Deliberative Capacity Research Articles

Filter Bubbles and the Unfeeling: How AI for Social Media Can Foster Extremism and Polarization

Social media have undoubtedly changed our ways of living. Their presence concerns an increasing number of users (over 4,74 billion) and pervasively expands in the most diverse areas of human life. Marketing, education, news, data, and sociality are just a few of the many areas in which social media play now a central role. Recently, some attention toward the link between social media and political participation has emerged. Works in the field of artificial intelligence have already pointed out that there is a close link between the use of machine learning algorithms in social media and possible epistemic isolation, which could lead to political radicalization. The idea supporting this paper is that artificial intelligence for social media can actively put users’ deliberative capacity at risk and foster political extremism. To prove these claims, I proceed along two lines of inquiry. First, I focus on filter bubbles, namely the result of selections made by algorithms that recommend contents that meet users’ expectations and opinions. To analyze this phenomenon, I refer to the Deweyan model of experience. Second, I connect the filter bubbles problem to the Deweyan idea of deliberative and participatory democracy and Nussbaum’s concept of political compassion. The purpose of this paper is to provide a philosophical foundation that can both (1) effectively serve as a method for analyzing machine learning algorithms and their potential problems in relation to political extremism, and (2) be adopted as a standard to counter the danger of extremism associated with social media experience.

Symbols and reasons in democratization: cultural sociology meets deliberative democracy

We develop an account of societal democratization that synthesizes cultural sociology and deliberative democracy. Cultural sociologists emphasize the symbolic inclusion of marginalized groups into the civil sphere. Deliberative democrats stress growth in the deliberative capacity of society. We argue that democratization entails the co-evolution of culture and reason. The basis of co-evolution is the performative construction of an inclusive demos, which requires a deliberative background but is also a source of the moral emotions that motivate deliberation. Since moral emotions can also sweep people up and make them do reckless things, they must in turn be redeemable in inclusive deliberation. This synthesis sharpens a normative position for the evaluation of episodes of inclusion, extends current accounts of the place of emotion in cultural sociology and deliberative democracy, and provides a frame for comparative analyses of democratization. We illustrate with an examination of the exclusion and inclusion of Indigenous Australians.

Recovering the Democratic Value of Public Discourse

The decline of democracy in the US entails the surge of authoritarianism, ascendency of demagoguery, dispersal of the democratic majority, and weakening of public reason. Dissent, envisioned as a rhetorical practice of democratic deliberation, resists authoritarianism by advancing democratic values. Accordingly, this paper examines democracy as a minority voice, explores the deliberative capacity of dissent, and identifies the rhetorical properties of deliberation. The paper argues that dissent, in its fugitive aspect, is dispersed across an array of modest sites, guided by a deliberative ideal partially realised, and framed by democratic values. Dissent functions in this capacity as an itinerant, recurring source of democratic renewal on occasions of political crisis. It is an adaptation to structural constraints that provides a nurturing aspiration to prompt political agency, establish realistic expectations, and sustain vigilance. While the immediacy of the authoritarian threat and corresponding questions about the role of democratic communication are addressed in terms of the 2024 general election in the US, the democratic challenge in the US is indicative of the abiding immediacy of the authoritarian threat to other democracies and suggestive of deliberative adaptations for restoring the vitality of democratic communication and culture. Complacency in democratic theory and practice is counter-indicated.

Infrastructural gaslighting and the crisis of participatory planning

This paper traces and critiques gaslighting – the manipulation of circumstances by elite actors to sow doubt or confusion in residents over what is ‘real’ – as an affective experience of infrastructure planning. Predominantly observed within intimate relationships, scholars now identify gaslighting as a structural condition that manipulates whole communities and reproduces systemic oppression. We concur, extending analysis to the realm of urban infrastructure planning, and drawing connections with Rancièrian critiques of elite orders of governance. In infrastructural worlds, regulatory arrangements have been harmonised to suit coalitions of elite government and private actors whilst extolling the virtues of participatory governance. Megaprojects are legitimised by planning processes that cement monopolies and shroud elite public-private deal-making, while detractors are delegitimised discursively in political and media discourse. Yet, dissent is also pacified via participatory planning processes that invite publics to give testimony but undermine their epistemic and moral validity. This, we contend, is an example of infrastructural gaslighting. The case of Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel Project (WGTP) is instructive – a ‘Market-Led Proposal’ from corporate infrastructure giant Transurban, backed by the Victorian government – where participatory planning was not simply tokenistic, but rather a discombobulating experience, concealing and ‘breadcrumbing’ information to publics, while undermining deliberative capacities. Exposing grounded experiences of infrastructural gaslighting, we join other critical urban scholars seeking conditions for just planning practices. Infrastructural planning regimes are consequential, but the realities they police are illusions that are as tenuous as they are politically constituted and, like other forms of gaslighting, are ready for challenge.

Learning Deliberative Capacities in Brazilian Schools

What are the impacts of teaching deliberation on students’ attitudes in practical discussions? This study presents research findings from a field experiment involving more than 500 students from five public schools in the Brazilian cities of Belo Horizonte and Belém. We found a small effect of deliberative training on students’ justifications of their views and telling personal stories. However, much larger effects emerged when data were analysed separately by schools’ socioeconomic contexts, suggesting that middleclass students benefited more from training than disadvantaged students. Respect did not vary between groups and school contexts. Overall participation in discussion increased, and the effect was significantly greater in treatment groups, with positive inclusion of female students. The results support the view that learning deliberation is not a unidimensional process, but a complex combination of different components, and some capacities are more easily achieved than others.

Ethnographer as honest broker: the role of ethnography in promoting deliberation in local climate policies

ABSTRACT In this paper, we are interested in how ethnographic research can contribute to the promotion of public deliberation. We do not use ethnography only to study deliberative processes but rather we intend to interpret ethnographic research as a social practice, and we research conditions under which ethnographic research might have deliberative consequences. The paper summarizes the results of the multidisciplinary research project Stories of Drought, which combines natural and social sciences in its approach. The project aims to understand how people in Czech rural areas respond to localized effects of climate change, especially drought. Following a systemic approach to deliberative democracy, we study how ethnography contributes to fulfilling three deliberative functions: (1) the epistemic function; (2) the ethical function and (3) the democratic function. In the context of irrigation disputes in South Moravia, we map the arguments of main actors and critical tensions in local discourses. We conclude that ethnographic research, due to its hybrid position between different sources of knowledge, its institutionally recognized expertise and its ability to establish an ethnographer as a trustworthy actor, can outweigh local critical power imbalances blocking deliberative capacity in local policy systems.

Deliberative Experience and the Civic Aspirations of Legal Education

AbstractAs law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

Guiding Digital Transformation and Collaborative Knowledge Creation in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Through Action Research

Digital transformation initiatives in supply chain require a sector-level approach, involving multiple stakeholders. This implies the development of new models for successful implementation that move beyond the dyadic relationship level and that fosters collaboration mechanisms in multi-stakeholder and multi-level systems. This study applies an insider action research approach to the implementation of the EU system for product traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain, the EU falsified medicines directive, focusing on stakeholder orientation's alignment. The study identifies how to overcome obstacles to the effective governance of multi-stakeholder digital transformation in supply chains. It proposes new pre-cycle and monitoring mechanisms to use in AR, highlighting the importance of formal structures to foster informal governance and relationships among different stakeholders and introducing the notion of deliberative capacity. Practical implications for managers of companies and organizations at different levels of the supply chain are discussed, illustrating the practical outcomes of the pan-European project.

Deliberative Boundary Work for Sustainable Finance: Insights from a European Commission expert group

To explain how multistakeholder groups organize democratic deliberations about complex sustainability issues, organizational scholars have focused on the key role of deliberative capacity, which encompasses the dimensions of inclusiveness, authenticity and consequentiality. However, the tensions inherent to the search of these three dimensions have been overlooked. In this paper, we argue that focusing on how spaces for deliberation are designed can help one understand how to manage such tensions. We identified the boundary work practices that shape the design of deliberative spaces and generate deliberative capacity properties in a high-level expert group (HLEG) launched by the European Commission about sustainable finance regulation. Our results show how these boundary work practices help balance deliberative tensions. We advance deliberation studies by conceptualizing deliberative boundary work, explaining how deliberative capacity is spatially generated and showing how deliberative tensions are balanced. We also contribute to boundary work theory by making explicit the deliberative nature of configuring boundary work and showing its relevancy to regulatory settings.

Who is sensitising whom? A participatory interview guide development as an awareness tool within a health care research project

Who is sensitising whom? A participatory interview guide development as an awareness tool within a health care research project

Telling Propaganda from Legitimate Political Persuasion

AbstractHow does propaganda differ from the legitimate persuasive practices that animate a healthy democracy? The question is especially salient as digital technologies facilitate new modes of political persuasion and the public square saturates with information factual and fabricated alike. In answer, we propose a typology based on the rhetorical strategies that propaganda and its legitimate counterpart each employ. We argue that the point of contrast between the phenomena turns on two key features: whether the rhetorical strategy sufficiently engages our deliberative capacities, and whether it runs counter to our epistemic interests. While in practice the boundary between the concepts is not always sharp, the account identifies a set of conceptual tools that help better frame and come to grips with propaganda and legitimate political persuasion in an information-dense and increasingly complex media landscape.

Market nudges and autonomy

AbstractBehavioural techniques or ‘nudges’ can be used for various purposes. In this paper, we shift the focus from government nudges to nudges used by for-profit market agents. We argue that potential worries about nudges circumventing the deliberative capacities or diminishing the control of targeted agents are greater when it comes to market nudges, given that these (1) are not constrained by the principles that regulate government nudges (mildness, sensitivity to people’s interests and public justifiability) and (2) are often ‘stacked’ – they come in great numbers that overwhelm agents. In addition, we respond to possible objections and derive several policy suggestions.

The Role of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Improving the Deliberative Capacity of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with concerns about MSIs’ deliberative capacity, including the limited inclusion of some marginalized stakeholders, bias toward corporate interests, and, ultimately, ineffectiveness in their role as regulators. In this article, we conceptualize MSIs as deliberative systems to open the black box of the different elements that make up the MSI polity and better understand how their deliberative capacity hinges on problems in different elements. On the basis of this conceptualization, we examine how deliberative mini-publics—forums in which a randomly selected group of individuals from a particular population engage in learning and facilitated deliberations about a topic—can improve the deliberative capacity of MSIs.

Mini-publics, student participation, and universities’ deliberative capacity

ABSTRACT Meaningful student participation is essential to realizing democratic ideals within the university. However, existing structures for involving students within university governance suffer from a variety of shortcomings, leaving scholars calling for ways to make student participation more inclusive, effective, and thoughtful. To address this challenge, this article draws on deliberative democracy as both a theoretical framework and a source of practical innovation. In doing so, it explores the ways in which student participation in university government both does, and could, contribute to universities’ ‘deliberative capacity’—that is, their capacity to host inclusive, authentic, and consequential deliberation on shared issues. By evaluating the most prominent forms of student participation against these democratic ideals, the article offers a deliberative democratic critique of student participation that coheres, builds on, and gives new significance to existing criticisms. In response, the article then introduces deliberative mini-publics as a democratic innovation which, while of increasing significance in the public sphere, has been neglected in the university context. Drawing on empirical literature to account for universities’ unique institutional realities, the article ultimately demonstrates mini-publics’ potential to bolster deliberative capacity in university governance, both in terms of introducing deliberative inputs into decision-making and by cultivating the abilities and environment which support deliberative governance more generally. In all, by bringing together higher education and political scholarship, this work advances theory on student participation and university governance and offers novel directions for university practice.

Political corporate social responsibility: The role of deliberative capacity

Political corporate social responsibility: The role of deliberative capacity

Deliberative democracy in contemporary political parties: Longitudinal evidence from Norway

Parties lose members, and organizational measures adopted to counter the alleged “crisis of parties” have often turned out to be counterproductive. In response to this development, scholars have argued that parties need to strengthen their deliberative capacity. Despite this (normative) claim, we know very little about levels of deliberation in contemporary parties. Based on unique longitudinal surveys among Norwegian party members between 1991 and 2017, the article analyzes levels of deliberative capacity across time and parties. The study finds a substantial level of deliberative capacity and that this capacity has been strengthened in recent decades. There is some inter-party variation, but it reflects the organizational origin of the parties only to a limited degree. The findings suggest that the deliberative capacity of political parties is far better than often assumed in the literature. Therefore, the study argues that “crisis” is a term unfit to describe recent developments in contemporary parties in Norway, and that membership figures alone are an insufficient indicator to measure the linkage potential of party organizations in democracies.

The fleeting moment and the long haul in urban panhandling

Sociological writings on panhandling have depicted protracted donor relationships as one of panhandlers’ surest paths to an income, while portraying the fleetingness of one-off appeals as a major barrier. In this article, I recast fleetingness as a facilitator of panhandlers’ fundamental task: trying to seem worthy of aid without attracting unwanted legal attention. Using participant-observation data from a Chicago neighborhood, I outline two favorable elements of fleetingness: it allows panhandlers to evoke sorrowful compassion only for a moment, denying passersby the chance to get stuck in the feeling; and grants passersby only a brief period to evaluate the candor of panhandlers’ appeals. Together, these limit potential givers’ deliberative capacity—their capacity to determine that the panhandlers before them are bothersome, intimidating, deceitful, censurable, or the like. Protracted time horizons still matter, but primarily insofar as panhandlers work continuously, and collectively, to uphold the neighborhood conditions that enable their fleeting appeals.

Authenticity, Deliberation, and Perception: On Heidegger’s Reading and Appropriation of Aristotle’s Concept of Phronêsis

At crucial junctures in the development of his concept of authenticity, Heidegger discusses at length Aristotle’s concept of phronêsis; there is a widely held suspicion that those discussions shape that development. The present paper examines that suspicion in the light of an apparent tension in Aristotle’s texts between understanding phronêsis as a perceptual capacity and understanding it as a deliberative capacity. Bronwyn Finnigan has argued that some influential recent Heideggerian scholarship on this topic emphasizes the perceptual and downplays the deliberative, and there is evidence in Heidegger’s texts that might suggest he does too. The present paper, however, offers an alternative to this perceptually focused reading that I call “the all-things-considered judgment reading.” It understands the exercise of phronêsis and the authenticity that Heidegger models upon it as deliberative feats, accommodates the evidence thought to support the perceptually focused reading, and avoids philosophical objections that the latter reading’s understanding of phronêsis invites.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Deliberative Capacity

Political Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Deliberative Capacity

Capable deliberators: towards inclusion of minority minds in discourse practices

ABSTRACT It is widely assumed that severe mental disabilities prevent relevant deliberative capacities from developing or persisting. Accordingly, excluding many people with mental disabilities from discourse practices seems justified. Against this common assumption I wish to show that the general exclusion is not justified and amounts to a form of epistemic injustice, as theorised by Miranda Fricker. The received norm of capable deliberators is connected to a specific model of deliberation. I introduce an alternative model of deliberation, which I dub the joint effort model. According to this model, people with minority minds (as I call them) add valuable cognitive diversity to the process of deliberation, which is a relevant element of epistemic improvement. In this part of the argument I rely on empirically informed theoretical work by Hélène Landemore. I scrutinise the minimal requirements of capable deliberators from the perspective of a joint effort model of deliberation, and I highlight specific beneficial contributions people with minority minds can make to discourse practices. I will argue that people with minority minds can be presumptively deemed capable deliberators and that therefore their general exclusion is unjustified.