Deliberative Institutions Research Articles

“You’ve Got Me Feeling Emotions”: Affective Norms of Deliberation in the Philippine lgbtqia+ Rights Movement

Abstract In contentious politics and deliberation, emotions function as rhetorical resources to substantiate claims and as evaluative criteria to assess social ties among actors. For social movements, then, emotions are vital in framing demands and sustaining collective participation. Grounded on accounts gathered from Filipinx lgbtqia+ rights movement through oral history interviews and analyzed through narrative and thematic approaches, this article illustrates the role of emotions when adherents deliberate with various interlocutors. I argue that advocates utilize affective ties to expand access to deliberative institutions and to sustain discussions of their claims. I also submit that specific ideologies motivate the idealization of particular affective norms when activists engage specific interlocutors. Hence, emotions figure in the movement both as framing tools and deliberative norms that need to be deliberated as well.

Maybe listening to the elite? Selective deliberation as a governance tool in rural China

AbstractIn order to improve local governance, the central government has, among other strategies, begun to introduce institutions for deliberation in rural China. This article analyses the implementation and consequences of this framework in two villages in rural Gansu Province. It shows that the current promotion of these institutions is a top‐down political effort and not a system with genuine local roots. Our findings also suggest that without strict legal requirements for deliberative institutions, village cadres do not follow the enactment of officially warranted procedures, which often may lead to rather formalistic implementation. Opportunities for deliberation seem to be offered only to those members of the community who are the most likely to be able to contribute social or financial capital to the local administration's agenda. This suggests that at least in this local setting, the rationale of introducing deliberation institutions clearly was to improve existing policy implementation and not to provide meaningful new avenues for participation. While this variant of deliberative institutions further raises the status of the rural elite, it appears to frustrate ordinary villagers and reduce their interest in these instruments.

Class Inequalities and Participatory Democracy: Assessing the Impact of Social Inclusion Tools in Citizens’ Assemblies

Recent research has examined the effectiveness of inclusion tools aimed at encouraging greater involvement of disadvantaged social groups in local deliberative institutions. Most research, quantitative and qualitative, tends to examine positive outcomes, although results are frequently ambivalent. This research begins by arguing that analytical frameworks should consider the limitations of inclusion tools and that greater attention should be given to alternative approaches to inclusion (material/symbolic, formal/informal, focused/general). Based on these theoretical points, the study focuses on the views and experiences of working-class people and smallholder farmers in relation to their participation in open rural assemblies ( concejos abiertos) in the Basque Country (Spain). The research employed an ethnographic methodology involving 20 observations of assemblies/events and 55 in-depth interviews conducted between 2012 and 2015. Three inclusion tools were identified as key to the functioning of the assemblies: “administrative and technical support” for engaging with the bureaucratic processes, a legal “right to paid work leave” for board members, and the use of “multi-disciplinary boards.” The study examines the effectiveness of these tools in motivating and facilitating the involvement of participants from disadvantaged social class positions, presenting novel findings in the case of paid work leave and multi-disciplinary boards. The importance of informal practices and procedures for reducing material constraints are emphasized as well as the identification of some limitations of inclusion tools in a context of predominant elitist paradigms.

Misperceptions and Minipublics: Does Endorsement of Expert Information by a Minipublic Influence Misperceptions in the Wider Public?

ABSTRACT As misperceptions undermine the factual basis for public debate, they pose a serious challenge to expert knowledge and the democratic legitimacy of public policy informed by expert evidence. In this paper, we theorize that in times of politicization and polarization of expertise, endorsement of expert information by a minipublic can serve to legitimize expert correction and render it more persuasive in the eyes of individuals. In developing our theoretical argument, we focus on the effect of a minipublic on individuals in the wider public – those who did not participate in such institutions. To test our theoretical predictions, we designed, pre-registered and fielded two experiments in the US (N = 2168) and one experiment in Ireland (N = 1125), during two different waves of COVID-19. The results show that minipublic endorsement significantly increases the uptake of expert information among (nonparticipating) citizens. Furthermore, when an expert correction explicitly asserts a scientific consensus, it is as effective as the minipublic endorsement. The findings have implications for the research on misperceptions, expertise and deliberative institutions.

Non-Procedural Dispute Resolution: Study of the Restorative Justice Approach Tradition in Indonesian Society.

The Indonesian Muslim community is familiar with restorative justice. The substance of restorative justice is building joint participation between perpetrators and victims through third parties. The objectives of this study are: to describe restorative justice in the traditions of Indonesian Muslim society and to examine the relevance of restorative justice for the settlement of criminal cases in the future. This research uses a philosophical approach, namely legal construction at an ideal level in the future. The results show that the restorative justice approach has strong roots in Indonesian Muslim society, namely deliberation to reach a consensus. Deliberative institutions are held to find solutions that can satisfy all parties. In the future, restoration justice needs to be applied in Indonesia in resolving criminal cases, especially crimes against life. The restorative justice approach offers a different view from the approach applied in the current criminal system.

Achieving Ecological Reflexivity: The Limits of Deliberation and the Alternative of Free-Market-Environmentalism

Environmental problems are often highly complex and demand a great amount of knowledge of the people tasked to solve them. Therefore, a dynamic polit-economic institutional framework is necessary in which people can adapt and learn from changing environmental and social circumstances and in light of their own performance. The environmentalist literature refers to this knowledge producing and self-correcting capacity as ecological reflexivity. Large parts of the literature agree that deliberative democracy is the right institutional arrangement to achieve ecological reflexivity. Our paper sheds doubt on this consensus. While we agree with the critique of centralized, technocratic planning within the literature on deliberative democracy and agree that ecologically reflexive institutions must take advantage of the environmental ‘wisdom of the crowd’, we doubt that deliberative democracy is the right institutional arrangement to achieve this. Ecological deliberation fails to address its own epistemic shortcomings in using crowd wisdom: Rational ignorance, rational irrationality and radical ignorance weaken the performance of deliberative institutions as an alternative and reflexive form of ecological governance. Instead, we propose an institutional order based on market-based approaches as the best alternative for using the environmental wisdom of the crowd.

Государственный Совет в системе государственного управления в XIX - начале XX в.: историко-правовые аспекты

Giving the State Council of the Russian Federation the status of constitutional state body in 2020 and its “ascension” to the top of the system of public authority actualizes the need for historical and legal analysis of the place and role of this body of supreme power in the strengthening vertical of imperial power in the 19th - early 20th century and constitutional construction of the Russian state. Purpose. The author's aim is the following - on the basis of the legal-historical analysis to define the peculiarities of incorporation (in the aspect of interaction with other organs of the Supreme Ruling) of the State Council into the vertical of imperial power. Methodology. The author used historical and formal-legal methods of research. Results. Historical evidence confirms that the period when the decision to create the State Council as a law-advisory body was characterized by a deep crisis in the system of public administration of the Russian Empire and the contradictory legal status of many public authorities, causing their uncertainty (impossibility of their legal identification). The urgent need for administrative reforms, political and socio-economic transformations in the state required the supreme authorities to resort to deliberative institutions, the members of which assisted the emperor in making important decisions in the field of public administration. The Council of State became one of them. The issues highlighted in the article allow us to better understand the place of the State Council in the 19th - beginning of the 20th century in the strengthening of the vertical of power, which in its turn opens up the possibility of making historical parallels in the development of this institution, functioning at the modern stage of Russia's development. Conclusion. The State Council could not become the significant state body that was conceived by M.M. Speransky. In the form in which it was first created by Alexander I, it only strengthened the centralization of state power. However, despite this, he acted as the basis for the further development of the state apparatus in some accordance with the demands of society, the foreign and domestic policy of the Russian Empire.

Deliberativity and aleatory procedures as a legitimation of somatic human rights: experience of the Republic of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Australia

The article demonstrates the importance of deliberative institutions and procedures in constitutional politics, on the example of the regulation of somatic and genetic human rights. The article identifies the relationship between the effectiveness of legal regulation and deliberative communication in the context of the “juridification of society”. The methodological foundations of deliberative procedures are revealed. In this work, we analyze the reasons for the development of deliberative procedures in the context of biopolitics. Particular attention is paid to the process of expanding the scope of legal regulation in the information state, and we have shown the historical process of increasing relations regulated by law. The authors illustrate the specifics of the legitimation of somatic human rights in a modern state and explore the current procedures for the legitimation of law. A comparative legal analysis of the deliberation principle in the adoption to public law decisions and the achievement of public consensus is given. The authors also assess the degree of significance of aleatory procedures, examining for this purpose the process of constitutional novelization on the example of amending national constitutions (for example, the Constitutions of the Republic of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Australia). This research also shows the effectiveness of certain aleatory procedures with the participation of randomly selected citizens, among them special attention is paid to the so-called “civil assemblies” and “citizens’ jury”. Such aleatory institutional forms are assessed as an important condition for the legitimacy and effectiveness of constitutional reforms.

Picturing deliberation: How dissatisfied citizens make sense of it

What makes politically dissatisfied citizens enthusiastic about deliberation? And what makes them hate it instead? Based on a picture task embedded in a series of focus groups conducted in Belgium, we argue that differences in sense-making help to explain why dissatisfied citizens (do not) support deliberation. We focus on two groups of dissatisfied citizens: non-partisan activists and politically disadvantaged citizens. For both groups, we find that when they thought of deliberation as low-key, informal discussion, they linked it to respectful communication and beneficial outcomes; when they thought of it as formalized, structured discussion, their appraisals became much more negative. For researchers of deliberation, our results make clear that we should be careful in asking citizens what they think about ‘deliberation’ without inquiring into the way they interpret it. For deliberation practitioners, our findings underline the relevance of integrating informal interactions into the design of deliberative institutions.

Social choice, stable outcomes and deliberative democracy

Abstract It has turned out that all voting rules fail on some intuitively plausible desiderata. This has led some political scientists to argue that the notion of the will of the people is profoundly ambiguous and the absence of voting equilibria a generic state of a airs. As a constructive remedy to this some authors have introduced the idea of deliberative democracy. This view of democracy has much to recommend itself, most importantly the emphasis on individuals in devising the decision alternatives. Some empirical evidence also suggests that the deliberative institutions provide an escape from some of the most notorious incompatibility results in social choice theory. We shall critically examine this suggestion. The view emerging from this examination is that social choice theory and deliberative democracy are complementary, not competing approaches to democratic decision making.

Deliberative democracy - theory and practice: The case of the Belgrade citizens’ assembly

In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to improve democracy by encouraging ordinary citizens to participate in political decision-making and if participation in deliberative institutions can make citizens more competent decision-makers. By using qualitative data, we analyze the discussion from the Belgrade citizens? assembly (CA) focused on the topic of expanding the pedestrian zone in the city center. The CA was organized in Serbia for the first time, as part of a research project aimed at promoting and advancing innovative democratic practices in the Western Balkans. The goal was to encourage the involvement of citizens in discussions of public interest. Our hypothesis was that, through the process of participation and deliberation in CA, ordinary citizens can make reasonable and informed choices, increase their knowledge of the issue discussed, and become more motivated to participate in political decision-making on the local level. Our qualitative content analysis suggests that deliberation had a positive impact on participants? knowledge of the chosen topic of the assembly. It also shows that citizens used exhaustive explanations rather than brief statements, could differentiate the good arguments from the bad, and more often appealed to general rather than private interests. Participants in the assembly reported a significant increase in interest in political decision-making that affects their lives, as well as a sense of being informed about politics. Finally, we wanted to draw attention to the challenges and open questions that remain, namely those that concern the impact of a deliberative body on political decision-making in the real world.

Promises and challenges of deliberative and participatory innovations in hybride regimes: The case of two citizens’ assemblies in Serbia

A worrying trend of autocratization that has been spreading globally in recent years, has thrust forward a new wave of appeals for deliberative and participatory democracy as a remedy for the crisis. With a few exceptions, the majority of participatory and deliberative institutions were implemented in stable democracies. The efforts to institutionalize participatory and deliberative models are almost completely absent in Serbia and other Western Balkan countries. Yet, there has been a trend of citizen mobilization in the form of social movements and local civic initiatives, which are both a symptom of unresponsive and quite openly authoritarian institutions, as well as a potential pathway to democratization. The pace and scope of these developments in the undemocratic societies of the Western Balkan region, in terms of both bottom up and top-down democratic experimentation, call for a better understanding of their internal dynamics, and their social and political impact. Responding to this need, the articles in the special issue focus on social movement mobilizations and deliberative experimentation. To begin with, our introductory article focuses particularly on understanding the possible role deliberative institutions could have in hybrid regimes. It looks at the first two cases of deliberative mini publics (DMPs) ever organized in Serbia, analyzing their rationale, specific design, implementation, as well as considering the possible role deliberative institutions could play in the hybrid regime of Serbia.

Évaluation délibérative et prise de décision : une clarification conceptuelle

A voluminous literature addresses the weaknesses of standard stated preference methods used to value non-market environmental goods and services, such as contingent valuation and choice experiment. Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) has emerged as a prominent alternative to the standard versions of these methods. It combines deliberative institutions with preference elicitation. Despite an anchorage in an extensive philosophical literature on deliberative democracy, the theoretical foundations of DMV are underinvestigated. A noteworthy exception is Bartkowski and Lienhoop (2018)’s effort to use Sen’s philosophical views to elaborate such theoretical foundations. The present conceptual contribution pursues this theoretical effort by pointing out two issues left unanswered by the above contribution. The first issue is: how can one ascertain that deliberation has attained its goal in DMV and, more broadly, in decision-making? (We term this the deliberative credentials issue.) The second issue is the role that economists and consultants involved in the proceedings of deliberation are supposed to play. (We term this the role of the analyst issue.) In order to clarify the kind of investigations that DMV or any alternative method should implement to be unequivocal on these issues, we use a formal framework introduced by Cailloux and Meinard (2019), designed to capture the stance that an individual has on a given topic once she has participated in a deliberation: her “deliberated judgment”. This framework allows to identify empirical questions that DMV do not tackle whereas answering these questions would be necessary to clarify the stance that DMV takes on the deliberative credentials issue. When it comes to the role of the analyst issue, our framework advocates an active role of the practitioner in creating what we call models of Deliberated Judgments. This framework thereby helps to characterize the normative stance adopted when implementing a deliberative approach.

“Our struggle, our cry, our sweat”: challenging the gendered logics of participation and conflict transition in Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT While women’s contributions to peacebuilding and conflict mediation are currently viewed as central to the durability of peace, women peace leaders still face constraints in their work toward a peace that is gender-just. In this article, we reflect on the gendered rules that structure the conflict transition environment in Solomon Islands, a context that is shaped by interactions between internationally driven liberal peacebuilding and local influences. Building on insights from feminist institutional analysis, we describe this environment as a complex ecology of gendered rule making in which constraints to women’s participation are formidable. Nonetheless, we are motivated to investigate whether closer attention to Indigenous deliberative institutions in this context, and perhaps in others, might offer possibilities for navigating these constraints. Our research suggests that if due consideration is given to these institutions, the political weight of women’s stories of “struggle,” “cries,” and “sweat” might drive change more effectively, making the objectives of durable and gender-just peace more attainable for those in conflict-affected societies.

Taking the Goals of Deliberation Seriously: A Differentiated View on Equality and Equity in Deliberative Designs and Processes

Deliberation must be immunized against coercive power by a baseline of equality. But what does the requirement of equality mean, in practice, for organizers designing deliberative events and forums? This question is complicated by the fact that equality is fundamentally about two—at times contradictory—values. On the one hand, the value of universal moral equality, which requires abstracting from social circumstances. On the other hand, the value of equity, which requires attending to social circumstances. Deliberative institutions vary in their capacity to promote one value over the other, or in their capacity to compromise between the two. We argue that negotiating between these twin values should be done with reference to the different goals of the deliberative process (generating legitimate decisions, producing more informed opinions, promoting mutual respect, enabling accommodation, and so on), and with an eye to the trade-offs that achieving particular goals might require. Focusing on civic forums, we review existing research related to three important aspects of design—participant recruitment, the nature of the interaction, and decision-making—and discuss how different designs impact deliberation’s different normative goals. We argue against a totalizing view of deliberation, where unitary institutions try to achieve all of deliberation’s goals at once, and instead discuss how the trade-offs between deliberation’s different functions can be resolved at the system level. We conclude by arguing that practitioners should not try to realize all deliberative goals—including equality and equity—at once, but rather should prioritize the goals they want to achieve, and select institutional rules and practices that optimally achieve these goals.

Democracy's Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and Epistemic Performance

AbstractThis article describes how issue specialization through deliberative institutions called “issue publics” can improve the quality of democratic decision making. Issue specialization improves decisions by instantiating a cognitive division of labor among the mass public, which creates efficiencies in decision making and grants large groups of average citizens a scalable advantage over small groups of even the smartest and most capable individuals. Issue specialization further improves decisions by capturing issue‐specific information, concentrating it within the specialized deliberative enclaves of issue publics, and refining citizens’ issue preferences. These advantages are brought to bear in wider democratic politics and policy through information shortcuts and through the specialized electoral incentives of representatives. The article responds to concerns about political ignorance, polarization/partisanship, rent seeking, and socioeconomic bias and argues that issue specialization can provide a valuable brake to polarization yet needs institutional supplementation to engage marginalized citizens and combat bias.

Political elites in deliberative democracy: beliefs and behaviors of Chinese officials

AbstractPolitical leaders and elites play an enormous role in shaping a country's political development. Participatory and deliberative governance represents a major trend of political development around the world; while many studies focus on the ordinary people involved in public deliberation, little is known about the roles elites play in facilitating or impeding the progress of this deliberation. Utilizing a new survey on Chinese officials, we offer the first empirical study that reveals Chinese officials’ perceptions and practices of deliberative democracy. We find that cultural and political traditions alongside personal and social factors have deeply shaped elites’ understandings of democracy, especially the new socialist deliberative democracy. Chinese officials understand democracy largely according to the Confucian tradition ofminbenand the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) political heritage ofmass line, both of which emphasize that officials should listen to the people and make benevolent policies for them. While many embrace the significance of deliberative institutions for improving democratic governance, others emphasize the pragmatic value of consolidating the status quo, or believe it is merely a political show. Democratic oriented officials in the Chinese sense – those who view themselves as servants of the people who should respond to their needs, value public input, are willing to converse with the people in an equal manner, and are less concerned about risks in social stability – are more likely to engage the public in daily decision-making through various channels. Our study suggests that different practices of authoritarian deliberation may lead toward distinct prospects for democracy.

Forest, water and people: The roles and limits of mediation in transforming watershed conflict in Northern Thailand

This study focuses on watershed management in Northern Thailand, where conflict over forest, land and water-use is a prevailing problem. A characteristic of watershed conflicts is that they are often multifaceted and involve multiple stakeholders with different interests and values, consequently requiring conflict management approaches that are sustainable in their outcomes, including addressing the underlying causes of the conflicts. Drawing from a case study in Mae Tia Mae Tae watershed in Northern Thailand, this study explores how mediation by external third party can contribute to the transformation of conflicts in the watershed and how the broader institutional contexts in which the conflict is embedded shapes the mediation outcomes. The study suggests that co-creation of mutual understanding and recognition of each party’s socio-cultural differences, including land-use practices, are critical in building trust and in how conflict transformation processes moved forward. Moreover, the ability of the mediator in facilitating the establishment of a deliberative institution (i.e. a watershed network committee) and agreed rules on forest utilization were also critical in maintaining long-term collaboration in the watershed and potentially preventing other conflicts arising in the future. Some issues, however, may threaten the continuity of the cooperation and sustainability of peace in the watershed, including the lack of structural reform that formally recognizes local people’s rights, insecure land tenure, and the absence of legal recognition for the watershed network committee as a legitimate mechanism for watershed decision making. The paper discusses these findings by comparing it with those from our previous studies in other locations (Cambodia, Indonesia and Western Thailand) to strengthen the insights from Northern Thailand. Finally, the research puts forward some recommendations for reforms and to strengthen the use of effective mediation, to achieve transformative outcomes, in conflicts of this nature. iation, to achieve transformative outcomes, in conflicts of this nature.

Interests, Information, and Minority Influence in Deliberation

The ability of citizens to advance arguments and have them considered fairly is essential to the equality and epistemic quality of deliberative institutions. This article builds on game-theoretic models of strategic information transmission to offer a theory of how the interests that deliberators have in the outcome of deliberation can reduce the influence of some citizens in deliberative process. Specifically, this article argues that the influence of an argument depends on whether the deliberator making the argument is in the majority or minority in terms of her interests in the outcome of deliberation. An argument made by a member of the minority will be less influential than the same argument made by a member of the majority. We offer the first empirical test of this kind of model in realistic deliberative conditions using a laboratory experiment and a field experiment and find support for this theory.

Unheard voices: The challenge of inducing women’s civic speech

Deliberative institutions have gained popularity in the developing world as a means by which to make governance more inclusive and responsive to local needs. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that persistent gender inequality may limit women's ability to participate actively and influence outcomes in these forums. In response, policy makers have tried to induce women's participation by leveraging the group-based format of self-help groups, which can build women's social capital and develop their sense of political efficacy and identity. This paper evaluates the impact of one such intervention, known as the Pudhu Vaazhvu Project, on women's civic participation in rural Tamil Nadu. Using text-as-data methods on a matched sample of transcripts from village assembly meetings, the analysis finds that the Pudhu Vaazhvu Project significantly increases women's participation in the gram sabha along several dimensions -- meeting attendance, propensity to speak, and the length of floor time they enjoy. Although women in the Pudhu Vaazhvu Project villages enjoy greater voice, the study finds no evidence that they are more likely than women in control villages to drive the broader conversational agenda or elicit a relevant response from government officials.