Deliberative Democracy and Its Operationalization

Abstract

The operationalization of the deliberative theory, both on- and offline, demands awareness that the deliberative theory is composed of two levels of normative requirements, which often lead to a confusion about what deliberation is about and how it can be measured. There are, on the one hand, the deliberative norms that define the discursive rules that a political debate should follow, and on the other hand, there are the deliberative norms that define how these discursive norms should be applied at the different levels of the decision-making process. While there tends to be relatively widespread agreement among the deliberative theorists about what constitutes a deliberative form of political debate, there tends to be no agreement on how these ideal discursive criteria should be concretely applied at the different levels of the opinion- and decision-making process. As indicated by Thompson in a recent article, deliberative theory and, more particularly its empirical analysis, faces a structural problem, “which calls for moving beyond the study of isolated or one-time deliberative experiences and examining the relationship between deliberative and non-deliberative practices in the political system as a whole and over time” (2008, 500).KeywordsCivil SocietyDeliberative DemocracyOnline ForumExternal ImpactOnline DebateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.