Public deliberation, highly valued by many African societies,
becomes the cornerstone of a new system of African political
philosophy in this brilliant, highly original study. In
Deliberative Agency ..., philosopher Uchenna Okeja offers a
way to construct a new political center by building it around the
ubiquitous African practice of public deliberation, a widely
accepted means to resolve legal matters, reconcile feuding groups,
and reestablish harmony.
In cities, hometown associations and voluntary organizations
carry out the task of fostering deliberation among African groups
for different reasons. In some instances, the deliberation aims to
settle disputes. In others, the aim is to decide the best action to
take to address unfortunate incidents such as death.
Through a measured, comparative analysis, Deliberative
Agency argues that the best way to reimagine and harness the
idea of public deliberation, based on current experiences in
Africa, is to see it as performance of agency. Building a new
political center around the practice places agency at the core of a
new political life in Africa.
This paper is positioned at the intersection of two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. It analyzes results from a national field experiment in which more than 500 ...registered voters were brought together from around the country to deliberate in depth over a long weekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre–post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, depolarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in affective polarization. The paper develops the rationale for hypotheses explaining these decreases and contrasts them with a literature that would have expected the opposite. The paper briefly concludes with a discussion of how elements of this “antidote” can be scaled.
Abstract
This article takes issue with public sphere theories’ lack of focus on the consequences of social inequality. Citizens divide the work of following politics between them, and we need a ...cohesive conceptualization of such divisions, through and beyond today’s intrusive media and with attention to social inequalities. Instead of ideals of fully informed individual citizens, I propose we take the empirical fact of distribution of citizens’ public connection as a starting point and anchor our theoretical ideals in the social world with an “ethnographic sensibility.” Doing so facilitates an operationalized concept of distribution of citizens’ public connection into four elements: issues, arenas, and communicative modes, which citizens variously rely on over time. With such an operationalization, we can assess when and for whom the distribution of public connection goes too far and disfavors certain citizens. This helps bring public sphere theory beyond the conundrum of our societies’ paradoxically uninformed citizens.
Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, ...we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research.
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Public administration is the largest part of the democratic state and a key consideration in understanding its legitimacy. Despite this, democratic theory is notoriously quiet about public ...administration. One exception is deliberative systems theories, which have recognized the importance of public administration and attempted to incorporate it within their orbit. This article examines how deliberative systems approaches have represented (a) the actors and institutions of public administration, (b) its mode of coordination, (c) its key legitimacy functions, (d) its legitimacy relationships, and (e) the possibilities for deliberative intervention. It argues that constructing public administration through the pre-existing conceptual categories of deliberative democracy, largely developed to explain the legitimacy of law-making, has led to some significant omissions and misunderstandings. The article redresses these issues by providing an expanded conceptualization of public administration, connected to the core concerns of deliberative and other democratic theories with democratic legitimacy and democratic reform.
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How should we deliberate with citizens who entertain post-truth beliefs in democratic societies? This is a central question for those interested in wielding the epistemic potential of democratic ...deliberation against post-truth. Yet, the strength of proposed deliberative solutions depends on the accuracy with which post-truth is diagnosed. Taking seriously the connection between epistemic diagnosis and deliberative remedy, this paper looks at the motivations provided by non-vaccinating parents for their beliefs and argues for an understanding of post-truth as misplaced distrust in testimony, as against a standard view of post-truth as indifference to fact. Second, the paper argues this new diagnosis of post-truth renders ineffective deliberative strategies aiming to harness the power of impersonal reason and accuracy, of the kind recently defended by Simone Chambers. Instead, combating post-truth as the paper defines it is effectively accomplished through employing bridging rhetoric.
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38.
Practitioner’s Note McKay, Spencer; MacLeod, Peter
Democratic theory (Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)),
12/2018, Volume:
5, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Deliberative forums, such as citizens’ assemblies or reference
panels, are one institutionalization of deliberative democracy that has become
increasingly commonplace in recent years. MASS LBP is a ...pioneer in
designing and facilitating such long-form deliberative processes in Canada.
This article provides an overview of the company’s civic lottery and reference
panel process, notes several distinctive features of MASS LBP that are
relevant to addressing challenges to democratic deliberation, and outlines
possible areas for future research in deliberative democracy applied in both
private and public settings.
Empirical research on deliberative democracy suggests many innovative institutional proposals for bringing current societies closer to that ideal. Although these proposals may share a common aim, ...they are often motivated by widely divergent views regarding the relative importance of different democratic values. Key differences can be illustrated by looking at approaches that focus on micro, macro, and local deliberation respectively. The first approach focuses on deliberation concerning general political issues among small groups of randomly selected citizens - mini-publics such as citizen juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, and so on. These institutional proposals are mostly concerned with increasing the quality of face-to-face deliberation and far less with increasing mass participation in political deliberation or citizen engagement in local politics. In contrast, proposals that focus on macro deliberative processes in the broad public sphere are more concerned with the inclusion of citizens in deliberation about general political issues, and much less with increasing the quality of face-to-face deliberation or the engagement of citizens in solving local problems. This latter concern is central for proposals that focus on deliberation among directly affected citizens regarding local issues such as the allocation of a city's budget or the operation of a school, but these proposals in turn are less concerned with macro deliberative processes of opinion and will-formation in the broader public sphere. In light of the different strengths and weaknesses inherent in each of these proposals, some deliberative democrats call for an integrative approach, that is, an approach that would combine the virtues of these different perspectives and, in so doing, avoid the weaknesses ensuing from adopting one of them while excluding the others. Conceiving deliberative democracy as a deliberative system with many different elements, levels, and sites may offer a feasible way to integrate different approaches without having to choose among them. Adapted from the source document.
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40.
Public Planner - A Deliberative Authority Mäntysalo, Raine; Westin, Martin; Mattila, Hanna
Planning theory & practice,
01/2023, Volume:
24, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Beyond merely mediating between particular interests, deliberative planners are in need of a firmer agency in shaping attention to common good concerns. However, locating such agency legitimately in ...the context of deliberative ideals is difficult, and not well supported by theory. A key problem is the weak conceptualization of legitimate forms of power-over, regarding the deliberative planners' agency. To address this theoretical challenge, the article employs Haugaard's rethinking of power-over, Salet's dialectics of public norms and performative aspirations, the "systems" turn of deliberative democracy theory, and Warren's related work on authority.
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