Measuring Democratic Listening: A Listening Quality Index

• Author: Mary F. Scudder
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912921989449
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(1) 175 –187

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912921989449

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912921989449

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This paper develops a listening quality index (LQI) to

quantitatively measure listening in democratic deliber-

ation. The LQI can be used to assess listening in a vari-

ety of “micro” deliberative settings (Bächtiger and

Parkinson 2019), from parliaments to deliberative mini-

publics and experimental settings. Creating more delib-

erative moments in the policy-making process can help

counter problems of polarization, citizen distrust in gov-

ernment, and demobilization (Dryzek et al. 2019).

Deliberative mini-publics—groups of randomly selected

citizens “tasked with learning, deliberating, and advis-

ing or deciding on a policy or issue”— help “deepen

democracy” by reducing certain democratic deficits in

representative democracies (Beauvais and Warren 2019,

893, 908). But without listening, efforts to create and

expand spaces for deliberation will not enhance democ-

racy (Ercan, Hendriks, and Dryzek 2019, 21).

Listening is at the normative and functional core of

deliberative democracy (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019;

Barber 1984; Bickford 1996; Dobson 2014; Ercan,

Hendriks, and Dryzek 2019; Hendriks, Ercan, and Duus

2019; Mansbridge and Latura 2017; Scudder 2020a).

Deliberation simply cannot occur without listening. “In

the same way one who catches the ball turns the throw

into a game,” the act of listening turns acts of expression

into communication (Srader 2015, 98). The act of listen-

ing is constitutive of deliberation. While deliberative

theorists have recently come to appreciate the centrality

of listening to democratic decision making, we still lack

an adequate means of operationalizing listening and

assessing its quality in deliberation.

This is a conceptual paper that works toward a more

normatively sensitive operationalization of democratic

listening. It provides a theoretically informed, norma-

tively relevant, but also flexible and feasible measure of

listening to guide empirical work on deliberation. A key

obstacle to this task is observation. Listening occurs

internally and so can only be measured indirectly by

looking for observable behaviors we expect to correspond

with it. Given these observational challenges, empirical

deliberation research has relied primarily on “responsive-

ness” as a proxy for listening (Button and Garrett 2016;

Steenbergen et al. 2003; Steiner 2012, 268–71).

But this approach has limitations. By equating listen-

ing with responsiveness, we miss important variation in

listening and listening quality (Scudder 2020a, 136).

Existing measures collapse “not listening” and “not

responding” into one category, denying the possibility

989449PRQXXX10.1177/1065912921989449Political Research QuarterlyScudder

research-article2021

1Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mary F. (Molly) Scudder, Department of Political Science, Purdue

University, 100 N University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2050, USA.

Email: scudder@purdue.edu

Measuring Democratic Listening:

A Listening Quality Index

Mary F. Scudder1

Abstract

Recent political theory in the area of deliberative democracy has placed listening at the normative core of meaningfully

democratic deliberation. Empirical research in this area, however, has struggled to capture democratic listening in a

normatively relevant way. This paper presents a new, theoretically informed instrument for measuring and assessing

listening in deliberation. Here, I tackle the observational challenge of measuring the act of listening itself, as opposed

to either the preconditions or outcomes of listening. Reviewing existing measures, I show that each, in isolation, fails

to capture the most democratically meaningful aspects of listening. The paper argues, however, that existing and

novel measures can be usefully combined to allow researchers to capture different degrees of democratic listening.

Using Rawls’s concept of “lexical priority,” I aggregate relevant components of listening into a normatively significant

lexical scale. The paper describes this novel measurement and highlights how it can be used in empirical research on

democratic deliberation.

Keywords

deliberative democracy, listening, listening quality index, uptake, deliberation, political communication

Article