Model Of Deliberative Democracy Research Articles

Water Management and the Procedural Turn: Norms and Transitions in Alberta

Water management reforms promoting deliberative, decentralized decision making are often accompanied by procedures designed to accommodate a range of stakeholder perspectives. This paper considers the role of political and ethical norms affecting this ‘procedural turn’ in order to understand the management of transitions in complex socio-technical systems. It examines the discourse and practice of water reforms in Alberta, Canada in order to identify how new procedures were designed alongside changes to management institutions. It finds that the existing social and cultural context is an uneasy fit with procedural norms theorized in deliberative models of democracy. Using examples from the Alberta case, it draws out implications for understanding the procedural turn in water management and the role of norms affecting transitions toward sustainability.

Deliberative Culture and Politics

The very thought of deliberative politics in contemporary China may seem surprising. Indeed, there are questions over its veracity. Analyses of scholarship on deliberative democracy in China to date might be said to fall into two camps: one sees the emergence of deliberative democracy in China as a real prospect for democracy; the other dismisses it outright. This essay offers an alternative evaluation to these two camps. It proposes a theoretical reconstruction of deliberative culture that accounts for a proliferation of contemporary deliberative practices in China and the CCP’s sponsorship of deliberative experiments and institutions. The theoretical reconstruction of contemporary deliberative practices bears traces of the Confucian moral code of deliberation and the institutionalization of deliberation throughout the history of the Chinese imperial states. The upshot in taking this theoretical approach is that we can confirm that the practice of deliberation in contemporary China is well and truly alive, but it does not readily map with Western theoretical models of deliberative democracy. This essay sets up a contrast between an authoritarian deliberation—the use of actual deliberative practices by the authoritarian state to improve governance and enhance its authority— and the “western” idealized version of democratic deliberation. It considers the limitations of the Chinese model of authoritarian deliberation and explains why and how it may constitute, at least partially, a defensible normative account of the contributions of deliberation to political legitimacy, and in doing so hopes to illustrate some important historical lessons for Western deliberative democracy.

Deliberative Democracy and Nanotechnologies in Health

The ethical, social and political dimensions of legislative regulations of issues concerning the citizens’ health are generally recognized to be of increasing significance in modern deliberative democracies. However, nanotechnologies in health have raised extra difficulties in deliberative democracies’ procedural justice arrangements. Could a deliberative model of democracy based on substantive commitments such as to equal moral and political value of collectively acting persons contribute to cope with difficult risk and uncertainty regulatory issues pertaining to the tremendous advanced applications of nanotechnologies in health? This is the main question for the bioethics oriented inquiry in this paper. Special emphasis has given on the field of the dental health.

Deliberative Democracy in Transnational Governance: Agency, Representation and Legitimacy

Is deliberative democracy a feasible model for democratizing transnational governance institutions? Recent literature presents deliberative democratic theory as viable notion of democratic legitimation for global governance, as it focuses on engaging existing agents in processes of public reasoning, rather than extrapolating democratic procedures from the nation-state. This paper challenges that idea. The claims that a deliberative model of democracy is more practicable, out of the box, for democratizing global governance, leave undertheorized the mechanisms by which deliberators at the transnational level represent or are accountable to democratic constituencies. In order to address those issues, I construct, in what follows, three different approaches to sustain the claim that existing global governance institutions and processes could increase their democratic legitimacy by engaging in more deliberative modes of decision-making, and then explore whether each approach coheres with deliberative democratic theory. On the first approach, deliberation may produce legitimate results irrespective of the agents’ internal democratic legitimacy, but this fails to explain how insufficiently legitimated representatives can produce legitimate results through deliberation. The second approach holds that social integrates are collective persons capable of rational deliberation. While consistent with deliberative theory, this version raises the bar for legitimate deliberation and challenges normative individualism. The third approach may seem most obvious: democratic representation. However, I shall argue that deliberative democracy needs to substantially adjust two core assumptions in order to accommodate a theory of representation: the insistence on actual deliberation among all and the rejection of sanctions from the concept of democratic accountability.

The Value of Unregulated Business-NGO Interaction

Political theories in general and deliberative democracy in particular have become quite popular in business ethics over the past few years. However, the model of deliberative democracy as generally referred to in business ethics is only appropriate for conceptualizing interaction between business and society which occurs within a context which is more or less institutionalized. The model cannot account for “unregulated” interaction between business and civil society. The authors argue that scholars need to resort to the so called “critical strand” of deliberative democracy if we want to conceptualize interaction that happens without the involvement of decision-making institutions as political action in a deliberative sense. Adopting this approach allows us to identify cases in which unregulated interaction between business and civil society is preferable over institutionalization.

Deliberative democracy: History of an idea

Deliberative democracy finds its model in ancient democratic practices. Among modern thinkers, theorists of deliberative democracy find inspiration in Rousseau's political thought and his concept of the "general will", especially in his persistence that the general will is not a mere aggregation of individual wills. However, the idea of ?general will?, public interest, and the care for the common good of the community, has been widely criticized as it appears that it does not leave the place for individual rights and freedoms. The goal of this paper is to to show that deliberative democracy does, indeed, strats of with individual rights and freedoms, but that it does not allow for democratic procedure to be reduced to the aggregation of individual preferences. Theorists of the deliberative democracy call into question the assumption that a collective decision-making procedure should be understood solely according the voting model. Through a process of public and rational discussion, voters do revise attitudes and initial preferences. Thus, as a result they reach either unanimous agreement or bring preferences closer to single-peakedness. In this way the model of deliberative democracy avoids paradoxes and problems that aggregative model of democracy encounters.

Disagreement and Responses to Climate Change

The potential harms associated with global climate change demand an urgent response. But at the same time, the nature and extent of both the problem and our proper response to it are continually contested, within the academic community and wider society. What should be the ethical import of this disagreement? In this paper I set out John Rawls' theory of reasonable disagreement as a way of analysing such contestation. On Rawls' account, reasonable disagreement is founded in diversity rather than straightforward error. I argue that many aspects of the scientific and ethical debate on climate change can be usefully viewed from within such a perspective. This raises, I suggest, serious problems for deciding what the human response to global warming must be. Lastly, I survey two responses which might be thought to cope with such pervasive disagreement. Neither, however, is clearly effective. In my conclusion I suggest that reasonable disagreement might be tackled best in a model of deliberative democracy. Such a model, however, does not generate easy answers to the problems of climate change.

Reconciling Historical Injustices: Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Reconciliation

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable.

The lobby regulation element of the European Transparency Initiative: Between liberal and deliberative models of democracy

The EU's dependence upon exchanges with organised civil society as a proxy for popular participation makes its procedures for participatory governance critical for input legitimacy. The most recent of these is the European Transparency Initiative (ETI). The article examines the development of the lobby regulation element of the ETI, the detail of its operation and the concepts upon which it is founded, in order to consider its potential to contribute to wider goals of participatory legitimacy. The main energies devoted to creating the initiative were spent in the struggle to get it established, with relatively less attention given to the implications of operational issues involved in registration. Although transparency is the main focus, a legacy of predecessor initiatives on interest group representativeness, primarily spatial in concern, remain embedded in the scheme, which place limitations on advocacy-based groups. An alternative regulatory device to representativeness is that of accountability, which can be accommodated within the EU's existing framework of liberal democracy with elements of deliberative overtones, and of which traces can be found in the Code of Conduct associated with the registration scheme.

Best Laid Plans … The Institutionalisation of Public Deliberation in Scotland

Despite increasing support for participatory and deliberative principles amongst academics, practitioners and parliamentarians alike, efforts to infuse political systems with more inclusive and consensual forms of debate often founder. This article explores this conundrum by examining institutional reforms through the lens of deliberative democracy. More specifically, we scrutinise attempts to institutionalise forms of civic deliberation within the Scottish political system via the Scottish Civic Forum and the Scottish Parliament's committee system. Our analysis tells the story of how these two types of institutional reform, both designed to facilitate the move towards a more participatory and deliberative model of democracy in Scotland, have fared over a ten‐year period. In turn, this analysis allows us to comment on the ways in which deliberative and parliamentary democracy may be integrated.

On Partisan Political Justification

Political justification figures prominently in contemporary political theory, notably in models of deliberative democracy. This article articulates and defends the essential role of partisanship in this process. Four dimensions of justification are examined in detail: the constituency to which political justifications are offered, the circumstances in which they are developed, the ways in which they are made inclusive, and the ways in which they are made persuasive. In each case, the role of partisanship is probed and affirmed. Partisanship, we conclude, is indispensable to the kind of political justification needed to make the exercise of collective authority responsive to normative concerns.

Book Review: Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality by Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett

Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett begin their book Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality with a review of the scathing indictments that have been made by environmentalists against a view of democracy typically described as “interest-group liberalism.” Charged with using language that is “stunted and shallow” (p. 1) and being “virtually obsolete” for the environmental movement (p. 2), how can democracy be rehabilitated from its less than stellar performance in handling the world’s most pressing problems? In other words, is green democracy theoretically possible? For Baber and Bartlett, the answer is yes. Trained in the fields of Public Policy Studies and Political Science, respectively, Baber and Bartlett attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice that has plagued environmental politics for so long. For these authors, democracy must take a deliberative turn if it is to avoid being relegated to the trash bin of useless ideas. In chapters one and two, Baber and Bartlett follow others in their respective fields who believe a deliberative approach is “the only way to overcome the failings of interest-group liberalism,” contending deliberative democracy has the potential to produce better environmental policy decisions (p. 6). Although Baber and Bartlett acknowledge that “deliberative democracy” is difficult to define, they argue it is a school of political thought that presumes the essence of democracy is “deliberation rather than voting, interest aggregation, or rights” (p. 6). For deliberation to work, participants must also be politically equal and engage one another in the “weighing, acceptance, or rejection of reasons” (p. 6). Of course, the authors also attempt to argue that Horkheimer and Adorno’s observations about instrumental reason in The Dialectic of Enlightenment can be addressed by deliberative democracy scholars. In chapter three, realizing different conceptions of deliberative democracy have drastically divergent assumptions, Baber and Bartlett wisely take three models of deliberative democracy as their “points of departure.” In chapters four, five and six, Baber and Bartlett explore the ideas of deliberative democracy as it has been articulated by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and thinkers such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, and James Bohman. Rawls represents the “public reason” approach to deliberative democracy, Habermas the “ideal discourse” perspective, and Gutmann, Thompson, and Bohman the “full liberalism” version. It is in these chapters that the authors are at their best. Baber and Bartlett tackle complicated material and make it accessible to readers

Defending Democracy: The Concentric Containment of Political Extremism

In this article we develop a concentric containment policy for dealing with political extremism starting from the deliberative model of democracy. This model of democracy is particularly well suited because it overcomes the traditional opposition between procedural and substantive views of democracy. On the procedural side, deliberative democracy emphasises the importance of tracking all the relevant concerns of citizens in the public sphere, whereas, on the substantive side, it stresses the need for an adequate filtering which guarantees the compatibility of actual policies with the core values of liberty and equality. The twofold requirement of tracking and filtering translates into a guideline of decreasing tolerance towards extremist organisations as they approach the centres of formal ***decision-making power. We argue that the resulting containment policy, which listens to extremist voters and simultaneously puts unremitting civilising pressure on extremist parties, is not only desirable from a normative point of view; as shown by the empirical findings concerning the successes and failures of actual containment strategies, the twofold concentric approach, including, if necessary, a cordon sanitaire around the extremist party, might also turn out to be the most effective one.

No Justice Without Democracy: A Deliberative Approach to the Global Distribution of Wealth

The debate about global distributive justice is characterized by an often stark opposition between universalistic approaches, advocating an egalitarian global redistribution of wealth (Beitz, Pogge, Barry, Tan), and particularistic positions, aiming to justify a restriction of redistribution to the domestic community (D. Miller, R. Miller, Blake, Nagel, Rawls). I argue that an approach starting from the deliberative model of democracy (Habermas) can overcome this opposition. On the one hand, the increasingly global scope of economic interactions implies that the range of individuals concerned with the redistribution of wealth should also be increasingly universal. On the other hand, the need for democratic deliberation refers to the fact that demands of justice should be contextual and should take into account the particular circumstances, needs and values of the people concerned. Both concerns can be realized simultaneously only within a multi‐layered democratic system in which redistribution is a concern at the domestic, the international and the global level.

Veni, Vidi, Disseri

As the most popular voluntary association in the United States, churches are sometimes touted as saviors of democracy. However, those who espouse deliberative models of democracy rarely see churches as nurturing the decision-making abilities of attenders. Thus, the authors examine the extent to which church small group sessions fulfill the conditions for deliberation as set forth by political theorists. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the authors find that churches offer authentic opportunities through small group involvements and, accordingly, tentatively declare the existence of a religious civility, with churches acting in the service of democratic capacity.

The Possibility of Deliberative Democracy as the Opposition to Exclusion and Violence - Around the Benhabib’s Model of Deliberative Democracy

The Possibility of Deliberative Democracy as the Opposition to Exclusion and Violence - Around the Benhabib’s Model of Deliberative Democracy

Consensus or Dissensus in the Legislative Approach to Complex Policy Problems? Animal Biotechnology as an Example

In this paper, the characteristics of the adequate legislative approach to complex policy problems will be discussed. The main target is to analyse the strong orientation towards consensus as a foundation for decision-making. Complex policy problems may be characterized by a complex structure with several different (moral) viewpoints, perspectives, and with uncertainties about possibilities, developments, and consequences at the very moment and in the future. These policy problems are not easily tackled. To analyse the structure of these complex policy problems and to illustrate the issues involved, case studies on animal biotechnology in three different countries will be used as examples. If the complexity of policy problems is not adequately understood, these problems may lead to intractable conflicts. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark the policy problem of animal biotechnology is characterized by rapid developments and a strong moral impact. Both entail a varying number of perspectives and viewpoints, and a lack of knowledge about future applications, risks, consequences, and impacts. There is a great deal of disagreement about the values, scientific methods, empirical facts, and definitions concerning animal technology, and about what to expect from the possibilities of this technology. Consequently, regulation of animal biotechnology is not easy. In the three countries of the case studies, the policy problem is tackled by a legislative approach with an orientation towards consensus which has raised problems in all three cases. The thesis of this paper is that an adequate legislative approach to complex policy problems is not served by a strong focus on consensus.The aim of this paper is not to argue for a general rejection of consensus as a basis for regulation, but to critically discuss the orientation towards consensus as a political aim for some kinds of policy problems. The adequacy of this strong focus on consensus in legislative approaches to complex policy problems is questioned. Instead, accepting dissensus as part of the political process can tackle issues concerning complex policy problems such as animal biotechnology. To analyse the focus on consensus, models of deliberative democracy will be discussed in this paper. Consensus and the search for consensus as a method to structure deliberation are important sources for legitimacy of decisions and the use of certain instruments in most models of deliberative democracy.

Deliberation interrupted

In this article I confront Jürgen Habermas' deliberative model of democracy with Claude Lefort's analysis of democracy as a regime in which the locus of power remains an empty place. This confrontation reveals several structural similarities between the two authors and explains how the proceduralization of popular sovereignty provides a discourse-theoretical interpretation of the empty place of power. At the same time, Lefort's insistence on the open-ended nature of the democratic struggle also points towards an unresolved tension at the core of Habermas' model between the cognitive nature of deliberation on the one hand and the freedom of moral and political agents on the other. A proper solution of this tension requires a full appreciation of the ineliminable gap between actual and ideal deliberation. Because actual deliberation can never result in an ideal consensus, the actual exercise of democratic power should be understood as an unavoidable interruption of deliberation.

Sketch of a conversational society

In this paper I consider what it might mean to see society as a kind of Rortian conversation. Although the idea of conversation is not always explicit in Rorty’s social thought, it is, I think, implicitly present. To therefore invoke it as a model is not to do an injustice to Rorty, but to bring out features of his own thought that he tends to underplay. In suggesting that we take seriously the notion of society as a kind of conversation, we should be careful not to overplay the aspect of talking, which is only a part of conversation. We should bear in mind that it also means living together. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that Rorty introduces the idea of conversation as a way of thinking about discourse, and so the notion as Rorty uses it prioritises the notion of talking. I would argue, however, that Rorty leaves his notion sufficiently vague and undefined to make it amenable to extension. In order to argue that we should look to the idea of conversation as a way of thinking about society more generally, I will proceed as follows. I will begin by considering the notion of conversation as discourse, focusing on two particularly prominent strands of criticism in response to this idea, namely that it ignores the role of argument and reason, and that it is a pointless sort of practice. Having rebutted these strands of criticism, I will outline a way in which we can extend the notion of conversation to society as a whole, and I will do this by debating with critics who see Rorty as privileging language over the more material and institutional aspects of society. Finally, I will argue that the conversational model is superior to the more entrenched deliberative model of democracy. Through an examination of one particular phenomenon, claro culture, which causes practical and theoretical difficulties for the deliberative model, I will offer a prima facie reason for suggesting conversation as a superior and more pragmatic alternative.

The Deliberative Model of Democracy: Two Critical Remarks

Abstract. The deliberative model of democracy, as presented by Jürgen Habermas and others, claims to reconstruct the normative content of the idea of democracy. However, since it overemphasises the epistemic facet of decision‐making, the model is unable to take into account other valuable aspects of democracy. This is shown in reference to two concrete phenomena from political reality: majority voting and the problem of the dissenter. In each case, the deliberative model inevitably fails to account for several normatively desirable features of democracy, such as formal political equality and proper respect for the judgement of each citizen.