‘There are moments of crisis when we can seize the opportunity for deliberative democracy to flourish.’ A conversation with Nicole Curato.
By Miguel Rivera*
Last 30 April 2024, Professor Nicole Curato gave an online seminar with UCD DeepLab on “Conspiracy, Empathy, and Deliberative Democracy: A Dispatch from the Philippines”. The seminar covered a range of topics surrounding the possibilities of building deliberative democratic spaces for communities, and how threats to these spaces are being resisted around the world. With a particular focus on the Philippines, Prof. Curato began with a presentation that challenged the mainstream notion that disinformation and mythmaking are mere problems of mass manipulation and deception. Instead, she put forward a compelling case that “disinformation is a problem of political inequality”. Then, together with UCD PhD student Miguel Rivera, Nicole discussed where Philippine political society has failed to address political disinformation, and how deliberative democracy can help reorient anti-disinformation activist efforts back towards community-centred approaches. Other seminar participants joined in the insightful conversation on how different sectors can help affirm the power of communities to build deliberative spaces. Below is the transcript of the Q&A segment between Miguel and Nicole.
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Her research demonstrates the transformative power of deliberative governance in fragile and conflict-affected settings. She examines the enabling conditions for marginalised communities to assert their voices in policymaking and implementation to secure better outcomes. She is the founder of the Global Citizens’ Assembly Network (GloCAN), former editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, founding editor of the Deliberative Democracy Digest, and founder of the Deliberative Democracy Summer School. She has published three books on deliberative democracy, numerous journal articles, public reports, and op-eds for outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Australian Foreign Affairs.
Miguel Rivera: Well, there are a lot of parallels between the work that DeepLab is doing in terms of precarity of labour, and so on and so forth. But let’s first take it on a theoretical level. In your other work you cited that the goal of emotion has been sort of underdeveloped, or sort of maligned by deliberative democrats. But what we see here in your presentation is there’s a lot of emotion that’s going on. Can you expound on the changing role of emotion and its appreciation within deliberative spaces? Because what if I see the other as someone who’s highly emotional? You know, for these maximalist deliberative democrats, that already dis-counts you [the emotional person]. But as you can see, emotion plays a huge role in how people appreciate ‘the other.’ So, can you expand on this particular aspect?
Nicole Curato: Yes, thanks, Miguel. Thanks for referencing my earlier work. At least in this deliberative forum, more than emotions, I think, what really facilitated deliberation was not the standard, rational, gentlemanly exchange of discourse or weighing of evidence. What actually sparked the conversation was stories. It was storytelling.
When people started talking about someone they knew who was a precarious digital worker or a precarious journalist, it facilitated a conversation about whether you can blame people for working in this information industry if they’re precarious workers. There was also a discussion about implementing a cybercrime law to curb fake news.
Someone also told the story that they tried to file a case against someone who had slandered their brother only to find out that the National Bureau of Investigation has no resources to investigate the person who slandered their brother. So, they backtrack on the more legalistic, more investigative kinds of recommendations to address disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. But they again went back to the more social kind of recommendation in the forum. So, I guess to answer your question, yes, emotion was definitely part of it. Emotion as expressed through stories. And I think that’s one important development that happened maybe a decade or more ago in deliberative democracy circles. Some colleagues stopped talking about or using the term exchanging of “reasons” because it sounds so, you know, Habermasian and rationalistic and broadening it to using the term “considerations”. We exchange considerations, whether that’s a personal testimony, an emotional consideration and anxiety, or a thought that’s not yet fully formed. These are considerations that we should put to the fore and honour and acknowledge and engage with.
Miguel: Alright. Now, in terms of considerations: a particular difficulty, for example, in my work with the Ateneo Martial Law Museum, which is directly involved with disinformation, part of what we find difficult is the notion that we are there to proselytise, that we are there to sort of impose or to teach. I know that, for example, the utilisation of narratives would help sort of alleviate that. But how do we prevent ourselves as academics or as experts to be seen or to act as if we know better. For example, I see this a lot with anti-disinformation people. They just say, “Oh, just give them the facts, and then they appreciate it.” They find it so difficult to understand that that is not the problem here. So, how do we go about creating a more equal engagement when there are so many biases on the other side.
Nicole: Miguel is trying to bait me into picking fights [laughs]. It’s 9:00 PM in Canberra. I will not pick fights. But I should first mention that what you are doing with the Martial Law Museum is incredible work. Congratulations to you and your team, and I fully appreciate the work that you are doing. I also obviously share your observation that sometimes there is a risk for these anti-disinformation advocates to, let’s say, sound patronising, right? And I think this is my main disagreement with dominant narratives of disinformation that [say], “people are dumb,” “people lost their free will,” “let us help you find the right way,” and people they disagree with are radicalised by TikTok, right? So, I find that incredibly dangerous, because that reduces the agency of people. It denies them their citizenship and their opportunity or ability to be able to deliver it.
I am not going to make suggestions on how museum curators can better do their job. But maybe I can speak from our work in deliberative democracy. We also notice that a lot of our colleagues in the arts and humanities space have also started using institutions of culture not just to convey ideas but also to be a site for creating or co-creating ideas. Right? So, I know that, in Berlin, I think it is a museum of democracy, if I’m not mistaken, it became a site for people to co-generate their imaginaries of what democracy should look like. They have used deliberative processes, bringing everyday people. You know, people that we think are tacky, who have no business being in a museum, or people who have no taste but are still invited in that space to curate and co-create an exhibition. So, maybe that is one thing that we can consider. How would we create narratives together instead of how some people create narratives imposed on others? I think we also, and this is maybe the tension that I have with some of our colleagues who are very much in the advocacy campaign space, because advocacy and campaigning really has, you know, very clear goals, very clear aims. You aim to convert what the other person is thinking, whereas a more deliberative approach invites people in and calls in people to a conversation instead of calling them out for believing in the wrong things. Right? I think that is the tension that we have with campaigns and advocacy versus deliberation. However, I must emphasise that we are all on the same team. I don’t like the Marcoses either. We are all in the same team, but our approaches are different.
Miguel: Okay. Now. There is one space that you have not mentioned yet, or have implied, that I want to focus on. Is there still a deliberative promise when it comes to social media sites or platforms? Because I am seeing that you are on the field, or that there are spaces of deliberation outside of the online space and it seems like a lot of these platforms are sort of the breeding grounds of disinformation. Do you think there is a promise there in terms of turning social media platforms into spaces of deliberation. Because some experts seem to think that it is not there.
Nicole: I think there is an inherent tension between good deliberation and deliberation taking place in a privatised public sphere. That is what we have on social media. Right? Ideally, deliberation takes place in a public sphere that is not controlled by techno-feudal lords. And so, I imagine it will be difficult for deliberation to take place on social media when it is controlled by big tech. I am quite sceptical. But having said that, I am also open to serendipitous encounters in social media that can prompt deliberation in the wider public sphere. When I think of a generative AI, for example, of course, it is kind of scary in the sense that generative AI is based on dominant stocks of knowledge and replicating that stock of knowledge. But when Google started doing generative AI with images, there was this huge backlash that the images that Google was generating were so white, right? And there was this big backlash of people saying, “No, you must realise if I say, ‘Draw me a picture of a doctor,’ you don’t show me a white man as a doctor. You show me a woman who’s from a minority background.’” Google adjusted the algorithm to respond to public outrage.
So, I guess what I am saying here is that public discourse may be taking place in a privatised public sphere, but we can also try to work within these constraints to hold big tech accountable and protect the integrity and diversity of public discourse. I suppose the second point that I want to mention is the work of colleagues like Jennifer Forestal, for example, who argues that platform design is really important for facilitating deliberation. In her work, she found that Reddit is actually the most deliberative of all social media platforms just because of its design. We have colleagues from Taiwan who organised a platform called Polis (pol.is) which is precisely designed so people from Taiwan can deliberate on common issues. They can upvote and downvote proposals on a particular issue, whether that is opening a new power plant or opening new bike lanes. So, the design enables a particular form of conversation. Maybe one answer is also platform design. But for the most part, I am sceptical if public talk is taking place in a privatised public sphere.
Miguel: Okay. But why does it seem like the far right, for example, or those who are branded as illiberal… Why do they seem to find it easier to find audiences and to create communities around deliberation, while progressives seem to have now a very difficult time creating the same spaces? I mean, the largest influencers and so forth in politics tend to be from the right. What are progressives missing in terms of creating these communities of communication?
Nicole: What we learned from the rise of far-right populists is that populists are very good at galvanising communities because they give voice to a particular grievance. But once they are in power, they have no solutions. And that is when these publics kind of start disintegrating. And we see this in the Philippines. We see this with MAGA supporters in the US as well. So, I think what the far right has going for them is giving voice to that grievance. My hope is, if they get into power, they are proven to be ineffective, and then their supporters will also disintegrate.
The second part of your question is the harder. Why can’t liberals get their act together? Basically, and I think when we compare, let’s say, the Philippines to the US and the UK. When we think about these 3 countries that had populist waves, the biggest issue is there is a lack of alternatives. There is a lack of imagination. Elections are coming up in the UK. In the US, the main issue is Gerontocracy. Why, why is no one replacing men in their eighties? Right? So, I really have no diagnosis for the reason the left has run out of ideas. But my sense is the grievance. Politics has become the territory of the far right. But the politics of alternatives. I think the liberals, the left, have not really captured that yet.
Miguel: So, I have also seen a pattern in Philippine politics where elites have become more deliberative as opposed to the masses. I mean, you have this entire narrative of who would run for president between Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte. Then they would go to a resort with Gloria Arroyo over the course of a few days and discuss who would run for there. Which seems to me sort of a shocking bastardization of the deliberative space model. But that has been my specific worry, for example, throughout the year. So, it seems that it is elites now who are being very deliberative while they spew conspiracy and disinformation to destroy deliberative spaces on the ground. Also, a lot of misinformation is spread not by everyday people. And, as I am seeing, but actually by elites like pastors, and so forth. Given how intricately and intimately a lot of people’s public lives are connected to elites and to dynasties… Do you think that elites will ever sort of capitulate towards some more deliberative structure for Philippine politics? I mean, we could talk about the anti-dynasty. But how can we get a lead to take on this challenge of building more deliberative spaces? Because, with this, they are going to have to let go of a lot of their power. Are there ever any prospects for that in such a country like ours, like in the Philippines?
Nicole: When I think of countries that have institutionalised processes for citizen deliberation, these countries have experienced massive crises. For example, Ireland is one of the favourite examples of using citizens’ assemblies. There was a citizens’ assembly on abortion and a citizens’ assembly on same-sex marriage that was tied to a referendum, and that was actually only made possible because the politicians realised that “we are on a deadlock. We cannot decide on this topic, as society is deeply divided on these seemingly religious issues.” And so, when they outsourced this, not necessarily decision-making, but when they outsource deliberation to citizens, they actually realise that “oh, actually, public opinion on abortion and same-sex marriage has actually shifted. They are more supportive of it especially.” Even people who still disagree with abortion and same-sex marriage tend to endorse changing the constitution because they understand the considerations of other people. So, in the example of Ireland, constitutional referendum, abortion, and same-sex marriage, the idea there is that the elites capitulated because they realized they were in a deadlock. They were in a crisis. They don’t know what to do. Give it to citizens. Belgium is the same. It is not the richest country in the EU, but it also had the record of the longest country that took the longest to form a government after an election. Longer than Iraq. So, one outcome of that is that political elites in Belgium realised that “maybe we need to bring citizens in more in policy making.” And so, they institutionalised a lot of citizen’s assemblies in Belgium as well.
I guess the message here is that maybe we cannot rely on the enlightened interests of the people with power who do not give up power. But there are moments of crisis when citizens, advocates, academics, activists, influencers… There are moments of crisis when we can seize the opportunity to share power with political elites when they are disorganised and when they are faced with a deadlock. Maybe these are moments for deliberative democracy to flourish. So, I am not expecting the elites to give up their power. But all systems face crises, whether we are talking about the Philippines, Brazil, or India. We need to be ready when the crisis happens. We need to be ready with a proposal to say, “this is how we bring citizens in,” when the elites cannot get themselves organised.
* Miguel Paolo Rivera is a former Director of the Ateneo Martial Law Museum and a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Ateneo de Manila in the Philippines. He is a PhD researcher at the UCD School of Geography and member of DeepLab.
