and misleading. In my group’s context, having looked at what has succeeded to better gauge what can succeed (considering the many challenges we had already identified), I believe we struck a healthy balance between realism and idealism by the end of our deliberation. Ultimately, not only did our group take on a more hopeful view of that evening’s topic, but of deliberative democracy itself.

By Sandro Chumashvili, DCI Fellow

Today I will be sharing the experience of an international student who is also a deliberation facilitator. Coming from a totally different country, Georgia, with different societal norms and, most importantly – issues, it was essential for me to establish an emotional connection with the struggles that people face here in order to feel sincere empathy and understanding during the deliberations. This step was crucial for my everyday social life, but today I will only focus on achieving empathy for deliberations.

Humans tend to subconsciously prioritize the problems that they face. When done at a group level, this nudges people towards a better collective understanding and unites them around a common issue. After coming to the US, I have heard about many issues that people face here but would never see back home. For example, racism. Georgia is a primarily white country, and the topic of racism never arose due to the general lack of racial  diversity.

Another vast difference is where the issues originate from. I came from the country which has 20% of its territory occupied by Russia and from the country against which Russia has started war most times, also known as Putin’s most hated country. This shows that Georgia’s significant problems emanate from external threats, while the US, having the strongest military in history, is mainly troubled by internal issues. This all forced me to take another look at my opinions that seemed set for me, such as those regarding military budgets. Georgian military budget is miserable considering the external threats, while the US overpays for many services and armaments. So what has been my approach to sympathize with issues I have never experienced myself without losing my own identity?

Diverging from logos to pathos. 

As an economics major, I love analyzing numbers and drawing a conclusion as a result of statistical analysis. Still, I have tried to employ my “emotional intelligence” when it comes to person-to-person interactions and be as compassionate and understanding of personal stories as possible. This has allowed me to become more emotionally open to others’ experiences and develop empathy towards situations that sometimes sounded surreal to me due to my background.

Rejecting assumptions. 

I believe this point is vital in all kinds of relations and deliberations, not only when one is becoming accustomed to a new society. Past experiences shape our present actions and views; therefore, just discussing the latter without taking the former under consideration is problematic and takes away the opportunity to understand one’s companion fully. One should not judge another’s path unless they have walked it in the same shoes. This orientation has not only allowed me to understand where others are coming from but has dramatically sharpened my active listening skill.

Historical understanding. 

Every insightful discussion, and especially every deliberation, needs a deep understanding of the past links that have led to a particular contemporary policy, opinion, or movement. In this case, unlike in my first point, logos and pathos are closely intertwined and cannot be separated. Understanding historical background has been crucial for me in developing empathy since it goes further than emotions and plays an important role cognitively as well. This creates an important synthesis of compassion on both rational and emotional levels.

As an international facilitator, these points have allowed me to widen my worldview and be able not only to bring something new to the table but understand what is already present. I firmly believe that deliberation without empathy is like a clock without ticks – useless. Understanding people from two different societies is essential to the critical task of being compassionate to deliberators with different experiences and backgrounds.

By Andrew Gardner, DCI Fellow

On February 11th, the DCI had the privilege of hosting an expert panel and deliberation on the topic of Supreme Court reform, an issue that has become especially salient in the last few years. We had the chance to hear from some of the leading scholars on this topic, each presenting a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the possibility of court reform. Ryan Doerfler proposed ways to disempower the court by limiting its jurisdiction and requiring supermajorities to pass critical decisions. Kent Greenfield presented his idea of a separate Constitutional Court to address some of the most controversial questions of constitutional law. Finally, James Lindgren made the case for term limits for Supreme Court justices.

While the panelists may have disagreed about their proposed solutions, there seemed to be consensus in identifying the problem: the modern Supreme Court has become too politicized and partisan. Each proposed reform tackled the issue of judicial partisanship in its own way. Dr. Doerfler and Dr. Greenfield seek to limit the prerogative of the court in hopes of removing it from the most vitriolic of partisan battlegrounds. Dr. Lindgren’s plan aims to routinize the nomination process by imposing regular term limits while also ensuring justices do not serve beyond their capacity for either personal or political reasons.

While it was fascinating to hear these experts speak on such an important and interesting topic, my favorite part of the evening came after the panel had concluded, when we broke into small groups to discuss what we had just heard. It was the first time the DCI has hosted a deliberation with this panel-discussion model, and I was encouraged by the results. Hearing experts weigh in on the topic before beginning our deliberation gave everybody a foundation from which they could approach what is undeniably a difficult question and gave me, as a facilitator, plenty of opportunities for specific questions.

It was rewarding as a facilitator to see my group struggle through some of the tough questions posed by the prospect of Supreme Court reform. We seemed to agree that the politicization of the Court was a problem, but like the panelists we had difficulty finding a solution we could all agree on. By the end, the group seemed to be mostly unanimous in supporting the idea of term limits, but even then, we acknowledged the limitations of such a proposal in its ability to mitigate partisanship.

The greatest challenge we faced, and one in which I’m sure the experts share, is the inextricable tie between politics and law. Removing the Supreme Court from politics, we felt, is to remove it from its innate purpose. What role does the Court serve if it is disallowed from weighing in on the issues which people cannot find political consensus? Reducing the greatest legal institution in the land to an arbiter of dry, inconsequential legal questions seems antithetical to its place in American politics. Thus, we felt the issue was not removing the Court from politics, but partisanship from the Court.

Sadly, an hour was insufficient time for a small group of non-experts to resolve a decades-long enigma, but I was nevertheless encouraged by the quality of our discourse and am certain that everybody, myself included, came away from our conversation with new perspective and insights.

By Ty McLaren, DCI Fellow

As a cohort of Deliberative Citizenship Initiative fellows, we recently began reading Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, a pair of philosophers from Vanderbilt who focus on argumentation theory and democracy, respectively. Despite growing up in the age of hyper-individualism, the two authors suggest that we still derive much of what we believe from others. With each individual pursuing their own ideal truthful and good lives, it certainly comes as a surprise that we depend a great deal on others even though we so desperately do it alone.  Look no further than teachers, relatives, celebrities, experts of your respective field or job, and your peers to see that this is true. Simply put, our individual reality and understanding of that reality is heavily dependent on others and their ability to provide us reliable, accurate, sincere, and honest information. It is our duty to do the same for others.

Within the context of our nation’s current political and social narrative, this fact of human existence is terrifying–largely due to its damage from hyper-polarization and contempt. Deriving one’s understanding and perspective of the world seems like a good thing, particularly when individuals are exposed to all that the world has to offer. But when individuals isolate themselves, retreating back to partisan echo-chambers, biased news cycles, and peers with whom they only agree with, one misses out on the majority of information that the human experience has to offer. What is worse is that once this polarization and isolation sets in, our sense of reality becomes extremely manipulated. Due to confirmation and self-serving biases, we become convinced that “all opponents of our beliefs are silly, stupid, ignorant, unreliable, and evil.” Meanwhile, while we maintain close contact with those we passionately agree with, our understanding of the truth shifts further to the extreme in what is known in psychology as group polarization. As Aikin and Talissse put it, such “group polarization is caused by group dynamics, not reasons.”

Despite our shared pursuit of truth and virtue, who we choose to associate with has consequences, and continuing to subject yourselves to isolation, running from those we disagree with, and demonizing those we disagree with severs our connection with others and with our common goals as humans, perhaps never to be healed again as the rift continues to separate like tectonic plates. It seems as if our belief systems and our “truths” are beginning to seem completely incompatible.

This is why our work at the DCI is so important. Our D Teams and Deliberative Forums provide opportunities for individuals to break the current cycle of polarization and willingly engage with others with varying opinions on key issues. Just as many Americans have made the active decision to tune out, our work at the DCI is to encourage our community members to make the active decision to tune back in. Thus far, I have been thoroughly impressed by the vast array of perspectives and viewpoints I have been exposed to by our participants and by the enthusiasm I have observed. Although we focus on a small portion of the national reality, our grassroots approach seems like the most practical way to begin countering hyper-polarization by simply encouraging the best humans have to offer — our shared thirst for knowledge and the pursuit of truth.

By Sam Bonge, DCI Fellow

Of the 2020-21 fellows for the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, I am the only natural science major student among the political science and other humanities and social science majors. Which makes sense in a way, as DCI is weighted heavily towards facilitating deliberations and topics which are often political in nature. 

However, I wanted to be a Deliberative Citizenship Fellow despite not being interested in political science, or even majoring in the humanities, because I want to improve my understanding of the concrete concepts and issues facing our society from a lens I don’t usually see as a STEM major. I also want to learn to listen to others’ experiences without inserting my own preconceived opinions, both generally as a citizen at a time of high political tension, and as someone who intends to work in the medical field in the future. Such work will require me to work with patients from a wide range of experiences and identities. 

One of the main things I’ve learned as a fellow is the importance of bridging divides, and at a minimum, listening to perspectives outside of your own, because otherwise you run the risk of isolating yourself in a bubble or echo chamber. If no one listens to anyone who they don’t already agree with, no one learns anything new, and nothing ever changes – which is why we see Deliberation as one of the first steps to bridging political divide, and enacting change, along with other forms of activism. 

One of the big divides I see, outside of politics, is in humanities versus STEM – who’s work is more important, who’s work dismantles and who’s enforces bigoted or harmful systems, who’s work is more difficult. There are harmful stereotypes among STEM students that humanities are less worthwhile, less rigorous. There are harmful stereotypes among humanities students that STEM is less connected to the world outside its academic bubble and is too difficult to understand. I think it’s important to bring the two together to get a complete picture, it’s why I choose to come to a liberal arts school in the first place. I think when we are trying to bridge divides, we should look at not just what people’s beliefs are, what side of the political spectrum they are on, but why they’re there, and where they’re coming from as well.