Ordinary Democracy

Ordinary democracy (OD) is the name Karen Tracy gives to communicative practices that occur in local governance groups; it references what actually happens in public bodies that are committed to acting democratically. As a theoretical idea, OD is most like Frank Bryan's concept of real democracy. Real democracy is what occurs in local-level direct democracy groups, such as town meetings where everyone gets to vote after a public discussion. OD is what occurs in local-level representative governance groups where elected officials make decisions following various kinds of input from their citizens.

OD's roots can be traced to Jane Mansbridge's ethnographic study of a town meeting in “Selby” Vermont. In her influential book, Beyond Adversary Democracy, Mansbridge examines the public meeting in one community as its citizens sought to problem solve cooperatively with each other, pursuing (partially) shared interests and making decisions about their community. In contrast to real democracy's focus on participant profiles (e.g., percentages of male-female attendees and speakers), the variation in meeting structures (e.g., morning vs. night meetings, bundling of town with school business, or not), and voting patterns, OD emphasizes talk. OD focuses on the content, style, [Page 699]and structures of the talk that citizens and elected officials use as they meet and make decisions in their public meetings. School boards and city councils are prototypical sites of OD.

Unlike most notions of democracy-deliberative, participatory, or strong democracy, for example-OD is not a normative ideal. It is empirical; it can be seen and heard. When governance groups meet, ordinary democracy is what they are doing. Ordinary democracy includes communicative actions that uphold ideals of democracy and actions that challenge, appeal to, and subvert the ideals. In sites of ordinary democracy, such as school board meetings, citizens and elected officials regularly appeal to competing normative notions of democracy, most often to criticize the actions of others or to defend their own or to advocate for a particular course of action.

In a study of Western U.S. school board meetings, for instance, Tracy found that participants drew upon contradictory notions of democracy to advance meeting purposes that they favored and to derail those they did not like. In their meeting commentaries, citizens and elected officials aligned democracy with rule following so groups could accomplish what was fair, and they aligned real democracy with a willingness not to follow rules that were unjust. Participants argued for the importance of elected officials who represented their constituents, and they appealed to democracy to make legitimate the process by which elected officials could use their own judgment to oppose ill-informed majorities. Tensions between adversarial and unitary ideals of democracy also were highly visible in people's talk. Sometimes people argued for a meeting group working collaboratively to craft a solution that everyone could buy into. At other times, and often on the same issue, people argued that the group's conflict was inevitable; speakers should simply advocate their positions and let the vote settle the disagreement.

OD bodies face multiple dilemmas as they figure out how they ought to conduct themselves. In addition to the multiple meanings of democracy likely to be at work in most OD sites, school board OD groups also face challenges related to limited resources and their competing goals of equity and excellence. They also must deal with an institutional decision logic that puts educational expertise alongside the community will, without recognizing possible tensions.

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