The Relational Basis of Democratic Legitimacy

The democratic quality of a state relies in part upon its citizens' ability to freely reason on public policy questions (Bohman & Rehg, 1997). Some scholars are concerned that modern societies lack the institutional and civic capacity necessary to become sufficiently deliberative democracies (Nabatchi, 2010). University-based scholars and public-interest organizations have responded by organizing procedural mini-publics, a type of public forum designed to enhance the quality and efficacy of political discourse (Fung, 2003). These deliberative processes differ from informal political conversation by systematically selecting participants and by constraining discourse to achieve normatively desirable outcomes (Bohman & Rehg, 1997, p. xvi).;In this dissertation, I use communication theory to explain how participants in deliberative processes manage to cooperate even in manifestly adversarial political contexts. I argue that interactions within mini-publics involve an understudied but crucial relational component. Using Relational Framing Theory (Dillard, Solomon, & Samp, 1996) to inform my investigation, I measure participants' relational perceptions during a small-group deliberative interaction. I use those data to examine the effect of differential relational judgments on participants' interactive experiences, reasoning, and legitimacy assessments.;In Chapter 1, I outline deliberation as a political practice and as a subject of scholarly inquiry. I discuss deliberative democracy as a theory of legitimate government. I then examine why some empirical social scientists embrace its tenets to guide academic studies of mini-publics as democratic interventions. I describe their features and give examples of the specific problems mini-public organizers intend to solve. I conclude by arguing that the development of procedural democratic deliberation is an attempt to increase political legitimacy.;In Chapter 2, I discuss political legitimacy as the focal concern of deliberative democratic theory. I define the concept of democratic legitimacy and differentiate four types of deliberative legitimacy. A central feature of deliberative legitimacy is that it links citizens' expectations about democratic norms with their experiences of communicative interaction. My central argument is that deliberative theory implies that legitimacy has a communicative basis. Thus, in Chapter 3, I consider how communication theory may inform deliberation theory.;In Chapter 3, I argue that the communicative aspect of small-group deliberation is undertheorized. Communication scholars have described this problem as the "'black box' of deliberation," in which scholars assume without evidence that dialogue under conditions of deliberative interaction produces democratically desirable outcomes (Mutz, 2008, p. 530; Stromer-Galley & Muhlberger, 2009, p. 174). Solving this problem requires theorizing based on foundational understandings of human communication. Thus, I draw on the concept of relational information processing, as articulated through Relational Framing Theory (Dillard, Solomon, & Samp, 1996), as a grounds for explaining how deliberative mini-publics legitimize collective selfgovernance through communicative interaction. This concept links Chapters 1 and 2 by explaining how the unique environment of a mini-public invites participants to maintain interpersonal relationships. These relationships are integral to the process of reasoning on policy arguments because they give participants a basis for differentiating between enactment of strategic (i.e. persuasion-oriented) and cooperative (i.e. understanding-oriented) goals.;In Chapter 4, I present four theoretical models that relate causal forces (e.g., process design and norm enactment) to democratic legitimacy outcomes. The first two models are attitudinal (influences on participants' legitimacy-salient judgements), and the second two are behavioral (influences on participants' legitimacy-salient actions).;I augment these models by theorizing about how variance in relational frame salience acts as a conditional effect within each of them. I hypothesize that relational frame salience is an outcome of the process design choices from Chapter 1. I argue that participants' differential perceptions of frame salience explains variation in participants' attitudinal perceptions of teleological and procedural legitimacy. Based on my theorizing in Chapter 3, I argue that interactions characterized by cooperative relationships allow participants to engage with reasons rather than compete over contested positions. Finally, I argue that participants are more likely to give symbolic consent when deliberation is teleologically and procedurally legitimate.;In Chapter 5, I describe my empirical methodology for collecting data to assess the plausibility of my hypotheses. I discuss my recruiting method, the design of my participatory mini-public, and the instruments I used for measuring variables of interest. I also report the measurement properties of my data. This section includes manipulation-checks of the experimental component and factor analyses to establish reliable measures.;In Chapter 6, I discuss my data analysis. I use structural equation modeling to test my hypotheses. The data support several of the hypothesized conditional effects that flow from relational framing. One key finding is that enactment of deliberative norms primes an affiliation/disaffiliation-salient interpretation of the interaction episode. The data also confirm my hypothesis that interaction framing is important for policy reasoning by reducing the role of prior commitment and increasing the role of argument-specific judgements.;In Chapter 7, I draw conclusions from my study for the theory and practice of deliberation. I also note limitations on my claims and future research avenues to address them. From my analysis, I draw the conclusion that relational frame salience is a conditional effect that partially explains why mini-public participants adopt deliberative norms, and when prior attitudes act as independent influences on participants' evaluations of issue-relevant argument quality.