Why Process MattersDemocracy and Human Nature

Abstract

Human nature and democracy have always been intertwined. Political philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have debated political systems based on the question of whether humans can govern themselves or whether they require some sort of stronger authority to ensure appropriate behavior. With the advent of the Internet and the increasing political polarization and animosity of our times, concerns about democracy and human nature have once again risen to the forefront. Deliberative democracy offers a particular response to these concerns, one that is rather optimistic, ambitious, and process oriented. A key assumption of those of us that support a more deliberative democracy is essentially that process matters. We optimistically believe that humans are certainly capable of self-governance, on the key condition that quality processes are utilized, which help bring out their best thinking. Alternatively, we realize that bad processes can bring out the worst in our fellow humans, and make democratic living untenable. As a result, a key question arises: what mechanisms can be employed to best tap into the positives of human nature and avoid the bad? With that question in mind, and armed with 10 years of experience running deliberative processes at the Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation, I decided to do a deep dive into the recent literature on social psychology and brain science to develop better answers to that increasingly critical question. This essay summarizes my key findings. The short answer is that my belief that process matters has exponentially been strengthened, based both on my realization that many of the public processes we tend to rely on the most are exceedingly problematic (i.e., they tap into and reify the worst in human nature) as well as the argument that when done well, deliberative practices have great potential to avoid or overcome those tendencies and unleash our inherent empathy, creativity, and sense of purpose. This essay is organized in four parts. I first summarize the research on and explain the impact of the unfortunately more dominant negative aspects of human nature, which I label “detrimental motivated reasoning.” I then summarize the less dominant but still critical potential positive aspects of human nature. Considering both, I then argue that our most common public processes—a two-party system; winner-take-all elections; politicized, forprofit media; public hearings and citizen comment time; most social media engagement; letters to the editor; etc.—unfortunately overwhelmingly tend to activate and exaggerate the negative and rarely tap into the positive. I then move to the more hopeful argument that deliberative processes can flip that script. To close, I qualify my argument with the recognition that the shift to a more deliberative political system will be exceedingly difficult at the national level, however, the possibility of supporting this shift at the local level is not only possible, but urgently necessary.