2015_04_15 Q Conference Abstract

Give-and-Take: How Citizens Would Think About Taxation, If They Could

Everyone pays taxes, and taxation affords us citizens some democratic control over the mixed economy, yet we often poorly understand it. Reasoning with one another may strengthen our democracy, but little is known how such a deliberative ideal fares on abstract policy or how deliberative quality might be measured.

The first CiviCon Citizen Conference (http://www.civicon.de) tests in a quasi-experiment how deliberating policy as abstract as taxation might work, and how people's thinking on taxation might change as a result. During the week-long conference, 16 diverse, self-selected citizens were tasked to design a tax system "from scratch", choosing among possible combinations of base schedule. They participated in learning phases (https://github.com/civicon/samuelson), deliberated in moderated small group and plenary sessions, met with experts and held a concluding press conference.

Before and after the conference, citizens sorted 79 statements on taxation and the economy according to their subjective viewpoint. Following Q methodology, sorts were factor analyzed to extract ideal-typical viewpoints shared by participants. Before the conference, citizens expressed resentful, radical and moderate viewpoints, including some apparent inconsistencies between beliefs, values and preferences on taxation. After the conference, citizens shared decommodifying, pragmatic and critical viewpoints and displayed a simpler, lower-dimensional structuration of viewpoints.

Results indicate that indeed, deliberation changes people's thinking on taxation, strengthening their viewpoint consistency and better structuring their subjectivities. Results also indicate that deliberating abstract policy can be meaningful: While citizens considered themselves ill-prepared yet to recommend a tax, they felt more confident in deciding on tax policy and advocated for more and longer citizen participation on such abstract matters.

Long-form deliberation may or may not yield rational consensus on taxation or other complex economic policy, but at least, it should help reduce the rough-and-tumble of economic ideologies to fewer, deeper and reasonable disagreements, more amenable to last resort majority decisions.

Q methodology and deliberative democracy share epistemological and normative roots in American pragmatism: that meaning is intersubjective, that communication is human action and that we can -- and should -- reach some mutual understanding on the objective and moral world, even if contingent and preliminary. This study illustrates and explores how this common legacy makes Q methodology and and deliberative democracy are a good fit for political psychology. On the one hand, deliberation posits the regulative ideal under which individuals can freely constitute and express their political subjectivity: a mutual and egalitarian give-and-take of reasons. On the other hand, Q may serve to measure the quality of deliberation, occupying a sweet spot between quantitatively constrained interpretations for researchers and qualitative leeway for citizens' viewpoints: increased consistency or structuration of Q sorts might be falsifiable meta-standards without substantive (and circular) prejudice as to which one viewpoint would be "deliberative". The study concludes by suggesting further extensions and applications of Q methodology and deliberative democracy.