Collective Opinion Formation for Public Decision Making in Local Governments

Democratic decision making on public issues requires that a collective form of public opinion be constructed in order to be legitimate. However, elicitation of collective public opinion has been challenging due to conceptual and methodological difficulties as well as practical constraints. This paper revisits existing methods of civic engagement through the lens of structured public decision making, and reveals the disconnects between methods of public opinion and the need for establishing public value and solid decision analysis in democratic decision making. This explains why the current online deliberation systems fail to support formation of decision-relevant public opinions. Based on such understanding, we propose Community Opinion Elicitation (COPE) as a solution to public engagement in local government decision making. COPE envisions a three-phase process where opinions from the general public are elicited (Phase III) only after public values and solid decision analysis have been established (Phases I and II). In practice, COPE is implemented by extending traditional online deliberation with two small-group deliberations that address public value identification and decision analysis. This process has been deployed by State College municipal government as a formal method to engage the public. We report our findings from such field exercises and their implications to scaling up online deliberation for public decision making.