Performative Governance

Participation, Culture and Democracy (Edited by Tadej Pirc), 2018

In recent years, thinking among public administrators and civic leaders has shifted from reliance on hierarchy and control in policymaking to a desire for collaboration and empowerment. With this shift have come new calls from civic reformers and public-minded officials for public participation in governance. This emphasis on participation by members of the public has necessitated the creation of novel venues for citizens and officeholders to meet. But do both lay and professional participants have the communicative attitudes and aptitudes conducive to effective collaboration in these new public meetings? In order to answer this question, we need first to take a look at public meetings in general. Here we develop a framework for examining the connections between key elements of such meetings, including goals, communication strategies, and task and relational outcomes. This essay, the first in a two-part series, provides a conceptual grounding that will facilitate the development of a typology of public meetings.

Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999-2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and evaluate conduct. I outline norms for deliberative democracy in a particular instantiation of democracy and show how local democracy draws from, and contributes to, the larger rhetorical-political culture in the United States. This essay contributes to studies of language and social interaction in political settings and addresses 1) the lack of communication scholarship concerning a fundamental part of New England local democracy, and 2) deliberative democratic theorists’ idealist notions of local democracy. Given the variety in forms of local political systems, opportunities abound for similar studies of other local democracies’ ways of speaking.

Journal of Public Deliberation, 2019

This essay offers a response to the special issue essays. It emphasizes that town meetings are a site for governance and have implications for contemporary deliberative practices.

The paper argues that Legislative Theatre, as an artistic methodology for active citizenship, creates a process of collective reflection to produce solutions to community conflicts. Boal used this tool of transitive democracy to conceive legal proposals in favour of marginalised groups. Thirteen of these proposals were approved by the legal system in Brazil. The analysis of a Legislative Theatre workshop in Spain using Boal’s methodology allowed the identification of some interesting elements but also the limitations of the tool. Aspects including the ideology of the audience, the scope of the legal proposals and the role of the joker are seen as important. Other conditioning elements and positive aspects are also discussed

MaRBLe

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.55 6.2 Description of the sample………………………………………………………….p.56 6.3 Actual interaction between citizens and local politicians………… p.57 6.4 Expectations concerning the interaction between citizens and local politicians ………………………………………………………………………….p.61 6.5 Expectations and actual interaction…………………………………………. p.71 6.6 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………..p.71 Chapter 7 _ Übach-Palenberg: empirical findings 7.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.73 7.2 Description of the sample………………………………………………………….p.74 7.3 Actual interaction between citizens and local politicians………… p.75 7.4 Expectations concerning the interaction between citizens and local politicians…………………………………………………………………………. p.80 7.5 The literature on local politics……………………………………………………p.90 7.6 Conclusion and recommendations…………………………………………….p.91 Chapter 8 _ Valkenburg: empirical findings 8.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.95 8.2 The Case Study of Valkenburg aan de Geul-a Dutch Municipality………………………………………………………………………………..p.95 8.3 Description of the Sample………………………………………………………… p.97 8.4 Actual Interaction between Citizens and Local Politicians………. p.98 8.5 Expectations concerning interaction between citizens and local politicians………………………………………………………………………… p.101 8.6 Expectations and Actual Interaction………………………………………. p.109 8.7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. p.111 Chapter 9 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………. p.113 References………………………………………………………………………………………………p.119 Annex 1.…….……………………………………………………………………………………………p.125 This booklet is devoted to the relationship between citizens and local councillors in four municipalities in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. Eight Bachelor students of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University conducted the research, in collaboration with Professor of Local and Regional Governance Klaartje Peters. We are grateful for the help of all participating citizens in the four municipalities and we are thankful for the hospitality of the municipalities. We also would like to thank the mayors and all other local politicians, and City Inspector Thomas de Jong who invited us to present the results of our research on June 27, 2016, in Übach-Palenberg. Finally, we want to thank the institutions that made this project possible, not the least the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, Sabine Kuipers for her help with the editing and Dr. Pieter Caljé, who deserves our gratitude for organizing and coordinating MaRBLe projects at our faculty, and offering Bachelor students a chance to learn how to do research.

2020

Research on complex municipal redevelopment projects from an insider's perspective is a much-needed addition to the discipline of leadership studies in the United States. International research has shown that project leadership must be examined as the exercise of power toward an intended outcome, and that leaders employ various strategies to determine that outcome. This intense normative case study analyzes how leaders of a large municipal redevelopment project used knowledge of local values, forms of social capital, and adept practical wisdom as effective strategies to successfully complete the project. The significance of the intense normative case study approach used here cannot be overstated, employing the researcher's insider perspective to ask: What did it take to build an Arts Center in a mid-sized city in the Midwest, US? Based on a review of literature examining cities as complex social systems, along with theories of constructing social space there in, 51 intense one-on-one interviews were conducted with people actively involved in the project. The data strongly supports the use of Goffman's dramaturgical theory as an analytic tool for studying the art of leadership in municipal redevelopment, in conjunction with theories of power; particularly the elements in Bourdieu's structural constructivism of habitus and circulating social capital, and Flyvbjerg's critique of contemporary social science as lacking a phronetic framework with which to study power as a practical art. In addition, emergent complexity theory newly applied to social systems, informed the analysis of leaders' strategic responses to events that lay outside regular expectations. The data demonstrated that leaders with earned social capital, who understood the city's habits and values and how to manipulate them with dramatic invocations and enactments, exercised their accumulated practical knowledge to reach an intended outcome.

2022

This chapter introduces Dramaturgical Analysis as a way of analysing the performative aspects of public deliberation. It outlines the key dimensions of dramaturgical analysis including scripting, setting, staging and performance, and shows how these dimensions can be used to analyse public deliberation in structured forums, the broader public sphere and in policymaking processes. Dramaturgical analysis directs the researcher’s attention to often-overlooked aspects of public deliberation, such as the performative styles of the actors involved in deliberation, the symbols and artefacts they use to stage their arguments, to reach out and persuade diverse audiences. The chapter illustrates the application of dramaturgical analysis in deliberative democracy research and presents this analysis as a particularly promising way of investigating non-verbal practices and performances in public deliberation.

Administration & Society, 2005

This article aims to shed light on the performative dimension of participation in policy making. It is argued that we can enhance our understanding of the dynamics of policy deliberation examining the setting in which the deliberation takes place as well as the particular staging of that setting. Portraying political processes as sequences of staged performances of conflict and conflict resolution, this article analyzes how the design of the setting affects what is said, what can be said, and what can be said with influence. This helps to understand why many of the familiar participatory arrangements fail to satisfy both governments and the public. It also gives a new perspective on joint policy learning and opens a perspective on how to enhance the democratic quality of policy deliberation.