39 —-1 —0 —+1 3 BUILDING DELIBERATIVE CAPACITY TO CREATE PUBLIC VALUE T HE P RACTICES AND A RTIFACTS OF THE A RT OF H OSTING J ODI S ANDFORT AND K ATHRYN S . Q UICK I n the second decade of the twenty-first century, polarization in American poli- tics is undermining civility in the public sphere (Jacobs 2014). Amid the acri- monious debates surrounding much policymaking, it is hard to sustain the core practices of our democracy: the ideal of engaging citizens and their representa- tives in articulating goals for government policies and programs. Public manage- ment practice has taken a turn toward market-based principles of performance measurement and competition (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004; Moynihan 2008; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011), thereby reinforcing a framework attending to custom- ers who demand to be served rather than citizens working with their representatives to cocreate public policy (Dahl and Soss 2014). Yet, as public affairs scholars, we take a different tack of studying public engagement initiatives as potential mechanisms for exercising and creating public value rather than customer service. Our notion is consistent with others (Alford 2008; Benington and Moore 2011b) in that we believe public value can be created by the actions of public affairs professionals, by what they do and how they do it. In this view, a central principle of modern democracy is citizens’ abilities to delib- erate with each other about social values and public policy, a process described by Reich (1990) as the “civic discovery” of public interests. Capacity for and enact- ment of democracy through deliberation have inherent public value as expressions of a democratic state (Benhabib 1996; Young 2000; Cooke 2000; Dryzek 2002; Gutmann and Thompson 2004) and forms of public work (Boyte 2012). When public affairs professionals build deliberative capacity, they create public value in two ways: deliberative capacity both advances democratic participation in gover- nance and provides a means to produce effective and efficient policy solutions. Our arguments about the contribution of deliberative capacity to public value are grounded in the emerging construct of public value governance (Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014). This idea emphasizes that deliberation and other forms of democratic participation are themselves public values, defined as inher- ently desirable features of good governance. Thus deliberative capacity can advance 534-61193_ch01_1P.indd 39 534-61193_ch01_1P.indd 39 06/01/15 4:16 pm 06/01/15 4:16 pm Sandfort, J & Quick, K.S. (2015). Building deliberative capacity to create public value: the practices and artifacts of the Art of Hosting. In J. Bryson, L. Bloomberg, & B. Crosby (Eds.), Public Administration and Public Value (pp. 39-52). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.