Assessing Citizen Participation in Public Processes: Making Visible the Ephemera of Decision-Making Talk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to current research in communications, rhetoric, and discourse analysis that extends disciplinary interests into the study of citizen participation in public processes. The impetus for this study comes from the troubling consensus that many public decision-making processes tend to discourage authentic citizen participation. In order to investigate the degree to which citizen participation may be judged as authentic, talk analysis is applied to the interactions of a government-citizen group as they negotiate a policy for the management of natural areas.The investigation examines the interactive dimension of the context of situation, which offers evidence of participation that goes beyond evidence offered by texts alone. The hypothesis is that the contextual dimension of the participatory process should provide richer evidence of the interactive, moment-to-moment, strategic moves of participants. The theoretical framework for the study integrates the concepts of recontextualization and structure-in-action with recent developments in activity theory and theories of agency.The findings show that, in their meetings, participants agreed and disagreed as they worked toward a consensus on how to write policy clauses. Microanalyses of their talk show evidence of an interactive inclusiveness and meaningful participation that is not apparent in the textual dimension of the written statements the committee ultimately submitted. This method offers researchers in communications and language studies a way of expanding rhetorical analysis to include the interactive dimension of context in real-world processes of civic engagement.Key words: authentic participation, recontextualization, structure-in-action, agency, public processes, decision-making processes
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".