Over the past two decades we have heard an historically unprecedented volume of talk about and praise of democracy, and many governmental, non-governmental, and international organizations have been ...engaged in democracy promotion. Democracy is a subject that crosses the boundaries in political science, and within my own field of political theory there has been a major revival of democratic theory. In political theory, argument about “democracy” is usually now qualified by one of an array of adjectives, which include cosmopolitan, agonistic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 John Dryzek could write that “deliberative democracy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory).” Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democracy, but its influence has spread far outside universities.
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News use via social media has been linked to pro-democratic political behaviors. However, most people use social media for non-political purposes, like connecting with friends and browsing news ...feeds. Recent research indicates these behaviors may also have democratic benefits, by means of political expression in social media. Drawing on panel data from a nationally representative sample, this study extends this line of research by exploring how social interaction and news-seeking behaviors on social media lead to diverse networks, exposure to dissenting political opinion, and ultimately reconsidering and changing one’s political views. Social media are a unique communication platform, and their attributes might influence exposure to political information. The tendency for users to build and maintain friend networks creates a potential deliberative space for political persuasion to take place. Consistent with prior literature, news use leads to political persuasion. More interestingly, apolitical, but social interactive uses of social media also lead to political persuasion. These relationships are partially mediated through network and discussion attributes.
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The local school board is one of America’s enduring venues of lay democracy at work. In Democracy, Deliberation, and Education , Robert Asen takes the pulse of this democratic exemplar through an ...in-depth study of three local school boards in Wisconsin. In so doing, Asen identifies the broader democratic ideal in the most parochial of American settings.
Conducted over two years across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Asen’s research reveals as much about the possibilities and pitfalls of local democracy as it does about educational policy. From issues as old as racial integration and as contemporary as the recognition of the Gay-Straight Alliance in high schools, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education illustrates how ordinary folks build and sustain their vision for a community and its future through consequential public decision making.
For all the research on school boards conducted in recent years, no other project so directly addresses school boards as deliberative policymaking bodies. Democracy, Deliberation, and Education draws from 250 school-board meetings and 31 interviews with board members and administrators to offer insight into participants’ varied understandings of their roles in the complex mechanism of governance.
India is undergoing a “deliberation backsliding”. Since the current government was elected to office in 2019, only 13% of all government bills introduced in Parliament were referred to Parliament ...Committees for detailed study, scrutiny and stakeholder consultations. While the deliberation deficit is concerning with respect to ordinary government bills, it becomes alarming with respect to bills which seek to amend the Indian Constitution. In this blog post, I argue that the promise of deliberative democracy in India is coming undone, which sets back the project of constitutionalism in India.
Abstract
Research on deliberative procedures uses normative concepts not only to justify the democratic legitimacy of these procedures but also as analytical tools to understand their empirical ...effects. This leads to a normativist bias in deliberation research. I argue that deliberative procedures should instead be regarded as a type of opinion-shaping social technology. I introduce a theoretical scheme that helps researchers analyze the interplay between formal and informal aspects of deliberative procedures. The usefulness of the scheme is shown in a case study of the
EuroPolis Deliberative Poll
.
The issue of climate change confirms the global reach of earth system governance, whose legitimacy and effectiveness could gain from democratisation. While electoral democracy as practised in states ...provides no model for global democracy, lessons drawn from the performance and history of states prove helpful in identifying the elements that a well functioning ecological democracy ought to strive for. We capture these elements through reference to the idea of a deliberative system, and show how the idea of such a system can be used to analyse, evaluate, and provide prescriptions for the global governance of climate change.
► Democracy is essential for legitimate and effective earth system governance. ► Conventional liberal democracy is inappropriate at the global level. ► Elements of global democracy are found in the notion of a deliberative system. ► A rudimentary deliberative system exists in global climate governance. ► Democratising global climate governance requires overcoming weaknesses in the deliberative system.
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It is frequently claimed that online disinformation threatens democracy, and that disinformation is more prevalent or harmful because social media platforms have disrupted our communication systems. ...These intuitions have not been fully developed in democratic theory. This article builds on systemic approaches to deliberative democracy to characterize key vulnerabilities of social media platforms that disinformation actors exploit, and to clarify potential anti-deliberative effects of disinformation. The disinformation campaigns mounted by Russian agents around the United States’ 2016 election illustrate the use of anti-deliberative tactics, including corrosive falsehoods, moral denigration, and unjustified inclusion. We further propose that these tactics might contribute to the system-level anti-deliberative properties of epistemic cynicism, techno-affective polarization, and pervasive inauthenticity. These harms undermine a polity’s capacity to engage in communication characterized by the use of facts and logic, moral respect, and democratic inclusion. Clarifying which democratic goods are at risk from disinformation, and how they are put at risk, can help identify policies that go beyond targeting the architects of disinformation campaigns to address structural vulnerabilities in deliberative systems.
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Son numerosos los trabajos interesantes sobre la democracia y sus crisis que se han producido en los años recientes. Forman parte de una discusión que en los términos de Sartori está abierta, y ...quizás es porque el concepto democraciasufre de manera más común el estiramiento conceptual. Este escrito busca presentar un análisis de la democracia deliberativa y los atajos de la democracia, teniendo en cuenta los planteamientos de la profesora Lafont, enmarcando esta discusión en el contexto de la cuarta revolución industrial, con el fin de analizar cuáles son los atajos que la tecnología le propone a la democracia contemporánea, y finalmente exponer una reflexión a manera de lección aprendida.
We investigated whether there is a causal relationship between the presence of customizability technology (i.e., technology that allows individuals/websites to tailor the information environment ...according to user's preferences) and political selective exposure. We found that various forms of customizability technology (especially, system-driven customizability) increase selective exposure in the context of online political news consumption. Moreover, customizability technology has a stronger effect on minimizing exposure to counter-attitudinal information than it has on increasing exposure to pro-attitudinal information. The effect of customizability on selective exposure was particularly strong for ideologically moderate individuals. This study extends the understanding of the selective exposure process in today's communication environment and clarifies the implications of the Internet for deliberative democracy theory.
•Various forms of customizability increase political news selective exposure.•System-driven customizability produced the strongest effect.•The effect was particularly strong for reducing exposure to counter-attitudinal information.•The effect was particularly strong for ideologically moderate individuals.
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