Final Report (all chapters)

One may wonder why public hearings remain so popular among public administrators if
they are such a poor institution of public consultation. There are several good reasons for this
situation. Public agencies with a statutory mandate to solicit input from the public regard them as
a quick and cheap way to formally meet their administrative obligations. In addition, public
hearings can be manipulated to minimize challenges to the agency’s preferred policy option.
Since the agency controls the logistical aspects of the decision-making process, it can choose to
convene a public hearing when fundamental policy choices have already been made. If an
agency expects the proposed policy to trigger strong criticism, it can decide to exclude the most
controversial issues from the agenda. Alternatively, it can convene the hearing on a day and at a
time that is likely to make it difficult for critics to participate.
Hearings are popular among administrators also because they provide an opportunity to
strengthen their relationship with key political constituencies. Organized interest groups are
predictable, their positions don’t change abruptly, and they master the technical and legal
language necessary to communicate effectively with public administrators. By contrast,
laypersons are often viewed as unpredictable, irrational, and poorly informed. In addition, the
agency can credibly describe its effort to reach out to its core constituencies as an adequate
approach to soliciting public input. Well-organized interest groups, for their part, welcome
public hearings because they afford them an opportunity to restate their positions in a public
setting. Finally, public hearings are useful to the agency because they may warn of upcoming
legal challenges. Against this background, it should come as no surprise that the available
empirical evidence suggests that despite their popularity, public hearings have very little impact
on agency behavior. 58
10.8.2 Consensus Conferences
Consensus conferences have been described by some commentators as a promising
institutional mechanism for democratizing political choices involving controversial technological
developments. 59 In this section, we briefly examine the history of this participatory instrument
58
59
Barry Checkoway, "The Politics of Public Hearings," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 17, no. 4 (1981);
Richard L. Cole and David A. Caputo, "The Public Hearing as an Effective Citizen Participation Mechanism: A
Case Study of the General Revenue Sharing Program," American Political Science Review 78, no. 2 (1984);
Carol Ebdon, "Beyond the Public Hearing: Citizen Participation in the Local Government Budget Process,"
Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management 14, no. 2 (2002); Daniel J. Fiorino,
"Citizen Participation and Environmental Risk: A Survey of Institutional Mechanisms," Science, Technology and
Human Values 15, no. 2 (1990), p.230-31; Tom Lando, "The Public Hearing Process: A Tool for Citizen
Participation, or a Path toward Alienation?," National Civic Review 92, no. 1 (2003); Jeanne Nelson Ratliff, "The
Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Analysis of a Public Hearing on the Proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste
Repository," Communication Studies 48, no. 4 (1997); Rowe and Frewer, "Public Participation Methods: A
Framework for Evaluation," p.18.
Edna F. Einsiedel and Deborah K. Eastlick, "Consensus Conferences as Deliberative Democracy," Science
Communication 21, no. 4 (2000); David H. Guston, "Evaluating the First U.S. Consensus Conference: The
Impact of the Citizens’ Panel on Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy," Science, Technology and
Human Values 24, no. 4 (1999); Simon Joss, "Toward the Public Sphere – Reflections on the Development of
Participatory Technology Assessment," Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 22, no. 3 (2002); Myung-Sik
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