Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress

dukelawweb — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:57:54 +0000

When healthcare reform was being debated in the United States last year,
many groups—including members of Congress, White House representatives,
and other public and private policy groups—attempted to hold and facilitate
“town hall” meetings to demonstrate how ADR-like processes, such as
deliberative democracy and consensus building, could be used to encourage
deliberative consideration of healthcare proposals. Instead of model
deliberative sessions, however, most of these sessions turned adversarial (and
were then subverted for more “interrupted” democracy), as they were
“sabotaged” by opponents of national healthcare reform. This paper reflects on
the deliberative democracy and consensus building literature that suggests how
less-adversarial processes might be used to achieve good policy making and
contrasts the theory with what actually happened in practice last year. How
does our theory and practice of deliberative democracy have to change to actually be effective? Was what happened peculiar to healthcare policy making,
or are there lessons to learn generally for deliberative democracy theory and
practice?

http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?74+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+1+(summer+2011)+pdf

Law and Contemporary Problems

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress