Graham W Wright

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Mary Parker Follett by scholars of management and public administration, but the acute relevance of Follett’s work to deliberative democracy has yet to be fully appreciated. In her 1918 work The New State Follett articulates a normative political theory that I refer to as Integrative democracy, which can be seen as an alternative formulation of deliberative democracy that is based on an activity that Follett refers to as integration rather than deliberation. In this paper I first present two contemporary challenges faced by deliberative democrats: how deliberation itself ought to be defined, and whether or not deliberation produces epistemic benefits in comparison to non-deliberative voting. I then show how Follett’s theory is able to respond to both of these criticisms. Finally, I discuss how Follett’s theory may need to be extended or modified to deal with challenges highlighted by the recent systemic turn in deliberative theory.

A number of high profile events, such as the violent protests that accompanied the visit of Charles Murray to Middlebury College, have intensified the national debate surrounding the issue of free expression at American universities. In recent years there have been increased efforts at American colleges to improve the well-being and comfort of marginalized populations, including racial and ethnic minorities, who are often subject to structural inequalities, discrimination, harassment, and microaggressions. However, there many who argue that these well-intended efforts are stifling the ability of students and faculty, especially those with more conservative political views, to freely discuss controversial political issues. Although an active debate on this issue has taken place in the popular press, it has largely proceeded in the absence of systematic data. We investigate this issue using data from surveys of representative samples of undergraduates at four elite US universities. We find that political moderates and conservatives are less comfortable than liberals discussing race relations in America, and that this lack of comfort is heavily driven by the perceived hostility of the discourse. Conversely, moderates and conservatives do not feel significantly less comfortable discussing other contentious political issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where lack of comfort was driven by a perceived lack of knowledge around the issue. These results suggest that future discussion of these issues should avoid generalizing about the climate for “free expression” in the abstract, but rather focus on students’ level of comfort discussing specific issue