Investigating Deliberativeness Comparatively

Abstract This article develops a normative model of public deliberation and proposes ways to apply it in the comparative empirical analysis of political media content. In the first part of the article, a set of normative claims connected to deliberativeness is explicated that revises some of the familiar claims found in the literature. Deliberative media content, it is argued, can provide a repository of diverging justifications for political positions as well as model deliberative behavior in audiences. In conjunction with an attentive, deliberating public, deliberative media content can also serve to procure and withdraw legitimation with respect to political decisions and the polity as a whole. In the second part of the article, a new research design is proposed that operationalizes deliberativeness in print media by taking into account apparent differences in the cultures of journalism. The proposal involves measuring deliberativeness on four different levels of analysis—the idea, the utterance, the article, and the page/edition—as well as in three different political/cultural contexts—the liberal, democratic corporatist, and polarized pluralist models of media and politics as distinguished by Hallin and Mancini. Keywords: deliberationdeliberativenessnews mediacontent analysiscomparative researchmedia systemsjournalismHabermas The author wishes to thank Bernhard Peters and Tanjev Schultz as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable criticism and advice. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 55th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (2005) in New York and the Annual Conference of the German Communication Association (2006) in Hamburg. Notes 1. I expand here on arguments made in Wessler and CitationSchultz (2007). 2. By forgoing speakers' intentions as a normative criterion for mediated public deliberation, the separation of a "discursive theory" from a (participatory or representative) "liberal theory" as proposed by CitationFerree et al. (2002) and CitationGerhards (1997) becomes implausible. I propose a broader model of public deliberation that connects well to conceptions of public debate or discussion within the liberal tradition (e.g., CitationLippmann, 1927/1993, p. 104; CitationMill, 1859/1991). For a more fully developed argument against artificially separating the liberal and the deliberative traditions, see CitationSchultz (2006). 3. CitationYoung (2002) presents the same kind of reasoning: She also couples her appeal for accepting non-argumentative types of communication such as greeting (or public recognition), rhetoric, and narrative (or testimony) with three, somewhat different normative criteria: "The only remedy for false or invalid arguments is criticism. Similarly, listeners to greetings, rhetoric, and narrative should be critically vigilant, and should apply standards of evaluation to them as well as to argument. Is this discourse respectful, publicly assertable, and does it stand up to public challenge?" (CitationYoung, 2002, p. 79). For a more radical argument in favor of public testimony, see CitationSanders (1997). Sanders also points to the experience that some people's arguments are just not taken as seriously as others' and that the power of such prejudice relies on ascriptive criteria such as race and gender. This is an empirical argument that does not debunk the normative standard of civil exchange as such. In addition, while there may be more effective ways to counter the effects of prejudice in policy outcomes and so forth, deliberation still seems to be the best way to dispel prejudice substantially and lastingly. 4. CitationGoodin (2003, p. 59) criticizes mediated deliberation as "emaciated" and "blinkered" because, in his view, the mass media strictly limit how much information gets through and facilitate "posting notices for all to read" rather than "talking to one another." Thus, he does not consider possible deliberative features of those "notices" and their potential salutary effects. However, Goodin rightly directs attention to the complementary roles of internal-reflective and external-collective deliberation and to some normative considerations concerning the former. 5. In their stimulating study, CitationKim, Wyatt, and Katz (1999) found good support for major tenets of theories of deliberative democracy, particularly for a strong association between news media use and political conversation of audience members as well as for the impact of these two factors on argument quality and political participation. They did not, however, consider deliberative qualities of news media content, and thus their findings support the general theoretical framework of this article but not my specific claims about the salutary effects of deliberativeness in the media. The same is true for the literature reviewed in CitationDelli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs (2004). More generally, the literature on citizen deliberation and the literature on deliberative media content (reviewed more thoroughly below) have not yet been properly connected. 6. "So far, researchers have found three conditions that tend to motivate individuals to adopt a deliberative frame of mind: accountability, high stakes, and diversity" (CitationRyfe, 2005, p. 57). This means that, all other things being equal, deliberation will be stronger if (a) deliberators know that they will have to explain their reasoning later on, (b) the consequences of the deliberative outcome are perceived to be great and direct, and (c) the social network in which the deliberator finds her- or himself is diverse rather than homogeneous. 7. Many authors, including CitationBennett (1990) and CitationEntman (2004), have demonstrated how important dissenting elites are for probing the justifications given by decision makers. But these elites also get part of their information and arguments from the news media, which seem to serve as a repository of divergent opinions and reasons for them as much as for ordinary citizens. In the end, a fertile synergy between elites and journalists stands the best chance of holding decision makers accountable by public justification. 8. This function of public deliberation is identical to the function of controlling the government attributed to the media in liberal conceptions of democracy. I cannot see how the control function could be effectively fulfilled without debating government claims rather than only informing about them and leaving the work of interpretation to the citizens (see also CitationSchultz, 2006). This shows, again, that there is much more overlap between "deliberative" and "liberal" conceptions of political communication than the juxtaposition of the two traditions by CitationFerree et al. (2002) and CitationGerhards (1997) would suggest. 9. In this context, CitationEntman (2004, p. 158) even points to a possible normative irony: "government responsiveness may not be desirable when it is responding to an underinformed public—underinformed in large part because Washington politicians are so exquisitely sensitive to the imagined public, to their perceptions of public opinion" that they refrain from voicing alternative opinions to those found in opinion polls. 10. CitationZhong (2002, Citation2004) presents fascinating examples of how, under the condition of state control of the media, genuine debate can be stifled and even supposedly dialogical formats such as talk shows can degenerate into pseudo-dialogue. 11. CitationEntman (2004, p. 151) even argues that the partition of news and opinion (rather than its synchronization) may prove problematic for genuine deliberation in certain situations, namely when the kind of balanced debate that may go on in editorials and op-ed pieces is not matched by a requisite variety of sources in the news section (usually privileging official power-holders). 12. From a more strictly Habermasian line of argument than has been pursued here, CitationBrady (2004, p. 350) arrives at a similar plea for "an empirical and comparative turn in public sphere research." CitationHallin and Mancini (2004, p. 303) also call for more comparative political content data. 13. As shown below, utterances can also take the form of full articles, as in journalistic commentaries or guest commentaries or in the answer sequences of a printed interview. The difference between the two units of analysis is thus not dependent on the length or the exact form of the text but on the question of whether the unit is exclusively made up of the view of one actor ("utterance") or whether it contains more than this ("article"). An article usually contains factual information along with the views of one or more actors. 14. In the quality press, articles sometimes refer to arguments made in other articles published earlier or in other outlets (see, for example, CitationPeters et al., 2005; CitationTobler, 2002). Such discursive references can also enhance deliberativeness if they refer to those arguments explicitly, that is, if they do what is captured by the measures rebuttal on the idea level and conflicting ideas on the utterance level. Since the deliberative quality of such intertextual discursive references is captured on these lower levels of analysis, I prefer to pragmatically stop at the level of a single newspaper edition and to not include cross-edition deliberation as an additional unit of analysis. A more serious problem is posed by implicit references to arguments or discussions not mentioned in the text but presupposed and needed to fully understand and interpret a particular contribution. Such implicit discursive references can only be reconstructed qualitatively using contextual background knowledge on the particular debate in question. They do not lend themselves to the kind of quantitative contentanalysis envisaged here and thus point to a limitation of this kind of approach. 15. Rebuttal and conflicting ideas can also be assumed to most effectively model deliberative behavior in audiences. 16. One aspect may be added that distinguishes moderately polarized systems such as the Northern and Western European countries from the more strongly polarized countries of Southern Europe. In the latter kind of countries with more extreme partisan lines of newspapers (see CitationHallin & Mancini, 2004, pp. 89–142), the standard of civility may be of even greater normative importance than in all other countries. 17. CitationSchultz (2004), for example, has shown that "justification questions" by the moderator of a political talk show are important tools to elicit supporting arguments for participants' claims and therefore a suitable way of fostering public deliberation. In fact, such questions may qualify as the functional equivalent of the combination of "justification" and "conflicting ideas" in print coverage. In principle, television (and radio) formats merit a similar, culture-sensitive development of measurements of deliberativeness as was done in this article for newspaper content. This task, however, will have to wait for a different occasion. 18. A good first guess would be to take those countries classified as at least "partly free" in the Freedom of the Press survey by CitationFreedom House (2004)—although such classifications and the ratings on which they are based are not altogether unproblematic. For a different rank order of countries based on a different assessment method, see CitationReporters Without Borders (2004). 19. For a similar diagnosis based on surveys among journalists, see CitationDonsbach and Patterson (2004). Donsbach and Patterson, however, use pejorative labels for professional role definitions centering on opinion and advocacy forms of journalism ("ideologue," "missionary") and thereby imply a hierarchy of value, which this article has tried to avoid.