PEOPLE
Q+A Jane Mansbridge with
The Ash Center sat down with Jane Mansbridge, Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, to discuss her work developing a package of case studies, simulations, and exercises for teaching effective legislative negotiation aimed at state and federal legislators in the United States.
What interested you about the field of legislative negotiation? My field is deliberative democracy. I realized recently that all of the academic literature on deliberation put down negotiation, denigrated it, considered it bargaining. Deliberation is supposed to be talking about the common good, whereas bargaining pits people against each other. But because I’m here at the Kennedy School, I work with colleagues teaching negotiation. So I knew that negotiation isn’t just two absolute enemies bargaining to just get the best thing for themselves. It’s more creative than that. So, I thought, ‘Well, let’s see what political science has to say about negotiation.’ And, the answer was: it had zero to say about legislative negotiation.
Why do you think that is? Legislative negotiation takes place behind closed doors. It has to be behind closed doors to maximize success. So to study it, you can’t watch it. You have to ask people who’ve been there what they remember. Two problems: First, they might not remember accurately. Second, even more importantly, they’re not necessarily going to tell you what went on, because the point of closed doors is to keep things from getting out. Good negotiators don’t talk at the time, and the best ones don’t talk later either. Also, unlike roll-call votes, there are no obvious numbers attached to the process. As a consequence, this really important democratic method has just not been studied systematically at all. Some journalists have done a brilliant job of writing case studies of particular negotiations, asking lots of people and beginning to pry things out of them. But there’s been nothing systematic.
What about the study of negotiation? Certainly at Harvard we regularly train negotiators in law, business, and other fields. Have legislators and their staffs regularly participated in these trainings? There has never been any training in legislative negotiation. The negotiation field came out of business and to some degree international relations. Most of the cases are business cases.
22
Communiqué
Fall 2019
