Deliberative Democratic Theory Research Articles

The Rise, Fall and Re-Rise Of Deliberative Democracy In New Zealand

In New Zealand the last few years have seen a re-emergence of interest in processes that build on the theory of deliberative democracy. Commentary on this trend, which typically positions deliberative democracy as a novel development in New Zealand politics, ignores several decades of public agencies’ democratic experimentation. In this article we describe three of the 15 identified processes displaying the critical elements of deliberative democracy: the Capital Power citizens’ jury (1996); Toi te Taiao: the Bioethics Council’s public deliberation on pre-birth testing (2007–08), and the citizens’ advisory panel on the Newtown–Berhampore cycleway (2014). We analyse the reasons for their ostensible failure and identify lessons that current policymakers interested in deliberative democracy should draw from these historical cases.

Can we do inclusive politics in urgent times?

In times of crisis it is even more important to ensure that political decisions have broad, popular and trusted support from a wide range of people than in normal, non-crisis times. We argue that the best way to achieve this is through the use of deliberative mini-publics, as leaving a crisis response only to our political leaders presents them with almost irresistible opportunities for the arrogation of power, possible corruption, and the use (or abuse) of emergency measures for partisan political point scoring. Having demonstrated the theoretical basis for our argument, which builds on the foundation of deliberative democratic theory, we then address the practical aspects of using informed deliberation within a mini-public during a crisis, when efficacy and speed are the most urgent and challenging aspects of decision making. The obvious solution, to us, is to institutionalize deliberative mini-publics in our democratic structures so that they are ready and able to rapidly address any crisis as it arises.

Embedding deliberation: guiding the use of deliberative mini-publics in climate policy-making

ABSTRACT The use of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs), such as citizens’ assemblies, is becoming more common in climate policy-making across many countries. The upsurge of these methods reflects an acknowledgement of the need to engage the publics in policy choices that significantly impact their lives. Many DMPs to date have focused on the general challenge of decarbonization, across a range of policy areas. In this article, we first situate DMPs within the wider field of public engagement methods. We then draw from deliberative democratic theory and practice to argue that the next step for climate DMPs is to focus them on specific climate policy challenges and to embed and routinize their use in existing policy-making institutions. We present a case study of the targeted use of a climate DMP, which we designed and ran in partnership with the UK Climate Change Committee, focused on home energy decarbonization. We use this case study to explore barriers and challenges to embedding such an approach in climate policy-making institutions. Finally, we suggest ways that such challenges can be overcome and identify a number of tensions that must be navigated as DMPs become embedded in climate policy-making.

When democratic deliberation encounters Confucian moral governance: Rethinking consultative politics in rural China

The last decades have witnessed the flourishing of consultative democracy (xieshang minzhu, a concept similar to deliberative democracy) in China, with ambitions for implementing consultative politics and governance. In the West, mainstream deliberative democracy studies largely overlook the fact that deliberation is an elusive and polysemic notion, which develops into various practices in different social and cultural contexts. Therefore, a non-Western-centred approach needs to be adopted to further investigate deliberative experimentation in rural China. Based on the four months of fieldwork conducted in several villages in rural China, this paper argues that China’s rural villages have inherited a strong Confucianism-based idea of deliberation and consultation. With case studies from the sociological–political perspective, this paper also aims to shed some new light on the compatibilities between modern democratic governance approaches and the informal, hierarchical and highly moralised forms of public order in the rural Chinese acquaintance society. Incorporating these empirical observations could bridge the gap between Western and Chinese perspectives on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

Procedural fairness andthe resilience ofhealth financing reforms inUkraine.

In 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed legislation establishing a single health benefit package for the entire population called the Programme of Medical Guarantees,‎ financed through general taxes and administered by a single national purchasing agency. This legislation was in line with key principles for financing universal health coverage. However, health professionals and some policymakers have been critical of elements of the reform, including its reliance on general taxes as the source of funding. Using qualitative methods and drawing on deliberative democratic theory and criteria for procedural fairness, this study argues that the acceptance and sustainability of these reforms could have been strengthened by making the decision-making process fairer. It suggests that three factors limited the extent of stakeholders' participation in this process: first, a perception among reformers that fast-paced decision-making was required because there was only a short political window for much needed reforms; second, a lack of trust among reformers in the motives, representativeness, and knowledge of some stakeholders; and third, an under-appreciation of the importance of dialogic engagement with the public. These findings highlight a profound challenge for policymakers. In retrospect, some of those involved in the reform's design and implementation believe that a more meaningful engagement with the public and stakeholders who opposed the reform might have strengthened its legitimacy and durability. At the same time, the study shows how difficult it is to have an inclusive process in settings where some actors may be driven by unconstrained self-interest or lack the capacity to be representative or knowledgeable interlocutors. It suggests that investments in deliberative capital (the attitudes and behaviours that facilitate good deliberation) and in civil society capacity may help overcome this difficulty.

Institutional Gaps in Agonistic and Communicative Planning Theories. Critical Implications of the ‘Systemic Turn’ in Deliberative Democracy Theory

The paper critically reviews communicative and agonistic planning theories from the viewpoint of a systemic turn in deliberative democracy theory. While the approach reveals complementarities between the theories, it also argues that each theory is vulnerable to criticism because of an ‘institutional gap’. The theories are found to complement each other in addressing planning conflicts at different dimensions. Communicative planning theory deals with conflicts between different stakeholders’ interests in planning processes. Agonistic planning theory, in turn, concentrates on conflicts from a more ontological dimension, related to the (implicit) conflict between hegemonic and marginalized discourses and related identity-forming processes of inclusion and exclusion in planning policies and governance. The institutional gap of communicative planning theory is argued to reside in its focus on situational deliberation that largely ignores the institutional dimension of rules and norms of democratic conduct. Agonistic pluralism, in turn, does engage with the dimension of democratic institutions, but in an overly critical manner, making it difficult for agonistic planning theory to address the dynamic interplay between institutional reconfiguration and policy stabilization in planning. This is argued to be the institutional gap of agonistic planning theory. The paper calls for further work in the field of planning theory to incorporate a systemic approach to deliberative democracy and thereby tap into the dialectics of institutional and situational dimensions of planning.

Deliberators’ Awareness of Attitude Transformation

The significance of deliberators’ awareness of attitude transformation can be derived directly from deliberative democracy theory, but the issue has received little attention in research. This paper is an attempt to synthesize literature on factors influencing this awareness into a heuristic that can guide further inquiry. Conceptualizing learning as a fundamental mechanism through which attitudes are influenced during deliberation, either consciously or subconsciously, this heuristic stipulates that the level of awareness of any transformation is enhanced by overt persuasion in accordance with communicative rationality, and lowered, first, by various subconscious biases prompted in dialogue settings, and, second, by certain forms of calculated manipulation of deliberators. For illustrative purposes, the paper also presents a few more tangible, if tentative, observations from two small Swedish citizen dialogues that exemplify how design of deliberation may interact with factors influencing awareness of attitude transformation in real-life settings. More specifically, the observations suggest that ‘hot’ dialogues addressing well-defined and conflictual policy choices may favor awareness, while ‘colder’ consensus-oriented dialogues on broader issues might make participants less aware.

Multi-stakeholder Initiatives and Legitimacy: A Deliberative Systems Perspective

The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as institutions for social and environmental governance in the global economy has received much scholarly attention over the past years. To date, however, research has yet to focus on assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in their interactions with other actors within larger systems of deliberation. Drawing on the deliberative systems perspective developed within deliberative democracy theory, we theorise a normative framework to evaluate the roles of MSIs within the broader systems of governance they co-construct through their interactions with other initiatives, governments, non-governmental organisations, and other external actors. As we demonstrate in our evaluation of the illustrative case of the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety as a MSI in the context of the Bangladeshi garment industry, this framework can help researchers assess whether a MSI ultimately serves to enhance or undermine the deliberative legitimacy of the overall system of which it forms a part.

Democratic Liberal Theory Based on Literature Review

Since the emergence of the application of the idea of democracy as the system of choice, various groups have complained about the evil practices of democratic politics. One of the shooting targets is that we choose the wrong one, namely adopting the model of the majority or liberal democracy. In the literature on democratic theory, one of the relevant theories for improving democratic practice is TDD (Theory of Deliberative Democracy). Although still using the principle of representation, TDD in general makes corrections or improvements to the procedures and substance of democracy which have so far been poorly practiced in Indonesia. This research is qualitative research using a descriptive-analytic method to provide a clear picture of the object of the problem. The conclusion of this study shows evidence of the existence of a democratic model both in substance and procedure. In contrast to the representative mechanism which was originally derived from the theory of representative democracy. There is visible hypocrisy and inconsistency in the implementation of democracy, which has never been considered a complete system.

Post-Truth Politics and the Competition of Ideas

ABSTRACT “Post-truth” politics is often framed as a failure of the competition of idea­s. Yet there are different ways of thinking about the competition of ideas, with different implications for the way we understand its benefits and risks. The dominant way of framing the competition of ideas is in terms of a marketplace, which, however, obscures the different ways ideas can compete. Several theorists can help us think through the competition of ideas. J. S. Mill, for example, avoided the metaphor of the market by focusing, instead, on competition as the testing of arguments in adversarial encounters before a critical audience. Georg Simmel, alternatively, conceived of competition as a form of indirect conflict, where two individuals strive in parallel to gain audience approval. This view emphasizes innovation and creativity in the competition of “all for all.” More recently, theorists have developed the market logic of competition by thinking of a marketplace not for ideas but for rationalizations. This articulates some of the features of Simmel’s view of competition, but underestimates the degrees of constraint required to secure the goods of competition. Ultimately, recognizing these different modes of competition in the public sphere can enrich our theories of deliberative democracy and sharpen our view of the problem of “post-truth” politics.

Blake Emerson, Review of Elizabeth Fisher & Sidney A. Shapiro Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law

Elizabeth Fisher and Sidney Shapiro’s important book is both innovative and traditional, and innovative insofar as it creatively reinterprets tradition. The argument is traditional because it centers administrative “expertise” as the cornerstone of bureaucratic legitimacy. At least since the Progressive Era, and arguably well back into the nineteenth century, Congress and the courts justified the delegation of policymaking power to administrative bodies in large part on the grounds of the practical, workaday experience, as well as technical skill, of public officers. The theory was most memorably articulated by James Landis’s The Administrative Process (1938), which defended independent regulatory agencies’ professional “expertness,” relatively confined subject-matter jurisdiction, and accountability to public opinion. In the wake of the New Deal, the expertise model underpinned the law’s understanding of administrative power, providing an all-purpose reason for courts to defer to agencies’ determinations of law, policy, and fact. That theory has come in for rounds of criticism over the years. It has seemed to many scholars as well as judges to ignore the important value choices that agencies must make above and beyond instrumental calculations about how to achieve well-defined goals. Theories of regulatory capture, interest-group pluralism, presidentialism, and deliberative democracy have offered alternative understandings of administrative legitimacy. On all of these theories something other than expertise is necessary to justify the significant power that unelected officials wield within a democratic-constitutional system. It seems that no one trusts an expert anymore. But nor have any of the competing theories successfully supplanted expertise as a broadly accepted, “neutral” basis on which to exercise administrative power. The problems of trust and legitimacy have reached almost epic proportions as the Supreme Court takes up constitutional challenges to administrative power and develops new doctrines to narrow agencies’ authority. At the same time, the American public fractures politically over whether to “follow the science” or rather “deconstruct the administrative state.” Now is the time, if ever, to rethink what US administrative law is about and how it ought to develop in the future.

Seeing the Whole Picture. Towards a Multi-perspective Approach to News Content Diversity based on Liberal and Deliberative Models of Democracy

ABSTRACT By providing diverse news content, news media are key for a well-functioning public sphere. However, agreement on how to measure news content diversity is lacking. Research often refers to democratic theory as normative reference point, but different models of democracy understand news content diversity differently. Our study makes a unique, innovative contribution to this field: (1) We develop a methodological framework for measuring news content diversity, that is a set of comprehensive measuring instruments that derive different operationalizations of topic and actor diversity each from liberal and deliberative democratic theories. (2) Considering that a good public discourse requires more than diversity, we analyze news content diversity in the context of four other journalistic standards: neutrality, rationality, discursivity, and civility. (3) We prove the applicability of our measuring instruments by means of a standardized content analysis of six German news media as a case study. The different quality profiles of these outlets our analysis reveals are explained by their different functions in the media system. Our study shows how important a multi-perspectival normative approach to news content diversity is, both empirically and theoretically. Future studies on news content diversity should make their normative foundations transparent and derive their indicators purposefully therefrom.

Being a master of metaphors

Being a master of metaphors

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Epistemic Norms for Public Political Arguments

The aim of the article is to develop precise epistemic rules for good public political arguments, by which political measures in the broad sense are justified. By means of a theory of deliberative democracy, it is substantiated that the justification of a political measure consists in showing argumentatively that this measure most promotes the common good or is morally optimal. It is then discussed which argumentation-theoretical approaches are suitable for providing epistemically sound rules for arguments for such theses and for the associated premises, rules whose compliance implies the truth or acceptability of the thesis. Finally, on the basis of the most suitable approach, namely the epistemological one, such systems of rules for the required types of arguments are presented that fulfil the conditions mentioned.

Mobile Democracy: Changing Conditions for Young Danes’ Democratic Information and Participation

The article focuses on mobile democracy in connection to the conditional foundations for young Danes’ democratic agency in a digital society. It investigates questions of democratic transformation through a conceptual and empirical triangulation of mobile democracy as a framework for analyzing these conditions. Conceptually, the article draws on research on youth and mobile technologies and on theories of mobility, deliberative democracy, and democratic conversation. Empirically, the article draws on 16 in-depth interviews with 16–24-year-old Danes conducted in 2021. This dataset is supported by findings from a representative survey (2017) and publicly available statistics and surveys. The article analyses three intersecting conditions that frame the concept of mobile democracy through an analysis of young citizens’ democratic participation: 1. Mobile technologies—democratic mobility occurs across the availability of technological mobile platforms and online services. The ‘always on’ status is defining for young citizens’ democratic agency. 2. Mobile information and social media—fragmented publics are increasingly missing societal reference points and ideological coherence, and young people are challenged in their attempt to establish coherent meaningfulness from the fluctuating information stream. 3. Mobile engagement and participation—information mobility affects perceptions of what information, citizenship and democracy are, and how this translates into actualizations of democratic participation.

Can Deliberative Participatory Fora Cure Representation Gaps in France and Germany?

The French and the German national parliaments are dominated by highly educated, older, and mostly male politicians. There are growing calls for a more balanced political representation of different social groups. This paper seeks to inform this debate by conceptualizing and measuring representation gaps for women, people of immigrant origin, the working class, and younger age groups in France and Germany and by assessing the potential of deliberative participatory fora to ameliorate underrepresentation. Based on theories of deliberative and participatory democracy, it suggests three criteria these fora must fulfill to potentially balance underrepresentation (descriptive representation in composition, deliberative quality, and coupling to politics) and explores them empirically in four recent cases of deliberative participatory fora: the Grand Débat National and the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat in France and the Bürgerrat Deutschlands Rolle in der Welt and the Bürgerrat Klima in Germany. We show that significant representation gaps exist for all groups studied. They have been narrowing for women and people of immigrant origin and remain most pronounced for class. Regarding institutional features, our cases fare relatively well in terms of balanced composition and deliberative quality, but the potential to balance representation gaps is seriously limited by a lack of coupling to the political system.

Effect of Citizen Participation on the Sustainability of Rural Development Projects: A Case of Nakuru County, Kenya

Citizen participation has been considered crucial in the efforts to attain project sustainability in government development projects. Practicing poor development practices and failure to prioritize and listen to inputs from beneficiaries could lead to a mismatch of needs and undesirable project outcomes. It is on this basis that the research aimed to explore the effect of citizen participation on the sustainability of rural development projects in Nakuru County Kenya. The objectives of the research were to examine the effects of interactive websites on the sustainability of rural development projects in Nakuru County and to examine the effects of focus groups on the sustainability of rural development projects in Nakuru County. The research was guided by Deliberative Democracy Theory and Social Action Theory. The research utilized descriptive research design and random sampling procedures to acquire 364 respondents from the possible target population of 4,089 people. The research further employed closed and open-ended questionnaires, interview schedules and focus group discussions to collect primary data. Secondary data was obtained from various publications. The study analyzed quantitative data from closed ended questions by editing, sorting and coding them into SPSS 25 for descriptive and inferential statistics. Qualitative data was categorized into narratives, discourses and conversations alongside research variables. Quantitative data was presented using means, standard deviations, charts, tables and graphs. Qualitative data was presented using various themes in accordance with the study variables. To ensure ethical guidelines were followed, the project cultivated confidence among the participants by promising them anonymity and confidentiality of their answers. With a beta value of 0.267 and a critical value of 0.000, the research found that interactive websites significantly and positively affect the long-term viability of rural development initiatives in Nakuru County. Focus groups were shown to have a favorable, statistically significant impact on project sustainability (beta = 0.186, p = 0.020).

Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Challenges and Prospects of Deliberative Democracy for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility

This introduction argues that the use of the concept of deliberative democracy in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research needs to be theoretically extended. We review three developments that have recently occurred in deliberative democracy theory within political science and philosophy: 1) the conceptualization of deliberative systems (macro level), 2) the considerations of mini-publics (micro level), and 3) the role of online deliberation. We discuss the challenges and prospects that incorporating these three developments into future CSR-related research creates. We thereby also introduce the articles in this special issue and show how they connect to each of the three developments. On the basis of this discussion, we outline the contours for a more general program of distributed deliberative CSR that enables CSR scholars to incorporate an updated understanding of deliberative democracy theory into their future work.

Habermas Theory of Deliberative Democracy as a Contribution to the Legitimacy of Judge Performance in Climate Change Cases - Urgenda v. The Netherlands

Habermas Theory of Deliberative Democracy as a Contribution to the Legitimacy of Judge Performance in Climate Change Cases - Urgenda v. The Netherlands