Abstract
During the past fifteen years, public deliberation has become an important focus of research, theory, and public practice. This has sometimes led to a variety of narrow conceptualizations that limit deliberation to particular forms of interaction, such as small group discussion, or to divergent conceptualizations deployed in different contexts, such as for media systems versus face-to-face discussions. To address this problem, we advance a flexible yet precise definition of deliberation that has the power to organize not only deliberation theory and research but also much of the larger body of work in political communication. As defined herein, deliberation includes both analytic and social processes and provides a unifying conceptual and critical framework for studying nearly the full range of political communication topics, including informal conversation, media and public opinion, elections, government institutional behavior, jury decision making, public meetings, and civic and community life. Using our flexible conceptualization, each of these research contexts amounts to a kind of deliberative critique and empirical analysis of public life.
Highlights
The core mission of the Journal of Public Deliberation is to advance scholarship on deliberation, as well as the public practice of deliberation
To argue that a broadened conception of deliberation can organize a larger body of research—the interdisciplinary study of political communication.* In turn, we demonstrate how the deliberative perspective frames and organizes political communication research in the context of discussion and conversation, mass media and public opinion, elections, government and jury decision making, public meetings, and community life
Democratic deliberation is a form of communication that is based on principles of democracy, such as those proposed by Dahl (1989)
Summary
The first theoretical context to which we apply this definition of deliberation is political conversation and discussion. Comprehension, and consideration have a rationalist side, but the social process of deliberation speaks directly to Barber’s (1984) interest in mutual respect and the consideration of “the other” as a whole person—more than a source of ideas and information that happens to be human. These analytic and social processes can be seen in the more informal interactions of political conversation and the structured discussions that happen in deliberative forums
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Published Version
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