PUBLIC DELIBERATIONÕS ROLE IN INFORMING CITIZENS

the knowledge of interest groups and individual citizens about emerging public issues.Ó Some of the members of this conference are going about reaching this objective in a way quite different from the politics-as-usual prescription for informing citizens. I would like to tell you what they are doing and accomplishing. Some educators in agriculture and family/consumer science are informing the public on policy issues by involving citizens in making the tough decisions characteristic of all these issues. They are finding that the challenge of making choicesÑÒchoice workÓÑincreases the amount of information people take in and that it also generates its own kind of public knowledge, which is a type of socially constructed knowledge. The agents who are adding public deliberation to their programs are reviving a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of our country, a tradition that people such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson considered as essential to self-government as the Constitution itself. (John Adams actually began his policy career as a moderator of a deliberative town meeting in Braintree, Massachusetts.) Why Citizens Take Time to Deliberat