By John Gastil, UW professor of communication

This Saturday, February 9, Washington voters will participate in Democratic and Republican caucuses to select delegates in each party’s Presidential election. The caucuses have potential to be a remarkable campaign event, in which people meet fellow citizens—neighbors, even—face-to-face to discuss the candidates and issues of the moment. It's a lively scene.

The only problem is, it’s deceptive.

The truth is that the caucus is just a complicated method of head-counting. At best, caucuses are a ritualistic exercise in counting where people’s shoes end up on a gym floor. At worst, they can devolve into shouting and intimidation competitions, as they did at times in Nevada.

The image of a reflective, careful electorate is as false for a caucus as for a primary. The dominant narrative in the Democratic election is “change” (Obama) versus “experience” (Clinton), despite the fact that either candidate would be a radical change, and both have only a modest amount of experience in government.

More striking is that younger voters and African-Americans are flocking to Obama while older voters and women are lining up for Clinton, suggesting more of a demographic-matching process than careful deliberation.

On the Republican side, the press have declared McCain the Republican nominee well in advance of his likely triumph, a fact that incensed Huckabee, who amusingly pled his case once again on the Feb. 7  edition of Colbert Report.

The dominant explanation for McCain’s reemergence as the frontrunner is the alleged recent “success” of the war in Iraq, which McCain had supported even when it was unpopular; this supposedly helped him win over the voters of New Hampshire one at a time. That sounds like a reasoning electorate, but McCain only had a narrow 5-point victory over Romney in the Granite State, with only 37% of the vote. Were the other two-thirds of Republican voters unreasonable? Moreover, does this make the Iowa caucusers irrational for backing Huckbee five days earlier?

All these explanations strike me as tortured, overwrought attempts to rationalize an electoral process that is anything but deliberative. This is the essence of the argument I make in my new book, Political Communication and Deliberation. 

I show some of the ways civic reformers are trying to change the way we hold public meetings. They're working for a new kind of community politics, journalism, and governance that encourage public deliberation. Groups like the November 5th Coalition promote a real kind of deliberation—not the sham deliberation that the caucuses represent.

To be clear, I consider it one’s civic duty to participate in elections. I will be among those  citizens trudging to the caucus on Saturday, in spite of a persistent flu, which I hope none of my fellow partisans catch. However, my being there makes me part of a very, very small percentage of Washington voters who will participate—roughly one-tenth as many can be expected to vote in a primary.

The caucus, particularly the Iowa Caucus, has built up a kind of credibility and “specialness” as a remarkable democratic (little “d”) event. Imagine a process where citizens carefully study their candidates then come together to compare one another’s choices. Imagine opposing partisan camps having the chance to make their case for their preferred candidate, hoping to woo both their counterparts and the clutch of still-undecided or independent-minded citizens who stand between them. I ask us to imagine the deliberation that could take place at these events because it is precisely that—imaginary.

So if you live in Washington, by all means attend the Democratic or Republican caucus. But attend expecting to stand around, tap into some party energy, and maybe bond with your like-minded partisans. Don’t go there expecting an education in democratic deliberation, or you’ll walk away disappointed.