Abstract
This book offers an in-depth case study of communication dynamics in the context of local education governance in the US. The author confronts normative arguments from currently fashionable democratic theory (participatory, deliberative) with empirically grounded reflections on ‘ordinary democracy’. Ordinary democracy refers to what myriad groups of citizens and officials do every day, mostly at the local level, as they engage with policy issues. The book illuminates how they perform communicative actions, construct and struggle with public issues and negotiate democratic practice through interaction. Therefore, ordinary democracy ‘begins with existing institutions and describes what is occurring within them’ (p. 4), especially in terms of ‘communicative conduct’ (p. 5).
Tracey's research spans the late 1990s, and focuses on the Boulder Valley school district (Colorado), which provides a rich case study in terms of public discourse. Using interviews and media and document analysis, the author deploys ‘grounded practical theory’ rooted in communication studies to analyse the ‘socially consequential activities’ embodied in ‘talk-focussed practices’(p. 217). This approach shines a light on a dimension often neglected in studies of participatory and deliberative democracy, namely, communicative action in public meetings.
Accordingly, the author analyses the interaction between citizens and elected school board officials through the lens of their speech performances. She illustrates how opposing concepts of democracy are invoked on the ground, and therefore ideas about appropriate democratic practice emerge as at least as contested as the very issues to be solved (ch. 3). She also studies the role of the media, mainly local newspapers, in fostering public deliberation through civic journalism (ch. 5). Most interestingly, the author zooms in on the micropolitics of spoken exchanges, offering an enlightening account of how dissent is performed and citizen input recorded (ch. 4), how personal attacks and platitudes play a ‘useful’ role (ch. 6) and how policy making is underpinned by highly consequential ‘fights over words’ (ch. 7).
The volume, which joins others in foregrounding the critical role of emotions in democratic engagement, concludes with a call for ‘reasonable hostility’ as the ‘communicative ideal of local governance’ (p. 203). The concept seeks to strike a compromise between rules of civility that actually strangle passionate engagement, and adversarial dynamics that end up hindering collective problem solving. The idea may leave both deliberative and agonistic democrats wanting further elaboration.
All in all, the well-written stories in this refreshing book demonstrate that participation and deliberation scholars, lately much focused on extraordinary democratic experiments, can learn a great deal from researching sites of ordinary democracy.