Political Deliberation Research Articles

The epistemic turn of critical theory: implications for deliberative politics and policy-making

Habermas formulated his political theory relatively late in his academic career. One can suggest that political issues have played an important role in his writings from the beginning, and one can ...

Dewey and His Vision of Democracy

In this essay, I maintain that Dewey’s 1888 article “The Ethics of Democracy” is the most immediate thematic and conceptual predecessor to The Public and Its Problems. Both texts revolve around a number of key themes at the heart of Dewey’s thinking about democracy: the relationship between the individual and society, the legitimacy of majoritarianism, and the significance and meaning of political deliberation. When these themes are taken together we come to understand the anti-elitist core of Dewey’s political thinking.

Deliberation and global civil society: agency, arena, affect

AbstractThe article provides a critical analysis of the role and function of global civil society within deliberative approaches to global governance. It critiques a common view that global civil society can/should act as an agent for democratising global governance and seeks to explore the importance of global civil society as an arena of deliberation. This more reconstructive aim is supplemented by an empirically focused discussion of the affective dimensions of global civil society, in general, and the increasingly important use of film, in particular. Ultimately, this then yields an image of the deliberative politics of global civil society that is more reflective of the differences, ambiguities and contests that pervade its discourses about global governance. This is presented as a quality that debates about deliberative global governance might learn from as well as speak to.

Anticipating the Interaction between Technology and Morality: A Scenario Study of Experimenting with Humans in Bionanotechnology

During the last decades several tools have been developed to anticipate the future impact of new and emerging technologies. Many of these focus on ‘hard,’ quantifiable impacts, investigating how novel technologies may affect health, environment and safety. Much less attention is paid to what might be called ‘soft’ impacts: the way technology influences, for example, the distribution of social roles and responsibilities, moral norms and values, or identities. Several types of technology assessment and of scenario studies can be used to anticipate such soft impacts. We argue, however, that these methods do not recognize the dynamic character of morality and its interaction with technology. As a result, they miss an important opportunity to broaden the scope of social and political deliberation on new and emerging technologies.In this paper we outline a framework for building scenarios that enhance the techno-moral imagination by anticipating how technology, morality and their interaction might evolve. To show what kind of product might result from this framework, a scenario is presented as an exemplar. This scenario focuses on developments in biomedical nanotechnology and the moral regime of experimenting with human beings. Finally, the merits and limitations of our framework and the resulting type of scenarios are discussed.

On a Governmentality Analytics of the ‘Deliberative Turn’: Material Conditions, Rationalities and the Deliberating Subject

Amongst social and political researchers, as well as diverse policy actors, debate has of late grown around the role deliberation can and could play in addressing contemporary social, political and environmental issues. Substantial conceptual and empirical concerns remain about this ‘deliberative turn’, including the strictures of achieving ‘true deliberation’ and a lack of focus to date on the contexts and ‘material conditions’ of deliberative events and spaces. In response, this paper argues that the recent growth of research utilising Foucault's governmentality thesis can provide a fruitful analytics to explore aspects of the deliberative turn, in particular the rationalities and subjectivities that undergird it. This argument draws on recent debates in both deliberative politics and governmentality studies, as well as examples of past and on-going deliberative research.

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

This paper argues that it is time for public understanding of science to develop a critical inventory of the forms, formats and methods of public participation and their respective implications and ambiguities. It highlights the need for analysing not only the limitations and deficiencies of participatory arrangements but also their constructive dimension, in particular the construction of the subject of participation. Looking into participatory governance arrangements in the issue area of genetic testing in Germany and the UK the paper presents a typology of formats according to the way the respective public is constructed and identifies four major constructions of publics: the general public, the pure public, the affected public and the partisan public. Each of these enables certain speaking positions while foreclosing others. The study shows that the main purposes of participatory arrangements in this issue area are knowledge production and education rather than political deliberation and decision-making.

EParticipation: Designing and Managing Political Discussion Forums

eParticipation is the extension and transformation of participation in political deliberation and decision-making processes through information and communication technologies (ICTs). The most commonly found examples of eParticipation systems are political discussion forums. Although much of the discussion of these technologies is conducted in the eGovernment and eDemocracy literature, political discussion forums present a distinct set of design and management challenges, which relate directly to information systems concerns. In this article, we use the overview model of eParticipation of Sæbø, Rose, and Flak to structure a critical review of the existing literature to identify key challenges for designing and managing political discussion forums. We offer a contribution to theory in the form of a descriptive model of political discussion forums in their social context, based on a literature review of relevant literature. The explanatory potential of the model is illustrated by analyzing D:mo, a Norwegian political discussion forum. Based on the review and the case study, we offer a contribution to practice by suggesting a set of guidelines for the design and management of political discussion forums.

Environmental justice and deliberative democracy: How social change organizations respond to power in the deliberative system

This article examines how civil society organizations transmit policy ideas to decision makers in deliberative politics. Drawing on a case of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, it focuses on how they respond to hegemonic power and considers action within “the deliberative system,” including deliberative forums and broader public discourse. I find that civil society actors use both discursive and coercive forms of power to mobilize meaning and interrupt prevailing assumptions about race in environmental decision making. Contrary to theory, the civil society organization used coercive power mostly in and relating to face-to-face deliberation (to secure a fairer process and get their policy problems on the agenda). When their ideas about racial discrimination were weakened in deliberations, however, they used non-confrontational forms of discursive power to develop critical discourse on race and disseminate it in the public sphere where it could inform future political action.

Fear's Anger: Virginia Woolf's Psychology and Deliberative Democracy*

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resistance that is part of reasoning in a deliberative system—especially when political deliberation results in a challenge to a person's identity. Woolf's solution for women writers, the material security represented by a room of one's own, can be applied to the larger problem of political deliberation as well. This leads to an expansion of the conception of substantive equality required for a deliberative democracy. Further, Woolf's insight challenges deliberative democrats to de-center capitalist economic relations. As a way of protecting the individual from the psychological dynamic Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, deliberative democrats should advocate a non-competitive economic space for those threatened by the powerful psychological reactions to deliberation.

Choosing Between Capitalisms: Habermas, Ethics and Politics

In Between Facts and Norms Habermas both accepts the place of distinctively ethical considerations about ‘the good’ in political deliberation, and advances a particular view of the nature and justification of ethical judgments. Whilst welcoming the former, this paper criticises the latter, with its focus on issues of identity and self-understanding, and suggests instead a broadly Aristotelian alternative. The argument proceeds, first, through a detailed engagement with Habermas’s theoretical claims about ethical reasoning in politics, in which it is argued that he fails to show how different ethical possibilities can be critically evaluated, and second, through the analysis of a practical example, that of a political choice being made between different kinds of capitalism. Here the paper draws on recent work in comparative political economy on the institutional differences between varieties of capitalism, and uses this to contrast the implications of Habermas’s conception of ethics, according to which what would matter is the congruence between economic institutions and a political community’s historically shaped identity, with those of its preferred alternative, which requires a comparison between the different conceptions of the good that each kind of capitalism institutionally favours, and collective judgments about their respective contributions to human well-being.

National identity, political trust and the public realm

The representative institutions of democratic government require the public sphere; but this in turn rests on the fellow‐feeling of citizens. In this article, I explore some recent ways of fleshing out Mill’s thought that patriotic fellow‐feeling is instrumental for a form of trust that the public sphere requires. Deliberation, argument and negotiation in the public sphere require a willingness to discuss, alter one’s position, compromise with others, and do so in good faith and in the belief that other participants are broadly also taking part in the same fashion. Since politics is a realm in which interests and identities clash, we have at least a prima facie reason to worry that others may in fact not be trustworthy in the desired way. Some potential for distrust is inherent in political deliberation, since it presupposes that there is some important conflict or disagreement that needs to be overcome through discussion: in other words, that I cannot simply rely on others to further my interests for the right reasons, or at all. While trust seems inherently problematic, political dialogue in the public sphere seems to require it from those who take part. I look at four accounts of the basis of democratic trust, viz. the communitarian, the ‘societal culture’ account, the public culture account, and what is known as the ‘constitutional patriotism’ account. In outline, my argument is that all four accounts fail to explain the basis of trust in the democratic sphere. I conclude that sharing a national identity still leaves the politics of trust to be negotiated by the participants concerned.

Stability, Fit, and Consensus

In Political Liberalism, Rawls develops a distinct account of the stability of a conception of justice. According to this account, a conception of justice is stable if it is possible for the holders of diverse reasonable views about the good to affirm the conception on due reflection. A number of commentators, however, argue that Rawls's approach secures affirmation by limiting the scope of political deliberation or removing controversial issues from democratic debate. I argue that these objections mischaracterize Rawls's theory. Rawls's account of stability, I argue, is designed neither to restrict debate nor to socialize the participants in that debate.

The Limits of Hospitality

The arrival of migrants in search of a better life puts forward urgent questions for social and political thought. Historically, hospitality has been considered as a religious duty, a sacred commandment of charity and generosity to assign strangers a place — albeit ambivalent — in the community. With the development of the modern nation state, these obligations have been inscribed into the procedures of political deliberation and legislation that determine the social spaces of aliens, residents and citizens. Current debates are tied to notions of justice which question borders and undermine the congruence of citizenship, territory and belonging that make up modern nation states. These debates focus on the rights of others and the demands of unconditional hospitality, an absolute requirement on one hand, and political and legal limitations on the other. The paper will critically engage with these debates, and evidence the tensions and limits inherent in current notions of hospitality.

Competition in the Best of Cities

By examining his account of individual virtues, making inferences from his analyses of flawed cities, and teasing out the tacit assumptions behind claims about the nature of political activity, I argue that Aristotle thinks of competition as being a political ideal rather than as an inevitable corruption of civic life. Virtuous citizens compete for civic honor through traditional “competitive outlays” and contend against one another for prestigious offices in the city. Moreover, I argue that the very structure of political deliberation is competitive. It is through a “vis-à-vis” competition among proposals that a winning policy is adopted, and the speakers who offer these proposals are themselves involved in a competition for political influence.

Scottish Press Coverage of UK General Elections after Devolution: the 2001 and 2005 Campaigns

This paper presents preliminary findings from a wider study into the form that political debate takes in Scottish and English/UK newspapers’ reporting of the 2001 and the 2005 UK Elections. The research project aims to contribute to the discussion regarding the role played by the Scottish press in political deliberation after devolution and compares its contribution to the electoral debate with that of newspapers bought in England. This paper explores the results of a content analysis of articles from daily Scottish and UK newspapers during the four weeks of each election campaign period. This reveals that, despite some differences, the overall picture of the coverage of major election issues is consistent. A selection of the coverage of taxation, the most mentioned reserved issue in the 2001 campaign, is subsequently analysed using critical discourse analysis, and the results suggest more distinction between the two sets of newspapers.

Choosing Constituent Cues: Reference Group Influence on Clergy Political Speech*

Objective. Though constituent reference groups have been shown to impact clergy political behavior, studies have largely cast group influence as a fixed effect. In an update of how specific constituent groups may affect clergy political speech, I assess whether clergy intentionally select cues from specific constituencies in determining whether to sermonize on an issue of political controversy.Method. Data were collected from a 2006 survey of clergy in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I use a series of maximum likelihood models to determine the effect of group cues on clergy behavior.Results. Results show that clergy look to cues from both their congregations and denominational leaders when electing to deliver a sermon. What is more, clergy report feeling pressure from their congregational constituencies to behave in ways that they do not prefer. This pressure also impacts their decision to sermonize.Conclusion. Taken together, these findings suggest that clergy, who are beginning to receive systematic attention for their role as framers and motivators of political deliberation among their followers, are subject to the influence of varied constituencies in exercising this deliberative role.

Religion and the public sphere

In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.

The Significance of Internet Communication in Public Deliberation

The article addresses recent structural changes in the public sphere related to media as platforms for debate and deliberation. New media platforms for communication lead to changes in the communication structure itself. This can easily be seen in the differentiation processes of the public sphere that is now taking place: The differentiation of topics, styles and actors is an astonishing phenomenon, is constantly a topic of debate in itself, often labelled as both decay and democratisation. I argue that as Internet-based media take actively part in, and accelerate the internal differentiation of the public sphere, the role and function of the public sphere is put in a new light. Inner divisions of labour in the public sphere emerge, which forces us to reconsider conventional understandings of the political public sphere vis-à-vis political deliberation. The article addresses this new complexity of public discourse and presents a revised view on its democratic functions. I argue that as a consequence of the Internet, social and political theory need to distinguish between a presentational and a representational dimension, each serving different functions. I also argue that the altered media composition underlying the public sphere suggests a more network-like view on national and international public spheres.

Deliberate and free

In this article, I consider the extent to which heteronomous people can be positive contributors to political deliberation. I examine the normative potential of heteronomous people as participants in public debate, and address the overall effects that inclusion of heteronomous people can provide for group deliberations. I subsequently consider empirical findings that bear upon the case I develop, and conclude that liberals ought to reconsider the importance of heteronomous people in healthy liberal democracy. This philosophical recognition lays groundwork for a more morally and politically compelling version of liberalism, one that outstrips comprehensive schemes that vaunt personal autonomy as liberalism's primary normative commitment.

Constitutional Implications of EU Membership: An Overview of Constitutional Issues in the Negotiating Process - The Croatian Perspective

Normal 0 21 false false false HR X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Times New Roman; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This article gives an overview of the constitutional issues arising from Croatia’s EU accession negotiations. Corresponding to the current status of negotiations, a provisional overview is made, consisting of the constitutional issues that are either already on the negotiating agenda or anticipated on the basis of the existing, internal legal analyses and/or the experiences of candidate countries from previous enlargements. They are divided into three groups: 1) constitutional issues which have arisen during the screening process and in subsequent talks and negotiations with the EU on individual negotiating chapters; 2) constitutional issues which have not been directly raised in negotiations with the EU, but which Croatia needs to consider in the context of the overall preparations for EU accession; 3) the possible further constitutional implications of EU membership following the entry into force of the latest EU treaty reform. The article looks at how Croatia and the EU approach these constitutional issues in the context of accession negotiations, especially having in mind the new procedural mechanisms (ie benchmarks) introduced by the EU into the process of negotiations. Different approaches are also determined by the type of constitutional issues: the sector-specific issues related to legislative alignment in certain areas of the acquis , which will be addressed in the course of negotiations on individual chapters, are distinguished in principle from the general constitutional issues related to finding the ‘right’ constitutional legal basis and formula for Croatia’s accession to and effective functioning in the EU (where Croatia has to decide on its own on the need for constitutional adjustments and the manner of making them). In comparison with the previous EU enlargement round, the analysis shows that there are no significant differences in Croatia's accession negotiations with respect to the areas in which constitutional issues have been identified. Croatia will be able to use the experiences of the ‘new’ EU Member States, although there are no standard or best solutions for adjusting the constitutional legal framework for EU accession. The final list of all constitutional issues that Croatia will (have to) address before accession to the EU will directly depend on the results of negotiations as well as on wider legal and political deliberations that are expected to take place in Croatia in the coming period.