Political Deliberation Research Articles

Real time political deliberation on social media: can televised debates lead to rational and civil discussions on broadcasters’ Facebook pages?

ABSTRACT As broadcast news organizations partner with social media to generate real time reactions to live political debates, this article explores how this trend impacts discussions among their Facebook page users. Data from the 2016 U.S. elections suggest that real-time conversations on broadcasters’ Facebook pages in response to televised political debates might have important democratic value, as viewer comments expressed a considerable degree of interactivity, rationality and civility. Discussions prompted by brodcasters' posts that quoted candidate acclaims and their policy positions resulted in more deliberate conversations than discussions prompted by opponent attacks and candidate character.

Contributions of critical thinking as a form of participation and political deliberation

Critical thinking is an attribute of consciousness that can be manifested in all human activities where it is required, as a condition of possibility, in the use of critical reason and deliberation. Consequently, it is in the domains of politics that critical thinking is used more frequently, to discuss the scope and concrete significance of the discourses and practices that, from the exercise of public powers, are deployed on intelligent citizenship and with the minimum necessary of information for peer deliberation. The objective of this article is to deconstruct the most common contributions of critical thinking as a form of participation and political deliberation. Methodologically it is a research of documentary design developed in the coordinates of the philosophical essay, next to the Latin American philosopher and the revision of the most popular political theory. Among the main findings, the idea that critical thinking is not the exclusive patrimony of certain self-defined political and ideological tendencies as progressive in the region stands out. It is concluded that, this way of thinking is uncomfortable per se for all the paradigms that serve as the basis for the status quo, in politics and society.

Social Media and Democracy: Fostering Political Deliberation and Participation

A democracy extends beyond partisan politics. The current study examines how a social media video about the environment can spark political deliberation and participation. Drawing from normative democratic theory, an experimental design was employed to test the effect of the video in engaging citizens in the political process and fostering interpersonal conversations, both online and face-to-face. At the core of these normative democratic outcomes is information efficacy, as individuals are moved to discuss the issue and act to protect the environment from the threat of single-use plastics. The results reveal that social media have the potential to have a positive democratic influence.

Reverse Technology Assessment in the Age of the Platform Economy

The rise of what is often referred to as the sharing economy is among the most daring challenges for cities around the world. Sharing platforms create opportunities for efficient market exchange, but also cause negative externalities for city dwellers. A challenge for city authorities is that platforms can be launched without ex ante assessment of externalities and public interests, leaving public debate and political deliberation ex post affairs. We call the platform innovation logic 'reverse technology assessment', which obstructs participatory planning and constructive technology assessment. We discuss the potential of an alternative policy framework known as 'right to challenge'. We end with a broader reflection on public policy regarding sharing platforms at different scalar levels, emphasizing local initiatives to develop alternative sharing platforms.

‘The nightmare of multiculturalism’: Interpreting and deploying anti-immigration rhetoric in social media

Social media is an important transmitter of anti-immigration political rhetoric. In this study, we examine the discussions posted in a Finnish online forum provoked by an MP’s anti-multiculturalist Facebook post. We draw upon frame analysis and discursive social psychology to analyse the communicative processes that challenge and normalise anti-immigration political rhetoric. Using frame analysis, we study how forum users entered heated societal discussion on multiculturalism by framing the MP’s anti-multiculturalist address as either hate speech or – more dominantly – as normal political conduct. Using discursive social psychology, we examine constructions of multiculturalism in these discussions. We demonstrate how anti-immigration political communication was normalised, multiculturalism was constructed as a threat and the proponents of multiculturalism were discredited. We argue that to understand the rise of anti-immigration political movements, it is important to examine everyday political deliberation online as part of a wider discursive landscape.

Is Bargaining a Form of Deliberating?

Prevailing literature argues that arguing is the only appropriate mode of deliberation. The literature acknowledges bargaining, storytelling, and other forms of communication, but is unwilling to describe these as deliberation, properly speaking. The claim is that describing them as such would amount to concept stretching. My first thesis is that arguing exhausts neither the legitimate modes of deliberation nor the modes for effective deliberation. To do this I further develop a two-type categorization of issues I have employed elsewhere to show that argument alone is sufficient for bringing closure to issues in the first category, but bargaining is needed to reach agreements on issues in the second category. I observe that the more agreeable variant of the second category of issues constitutes a great deal of issues deliberated outside the purely theoretical classroom. Progressing from these observations, my second thesis is that bargaining is in fact the preeminent way of reaching agreements in political deliberation. To illustrate this, I demonstrate that normative differences and distributive consequences are inherent features of political issues.

Aesthetic injustice

ABSTRACT In this article, the author advances the concept of aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to someone specifically in her capacity as an aesthetic being, and explores four dimensions of this new philosophical concept. First, the author appeals to the notion of colonial mentality presented by Amílcar Cabral in order to show how aesthetic injustice is experienced differently by the oppressors and the oppressed. Then, the author engages critically with Augusto Boal’s The Aesthetics of the Oppressed and underscores the mutual influence between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice. Next, the author suggests how both types of injustice may be resisted by dint of an analysis of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and The Rainbow of Desire. The author concludes by examining how aesthetic injustice is inimical to democracy and by explaining why a democratic regime requires aesthetic justice, a normative concept according to which all citizens are equally entitled to have their way of seeing and feeling about public issues taken into account in political deliberation.

Using Values as Evidence When There’s Evidence for Your Values

I have argued that political values are beliefs informed, more or less well, by the evidence of experience and that, where relevant and well-supported by evidence, the inclusion of political values in scientific theorizing can increase the objectivity of research (e.g., Clough 2003, 2004, 2011). The position I endorse has been called the “values-as-evidence” approach (Goldenberg 2013). In this essay I respond to three kinds of resistance to this approach, using examples of feminist political values. Solomon (2012) questions whether values are beliefs that can be tested, Alcoff (2006) argues that even if our values are beliefs that can be tested, testing them might not be desirable because doing so assigns these important values a contingency that weakens their normative force, and Yap (2016) argues that the approach is too idealistic in its articulation of the role of evidence in our political deliberations. In response, I discuss the ways that values can be tested, I analyze the evidential strength of feminist values in science, and I argue that the evidence-based nature of these values is neither a weakness nor an idealization. Problems with political values affecting science properly concern the dogmatic ways that evaluative beliefs are sometimes held—a problem that arises with dogmatism toward descriptive beliefs as well. I conclude that scientists, as with the rest of us, ought to adopt a pragmatically-inclined appreciation of the fallible, inductive process by which we gather evidence in support of any of our beliefs, whether they are described as evaluative or descriptive.

La falsa democracia del espacio público Geopolítica, producción discursiva y cartografías del poder en América Latina

En los últimos veinte años, el concepto de espacio público se ha vuelto dominante tanto en los discursos gubernamentales como académicos, sobre todo en regímenes políticos progresistas y democráticos de América Latina, y eso por el arbitrio ideológico y abstracto de lo público, del orden democrático y de la opinión pública moderna, lo cual ha sido determinante como marco legitimador de prácticas geopolíticas y discursos hegemónicos que determinan un statu quo que ha permitido al sistema capitalista neoliberal seguir reproduciéndose a partir de las estructuras urbanas y el desarrollo urbanístico en contextos de dominación y dependencia. En este sentido, el presente trabajo procura (des)mistificar la conformación hegemónica occidental del concepto de espacio público (como ámbito de la filosofía2 y esfera pública de deliberación política), desde la teoría crítica urbana y la teoría política feminista y cómo el mismo ha encontrado un territorio fértil de materialización discursiva y anclaje espacial de control y dominación de los países hegemónicos hacia Latinoamérica, reproduciendo un statu quo de colonización y explotación asociada a formas progresivas de politización teórica, a través de una trasnacionalización de la política, que se hace visible en los grandes proyectos de renovación urbana. Este trabajo se apoya de reflexiones teóricas, como marco analítico que permití hacer visible que el uso del concepto de espacio público no es neutral, pero está subsumido a una lógica política de legitimidad social y empoderamiento del capital hegemónico, y que ha tenido consecuencias espaciales, como una mayor segregación y fragmentación socioespacial, bajo un discurso democrático de “para todos”, inclusivo y del bien común que ha perpetuado en la reestructuración de nuevas formas de control y dominación.

The Case for Citizen Duty

This article defends a novel type of institutionalized mass deliberation: Citizen Duty. Citizen Duty would legally require every citizen to engage in one day of diverse, moderated political deliberation prior to major elections. This deliberation would realize a variety of benefits, including wiser electoral decisions and a more respectful electoral process, while avoiding the dangers of citizen deliberation. A comparison with jury duty and with non-deliberative alternatives suggests that Citizen Duty’s substantial economic and liberty costs are justified. Finally, an examination of citizen attitudes towards politics and deliberation suggests that Citizen Duty is not as quixotic as it first appears.

The Priority of Public Reasons and Religious Forms of Life in Constitutional Democracies

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. 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.

Vulnerability and non-domination: a republican perspective on natural limits

ABSTRACT A politics that affirms natural limits – either ecological limits or limits posed by the human constitution – is subject to certain criticisms. One of these suggests that a focus on natural limits unduly constrains politics, crowding out deliberation and self-government in favour of expert management. This paper considers how the civic republican tradition approaches the concept of natural limits. The republican tradition offers two arguments for affirming natural limits, one emphasizing the value of vulnerability and the other emphasizing the ideal of liberty as non-domination. However, the two arguments are in tension with one another. An emphasis on vulnerability suggests a natural, pre-political set of constraints on politics (thus seemingly validating the very criticism levelled at a politics of limits), whereas an emphasis on non-domination suggests a more open-ended, contested politics. This tension points to deeper tensions between the communitarian and Italian-Atlantic strands of the republican tradition. In the end, the paper tries to address these tensions by showing that an egalitarian approach to vulnerability actually supports the ideal of non-domination and that a respect for natural limits is consistent with a robust, deliberative republican politics emphasizing contestation and self-government. In developing the concept of vulnerability, the paper draws upon not only republican thought, but also feminist theory.

Political Communication Apprehension: Toward Productive Political Discourse Online and Face‐to‐Face

Based on the theoretical framework of Byrne's similarity attraction paradigm and the spiral of silence theory, the current paper conceptually defines political communication apprehension as the fear or anxiety associated with real or anticipated communication about politics with another person or persons. Although communication apprehension research has encompassed numerous topics and contexts known to increase anxiety, including religion, race, and death, researchers have failed to examine the relation between political discourse and anxiety. Politics is a well‐known anxiety provoking discussion topic, and political communication apprehension is an important and timely topic that needs further investigation. Political deliberation and discussion are essential to the growth and development of a democratic society. Furthermore, the need to process beliefs, feelings, and thoughts is a natural part of human communication and relationship building. For leaders, the ability to listen and connect with empathy and respect to all people, regardless of ideological differences, is a vital component of impactful leadership. Therefore, the purpose of the review is to begin the discussion regarding political communication apprehension (PCA) and to set the stage for future studies examining the validity and reliability of a PCA measure. The current paper not only introduces PCA but also argues that PCA is a relevant construct that may hold the key to more productive political conversations for leaders and followers, online, face‐to‐face, and inside and outside the classroom.

Televising the Revolution

In the summer of 2006, during a popular uprising in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, a group of Oaxacan women occupied state television and transformed it into TV by and for the people in just twenty-one days. Engaging with the amateur and fugitive aesthetic of the women’s self-produced media, this article examines the ways in which the broadcasts helped build The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) as a model of decolonial democracy. I argue that through the recuperation of foreclosed public space, the women used the instruments of state power to develop forums for political deliberation and debate that re-articulated and reframed issues of gender, class and indigeneity in the social movement. They prefigured APPO’s proposed democratic model by visualizing the popular assembly as a dynamic work-in-progress, and in turn helped to manifest it by inviting broad public participation and support to realise APPO’s democracy ‘to come’.

Populists as Technocrats

ABSTRACT An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features of our ambient culture, then, could explain the simplistic and combative approach that populists seem to take to politics and policy, their impatience with political debate and deliberation, their willingness to set aside democratic legal forms and political norms, their nationalism, their personalization of politics, their inclination toward conspiracy theorizing, their fondness for fringe sources of information, and their suspicion of political, scientific, and media elites? Using focus group and survey data, we can understand these populist traits as reflections of the culture of “democratic technocracy”: a regime in which we, the people, are assumed capable of rendering sound judgments about how to solve our social and economic problems. Whether or not this assumption is warranted, its cultural dominance seems likely to generate the ideas that populist citizens apparently take for granted.

Responsive Government: The Diversity and Institutional Performance of Online Political Deliberation Systems

Along with innovation in ICT technology and the spread of the internet, the online network, through its “technological empowerment” of citizens and governments, has driven a series of institutional changes designed to promote government responsiveness. The global spread of online political deliberation is indeed an achievement of the internet-driven construction of responsive government. In recent years, the Chinese government has vigorously promoted online political deliberation, established virtual platforms to build bridges between netizens and public power, brought internet activism into institutional channels, and implemented political absorption and online consultation. Under the influence of policy initiatives and local innovations, China has created diversified response systems that strengthen the institutionalization of online political deliberation and thereby enable this system to play an active role in improving government capacity and regulating the relationship between the state and society. At present, China has seven types of online response: the Communist Party Committee-led mode, the mixed mode, the government-led mode and the modes led by the departments in charge of absorption, business, supervision departments, and petitioning. Empirical studies show that the diversity and degree of institutionalization of online political deliberation significantly affect institutional performance and that political authority and professionalism are important features that enable the different response systems to influence institutional performance. In short, the endogenous elements of the response system—level of institutionalization and institutional diversity—are key factors in institutional performance.

Revisiting Politics in Political CSR: How coercive and deliberative dynamics operate through institutional work in a Colombian company

This article analyses the political dynamics taking place within a Colombian supplier company during the implementation of a client’s global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, which radically transformed the local understandings of the supplier’s social responsibilities. We distinguish two forms of politics in political CSR – coercive and deliberative politics – and examine how they unfold through lower-level managers’ institutional work. Our longitudinal case study identifies four types of institutional work, which combine into three political configurations – irreconcilable politics, complementary politics and aligned deliberative politics – resulting in the hybridization of explicit and implicit CSR. By analysing how local managers from emerging countries and at the bottom of the supply chain cope with the new political role of MNCs, we expand the political microfoundations of CSR and highlight the interactive and political nature of institutional work aimed at addressing major societal challenges.

Interests, ideas, and the study of state behaviour in neoclassical realism

AbstractIdeational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas asexternalisedindividual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors.

The Transformation of Communicative Power Into Political Power

AbstractThis article examines Jürgen Habermas’ concept of communicative power and describes how it transforms into political power in actual decision-making. For this purpose, the article develops the use of Habermas’ typology of validity claims in communicative action as a framework for analysis. This means analyzing how public performances invoking these validity claims affect actors’ authority, which is then capitalized in policymaking. The article thus integrates Habermas’ procedural view on deliberative politics with the more culturally oriented view on political performances. It also contributes to the discussion about the “mediatization of politics” by introducing a communicative perspective to complement the more common institutional and systems perspectives. This theoretical and analytical approach is illustrated by examples drawn from evidence in 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with participants in the policy networks involved in the 2015 Finnish labor market negotiations.

Brevity is the Soul of Twitter: The Constraint Affordance and Political Discussion

Abstract Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a tweet in November 2017, which provided an opportunity to study the effect of technological affordances on political discussions using a discontinuous time series design. Using supervised and unsupervised natural language processing methods, we analyzed 358,242 tweet replies to U.S. politicians from January 2017 to March 2018. We show that doubling the permissible length of a tweet led to less uncivil, more polite, and more constructive discussions online. However, the declining trend in the empathy and respectfulness of these tweets raises concerns about the implications of the changing norms for the quality of political deliberation.