Ideals Of Deliberative Democracy Research Articles

Emancipation cannot be programmed: blind spots of algorithmic facilitation in online deliberation

ABSTRACT Challenges in attaining deliberative democratic ideals – such as inclusion, authenticity and consequentiality – in wider political systems have driven the development of artificially-designed citizen deliberation. These designed deliberations, however, are expert-driven. Whereas they may achieve ‘deliberativeness’, their design and implementation are undemocratic and limit deliberative democracy’s emancipatory goals. This is relevant in respect to the role of facilitation. In online deliberation, algorithms and artificial actors replace the central role of human facilitators. The detachment of such designed settings from wider contexts is particularly troubling from a democratic perspective. Digital technologies in online deliberation are not developed in a manner consistent with democratic ideals and are not being amenable to scrutiny by citizens. I discuss the theoretical and the practical blind spots of algorithmic facilitation. Based on these, I present recommendations to democratise the design and implementation of online deliberation with a focus on chatbots as facilitators.

Hard choices in global deliberative system reform: functional fragmentation, social integration, and cosmopolitan republicanism

The ‘systems turn’ amongst deliberative democrats advocates incremental institutional reform guided by deliberative democratic ideals. Whilst ideal global democracy is beyond our reach, incremental reforms can improve the quality and inclusiveness of global deliberation. However, incremental reform in non-ideal circumstances involves trade-offs between competing normative goals. The paper highlights a neglected purpose of democratic deliberation: the integration of highly fragmented technocratic deliberation on isolated issues with more holistic social perspectives emerging from the public sphere. As global governance has shifted beyond the nation state, jurisdictions have become functionally fragmented encouraging issue-specific technical framings of problems (trade policy is institutionally separated from labour, the environment and development). Fragmentation across the domestic executive is mitigated by the legislature’s role in bringing isolated technical perspectives together and subjecting them to wider public scrutiny. No analogous institution exists internationally. Highlighting functional fragmentation is important because dominant concerns with cosmopolitanism (unsettling state-centric issue framing) and republicanism (the need for institutional variety to combat the potential domination of a world state) in global governance lead to an active enthusiasm for overlapping functional jurisdictions in much of the literature, obscuring important trade-offs with the need for social integration.

Epistemic approaches to deliberative democracy

AbstractThis article offers a comprehensive review of the major theoretical issues and findings of the epistemic approaches to deliberative democracy. Section 2 surveys the norms and ideals of deliberative democracy in relation to deliberation's ability to “track the truth.” Section 3 examines the conditions under which deliberative mini‐publics can “track the truth.” Section 4 discusses how “truth‐tracking” deliberative democracy is possible through the division of epistemic labor in a deliberative system.

Facilitating Inclusion: Austrian Wisdom Councils as Democratic Innovation between Consensus and Diversity

Democratic innovations face the challenge of realizing deliberative democratic ideals in the context of structural inequality. Consensus decision making and expertise have been said to have exclusive effects on marginalized groups like women and ethnic and sexual minorities, which obstructs diversity. Wisdom Councils as practiced in Austria attempt to counter inequalities by including marginalized groups through the moderation technique dynamic facilitation. Exploratory participatory observations and interviews with a moderator and the participants of two Wisdom Councils in Austria provide a deeper understanding of the inclusive processes at work in Wisdom Councils facilitating a productive combination of consensus and diversity.

Socio-economic and political barriers to public participation in EIA: implications for sustainable development in the Maldives

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a policy process that can lead to more sustainable development by preventing or mitigating the negative impacts of development projects. Public participation in the EIA process, especially one based on the ideals of deliberative democracy, is essential to deliver on the goal of sustainable development that is arguably the primary objective of EIA. This article specifically focuses on a study of public participation in the EIA process of the Maldives. Using a qualitative research design involving an analysis of documents and interviews, it investigates four aspects of a deliberative participatory process: fairness, competence, willingness and capacity. The analysis suggests that the process for public participation in the Maldives cannot be characterized as fully fair or competent. It further identifies several socio-economic barriers that affect the capacity and willingness of the actors to participate including political influence, lack of human and financial capacity, gender gap, loss of community spirit and lack of environmental and procedural awareness.

Animal rights and the deliberative turn in democratic theory

Deliberative democracy has been castigated by those who regard it as exclusive and elitist because of its failure to take into account a range of structural inequalities existing within contemporary liberal democracies. As a result, it is suggested, deliberative arenas will merely reproduce these inequalities, advantaging the already powerful extolling mainstream worldviews excluding the interests of the less powerful and those expounding alternative worldviews. Moreover, the tactics employed by those excluded social movements seeking to right an injustice are typically those – involving various forms of protest and direct action – which are incompatible with the key characteristics of deliberatively democracy. This paper seeks to examine the case against deliberative democracy through the prism of animal rights. It will be argued that the critique of deliberative democracy, at least in the case of animal rights, is largely misplaced because it underestimates the rationalistic basis of animal rights philosophy, misunderstands the aspirational character of deliberative theory and mistakenly attributes problems that are not restricted to deliberation but result from interest group politics in general. It is further argued that this debate about the apparent incompatibility between the ideals of deliberative democracy and non-deliberative activism disguises the potential that deliberative democracy has for advocates of animal rights and, by extension, other social movements too.

Deliberative Democracy and Political Law: The Coercion Problem

Deliberative democratic theories contend that, prior to the making of collective decisions, there ought to be deliberation among those affected by the decision, where deliberation is understood in some sense as interpersonal discussion. A deliberative theory imposes moral demands upon citizens: each citizen ought to remain open to her co-citizens’ views (that is, to listen attentively and try to understand them); and she should be willing to change her view or preferences in light of what she learns from the discussions. Deliberative perspectives dominate modern democratic theory. Yet most deliberative democrats undervalue law and neglect to address its substantial and varied influences on political practice. Since the 1960s, the legalisation of politics has deepened. “Political law” now extensively regulates democratic procedures. In this paper (part of an ongoing “Law of Deliberative Democracy” collaborative project) I consider whether institutional designers can help to realise deliberative democratic ideals through carefully tailored law, or alternatively whether law has a generally anti-deliberative role to play in democratic politics. Much turns on this question. If the latter is more likely, then given political law’s modern spread throughout democratic practice, the general feasibility of achieving deliberative democratic ideals appears doubtful.The paper focuses on what I call “the coercion problem.” A hallmark of deliberative theory is that nothing should compel decision-makers to reach a particular decision except rational persuasion. But the aim of law is often precisely to coerce: to use the force of the state to pressure a law’s subjects to conform to mandates and restrictions. According to Habermas, law might coerce only up to a point. But political law uniquely influences deliberation not just by creating broad institutional foundations, but additionally by establishing a fine matrix of political rules. The problem of legal coercion is potentially fatal to deliberative democracy. Yet I conclude on a note of cautious optimism: that certain modes of regulation may mitigate coercion, such as Raz’s “guidance,” and Sunstein, Anderson and Pildes’ “expressivism.”

The “Deliberative Digital Divide:” Opinion Leadership and Integrative Complexity in the U.S. Political Blogosphere

This study examined the association between political ideology and linguistic indicators of integrative complexity and opinion leadership in U.S. political blog posts (N = 519). Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis, we found that the posts of conservative bloggers were more integratively simple than those of liberal bloggers. Furthermore, in support of a proposed opinion leadership model of integrative complexity, the relationship between ideology and integrative complexity was mediated by psychological distancing (an indicator of a hierarchical communication style). These findings demonstrate an ideological divide in the extent to which the blogosphere reflects deliberative democratic ideals.

Trust as Glue in Nanotechnology Governance Networks

This paper reflects on the change of relations among participants in nanotechnology governance through their participation in governance processes such as stakeholder dialogues. I show that policymaking in practice—that is, the practice of coming and working together in such stakeholder dialogues—has the potential for two-fold performative effects: it can contribute to the development of trust and mutual responsibility on the part of the involved actors, and it may bring about effects on the formation of boundaries of what is sayable and thinkable in nanotechnology governance. Three vignettes about the work of the German NanoKommission indicate the development of new relations of trust, recognition and mutual responsibility among actors. It is concluded that governance in practice can assemble new collectives in which relations of trust are the glue holding the complex structure together. While such a consensus-based progress may be favourable for smooth technology development, it can be considered problematic if evaluated against the ideals of deliberative democracy, which often form the premises on which public engagement is based. Stakeholder forums were set in place with the intention of including various actors, but this is Janus-faced: if a dialogue becomes encapsulated in new governance networks, new exclusions can arise. For example, a policing of which information is released to a wider audience can occur.

Between Input Legitimacy and Output Efficiency: Defensive Routines and Agonistic Reflectivity in Nordic Land-Use Planning

The article describes tensions generated in land-use planning practices in Norway, Finland and Sweden, due to the shift towards New Public Management in actual governance practices, while the ideals of deliberative democracy in planning discourses and legislation have been retained. These tensions are studied empirically by making comparative observations of planning systems and practices in each country. The theoretical approach is developed by combining democracy and legitimacy theories with double bind theory and organizational learning theory. Based on this theoretical work, the article offers insights for reflectivity on the tensions. The Nordic ideal of deliberative democracy, expressed in the primary aims of our planning laws, may prohibit open acknowledgement of the uneasiness which follows from the fact that liberal democratic values (rights of landownership, free enterprise, etc.) are also secured. Thereby planners act and speak in terms of mixed messages, potentially habituated into defensive routines that may prohibit metacommunication on the basic tensions. The idea of agonistic reflectivity is offered as an approach to planning, which would acknowledge the tension between input legitimacy and output efficiency as a legitimate condition in itself, requiring ongoing political debate where the tension has to be continually discussed without actually ever being resolved.

Should We Elect the US Supreme Court?

Extensive political science research reveals that the decisions of the US Supreme Court are deeply political. And both advocates and critics of judicial elections concede that partisan elections are a democratic method of judicial selection. Does the value of democratic representation mean that US Supreme Court Justices should be selected through partisan elections? I argue not. Partisan judicial elections are actually far poorer institutional mechanisms for capturing the judgment of the people on legal matters than has been recognized. The role of parties in structuring a campaign distorts the deliberative environment surrounding judicial elections, creating significant barriers to voters expressing a judgment on matters of legal meaning. The kind of distortion is best understood through reference to aprocessualcriterion of deliberative democracy, which provides a fitting normative template to ground theoretical inquiry into the reason-giving possibilities of existing democratic institutions and practices. Hence, answering why the US Supreme Court should not be elected on democratic grounds also reveals new insights about the role of parties in sustaining (or subverting) deliberative democratic ideals.

Deliberative governance in the context of power

Deliberative forms of governance are on the rise worldwide as governments, businesses and not-for-profit organisations seek to engage with their constituents. Empirical research on these deliberative experiments is beginning to emerge; with most studies focussing on how well deliberative practice lives up the ideals of deliberative democracy. Little, however, is known about how the practice of deliberative governance negotiates and accommodates different forms of power prevalent in the policy process. This is the subject of this special issue. This introductory piece provides an overview of how theories of deliberative democracy relate to both coercive (‘power-over’) and generative forms of power (‘power-with’). Drawing on insights from the empirical research in this special issue, the paper argues that power is not necessarily a negative force for public deliberation. Indeed coercive forms of power may be needed by some marginalized groups to push their issue onto the agenda, while more generative forms of power can inspire actors to engage in collective thinking.

When unequals are treated equally: The 2002 commission of inquiry into Orica's geomelt proposal

This paper deals with the Commission of Inquiry (COI) established by the NSW Department of Planning to examine Orica's proposal to build a Geomelt plant at its Botany site to destroy its stockpile of Hexachlorobenzene. The Inquiry is analysed in light of the literature on democracy/democratisation. The paper argues that the standard operating procedures of the Inquiry ensured that all stakeholders were treated equally. However, this equality was found to be purely formal, and drawing on the critique of formal equality dating back to Aristotle, it is argued that treating unequals equally results in the circumvention of deliberative democratic ideals by perpetuating entrenched structural inequalities while nonetheless giving the superficial appearance of fair play.

Localism and Deliberative Democracy

Localism and Deliberative Democracy John Parkinson (bio) Introduction It is sometimes claimed that one of the most fruitful ways of deepening democracy is by "the proliferation of better minipublics", the extensive use of small-scale deliberative processes rather than wholesale reform of the public sphere.1 This article argues that there are reasons to be cautious about enthusiasm for the small scale. In particular, it argues that in a political context characterised by what in Britain is called "localism", certain kinds of minipublic can damage democracy by undermining the motivation to participate in politics more broadly. When exploring the relationship bet-ween any political ideal and the real world, it is essential to keep three elements analytically distinct: theoretical statements of that ideal, the institutional designs that attempt to express that ideal, and the institutions in use in a given context. Otherwise it is impossible to tell whether issues identified in particular cases are to do with the theory itself, the fit between the theory and the institutional design, or the way in which the institution interacts with its context. In what follows, therefore, my aim is not to pour cold water on the call for more deliberative minipublics—far from it. Rather, I argue that that call should be made with more awareness of how minipublics interact with features of their context, sometimes with results that are quite the opposite of what their advocates would hope for. The argument begins with a sketch of the outlines of localism in Britain. I then consider what happens when deliberative democratic ideals are applied in that localist context, drawing on the political theory of motivations, and illustrating with examples from British deliberative practice. The new localism Localism can be loosely defined as the view that policy is best when it operates at the level closest to the people it affects: to put it crudely, that devolution of power is good, centralisation bad. It fits with a long-standing tendency to equate centralisation with authoritarianism, decentralisation with democracy.2 Britain has a long localist tradition, with central government historically holding relatively few powers to deliver services directly to citizens, but rather being enmeshed in webs of interdependence with local agencies and non-governmental institutions in all sorts of areas like education, policing, housing, health and social services, areas that in many welfare regimes are under more direct control of central ministries.3 In its most recent incarnation, "the new localism" refers to at least two related but distinct sets of ideas. One version is best summed up by Pratchett, as follows: It has two key features. Firstly, it recognises the importance of national standards and priorities as a driving force for public policy. Central government has a primary role to play in ensuring territorial justice, equity and the collective provision of public goods. In this respect, the centre can be expected to emphasise particular policy outcomes and to focus attention on particular priorities, especially where it has manifesto commitments to specified policies or outcomes… Secondly, however, the 'new localism' also recognises the primacy of the institutions of local governance in delivering public services on behalf of the centre, as well as wider arguments for locally sensitive policy implementation and community leadership. The advocates of the 'new localism', therefore, argue that diversity, choice and local difference should lie at the heart of policy developments.4 The advocates of this kind of localism have not promoted the complete devolution of power to local agencies. Phrases such as "earned autonomy" provide clues that power remains very much in the hands of central government which determines the grounds on which local agencies earn greater powers or not: as Pratchett puts it, there is rather more "freedom to" than "freedom from" under this kind of regime. This is for good reasons, according to its advocates. The idea is to attempt to overcome some of the common pathologies of decentralised government, particularly what is popularly called "the postcode lottery" in Britain, the idea that the quality and availability of public services depends on where you live rather than what you need. This first kind of localism has dominated British centre-periphery relations for the last decade. With a new...

Deliberately personal: Tobacco control debates and deliberative democracy in New South Wales

In this paper the authors examine some of the main features of public discourse concerning tobacco control, analyzing parliamentary debate in New South Wales between 1980 and 2003. They ask how deeply tobacco industry discursive frames (e.g. the ‘right to smoke’) penetrated and organized parliamentary discourse and also identify what kinds of ideas were mobilized to justify tobacco control despite government reluctance to intervene. They find that the overall evolution of tobacco control policy was shaped by legislators’ commitment to the ideals of deliberative democracy. It is argued first that parliamentary debate on tobacco control was conducted in highly moralized language that effectively excluded the tobacco industry's arguments. Second, it is shown that this discourse was constructed and validated through the extensive use of personal anecdote and references, through which MPs sought to reflect public opinion and engage in authentic deliberation. Finally it is argued that MPs positioned this concern for authentic deliberation as part of the debate on tobacco itself, associating tobacco control with ideal government.

Rickety Bridges: Using the Media in Deliberative Democracy

It is a fairly common criticism of deliberative democratic ideals that one cannot involve thousands, let alone millions, of people in a decision-making process and still retain its deliberative character, at least not in any sense as strict as those of the classic expositions of deliberative democratic principles. Various solutions to this scale problem have been proposed, but implicit in most deliberative designs is the media solution. People can watch the debate unfold on television, can listen to it on the radio, can follow it, or even contribute to a limited extent, online. This is supposed to ensure not only that deliberation is subject to the check of publicity, but also that it is dispersed throughout the public sphere.This is precisely the idea behind James Fishkin's deliberative poll technique, designed to be televised so that deliberation among a few would be brought to ‘an audience of millions’, ‘bridging the gap’ between informed and uninformed opinion, and acting as a ‘catalyst’ to change the nature of discussion on a topic in a broader community. But what happens when we rely on the media to bear the weight of responsibility for generating links between insiders and outsiders in public deliberation? The media are not broad pipes which simply convey whatever is put into them but, like all institutions, shape that input in sometimes significant ways. If we are to understand the value of the media in addressing problems of deliberative scale, we need to understand those institutional effects.In this Research Note I examine the effects the media had on the kinds of information transferred from deliberators to audience in a deliberative poll that took place in the United Kingdom in July 1998.

A Habermasian analysis of the deliberative democratic potential of ICT-enabled services in Swedish municipalities

The aim of this article is to derive a critical standard against which institutional arrangements of e-government can be assessed in terms of democratic potential from Jürgen Habermas’s discursive model of deliberative democracy, and to illustrate how this standard can be applied through an assessment of the information and communication technology-(ICT) enabled services found on Swedish municipal websites. The assessment focuses on the potential of the ICT infrastructure to support deliberative democratic ideals and is based on a quantitative exploration of all 289 Swedish municipal websites. The results suggest that, if correctly designed, ICT-enabled services have a deliberative democratic potential. But this does not overshadow the fact that the services existing today only support to a limited extent processes of social learning through rational argumentation, the core idea in Habermas’s discursive model of deliberative democracy.

A Habermasian analysis of the deliberative democratic potential of ICT-enabled services in Swedish municipalities

The aim of this article is to derive a critical standard against which institutional arrangements of e-government can be assessed in terms of democratic potential from Jürgen Habermas’ discursive model of deliberative democracy, and to illustrate how this standard can be applied through an assessment of the information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled services found on Swedish municipal websites. The assessment focuses on the potential of the ICT infrastructure to support deliberative democratic ideals and is based on a quantitative exploration of all 289 Swedish municipal websites. The results suggest that correctly designed ICT-enabled services have a deliberative democratic potential. But this does not overshadow the fact that the services existing today only to a limited extent support processes of social learning through rational argumentation, the core idea in Habermas’ discursive model of deliberative democracy.

Public Journalism and Deliberative Democracy

Public journalism may be the most significant reform movement in American journalism since the Progressive era. Prompted by flagging popular interest in public life and declining newspaper readership and influenced by ideals of deliberative democracy, public journalists think the promotion of reasonable and informed dialogue among citizens should be part of the role journalists play in a democracy. They have reconstructed traditional reporting practices by advocating public listening in newsgathering, by producing purposeful news, and by encouraging public debate. Such reforms have drawn fire from critics who believe they endanger standards of journalistic independence and fairness. Though public journalists can overcome their mainstream critics, they must look more carefully at their deliberative democratic goals to generate more precise standards of professional practice. Turning to the theoretical literature for a model of deliberation, this paper argues that the role of journalists in promoting public...