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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Many deliberative democrats herald the potential of minipublics to help improve the quality of democratic decision-making. Yet these democratic innovations present a paradox: how can the use of ...minipublics be perceived as legitimate by the maxi-public when most citizens cannot participate? In this article, we address this question in the context of Lafont’s argument that minipublics amount to ‘shortcuts’ in the democratic process. We challenge this argument by hypothesising that non-participants perceive minipublics to be legitimate when they perceive minipublic participants to be like them – and when they perceive politicians to be unlike them. Similarly, we expect that the relative importance of descriptive similarity will be related to the issue in question. We test our hypotheses in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland, where a minipublic was held on the salient and contentious question of the polity’s constitutional future. Survey evidence confirms that ‘like me’ perceptions constitute a significant predictor of minipublic legitimacy perceptions. Our results have implications for the communication of minipublic features to the broader public, for the use of minipublics alongside conventional decision-making processes, and for further empirical research.
This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical ...studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualizations and operationalize a measure of deliberation, and then apply the measure to the case of the debate fostered by the Constitutional Council online public platform dedicated to drafting the Icelandic constitution - the first “crowdsourced” constitutional project in the world. This is the first effort to both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the nature of deliberation in the case of Iceland. Generally, this exploration is meant to identify and analyze markers of deliberation in a setting that aspires to foster such exchanges. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future political theory and related empirical investigation.
Hélène Landemore and Ana Tanasoca have recently proposed two different approaches to deepening the deliberative dimension of democracy. In Open Democracy (2020), Landemore introduces a novel paradigm ...of democracy—open democracy—which grants ordinary citizens access to an actual exercise of political power through innovative forms of democratic representation. In Deliberation Naturalized (2020), Tanasoca develops a naturalized normative theory of deliberative democracy which stresses the role of citizen deliberation in what she refers to as ‘naturalistic’ settings, i.e., the public sphere. Both texts invite us to stretch our imaginations of how contemporary democracy can be deepened in deliberative ways.
The De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assembly showcases the state of the art of Citizens’asembly and opens new perspectives informed by multidisciplinary research and new thinking about deliberative ...participatory processes.
Assumptions based on deliberative democratic theory have dominated scholarship of democratic citizenship within political science and educational research. However, both fields have produced ...scholarship that raises questions regarding the efficacy of the deliberative model of democratic education. This article presents a critical synthesis that highlights the major trends of deliberative democratic theory from the field of political science, while making connections to education specific literature. The shift, away from idealistic notions toward a model of deliberative democracy that considers identity, group interests, and power differences within society, supports similar efforts to revisit democratic theory within civic education. The article concludes with recommendations for a revised, more realistic, conceptualization of civic education.
•Reviews developments of deliberative democratic theory from a political science perspective.•Makes comparisons to contemporary approaches to civic education.•Offers suggestion to revisit civic education in practice based on recent scholarly contributions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
This paper questions the notion that states may be justified in denying certain prisoners the right to vote as a means of distancing themselves from particularly grave wrongs. Christopher Bennett has ...recently defended prisoner disenfranchisement as a fair and deserved retributive punishment for crimes, and Mary Sigler and Andrew Altman have argued in favor of prisoner disenfranchisement as a civil restriction. All three proponents agree that disenfranchisement should be reserved for those guilty of the most serious offenses. I assert that it is inappropriate to treat citizens in this manner and will advocate for the right to vote, whether disenfranchisement is perceived as a form of punishment or as a civil measure. I will present two arguments against disenfranchisement as it impacts both citizens and political community at large. First, it excludes citizens from the democratic arena and restricts the opportunity to reintegrate offenders into the political community. While a criminal sentence is intended to be burdensome, the burden associated with disenfranchisement extends beyond the appropriate penal scope.
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This article refers to an investigative study of a design in a creative project at Estetiska programmet Dans at an upper secondary school. The didactic choices, tools and methods used in the project ...was analysed from a designforlearningperspective. The study was exploring how a design in an artistic collaborative process can provide knowledge development in an artistic process. The data was analysed by using the vocabulary of Staffans Selander (2017), such as
The result shows that Value Clarification/Rundan as a method in combination with deliberative conversation can provide and develop knowledge in creating dance as well as a practice in deliberative democracy.
An experiment (N = 272) demonstrated that disagreement-either civil or uncivil-may have a chilling effect on the public discourse vital to a deliberative democracy. Both forms of disagreement-in ...comments posted on a news story about abortion-caused negative emotion and aggressive intentions. However, only uncivil disagreement led people to respond back uncivilly and indirectly led to greater intention to participate politically, if it aroused aggressive feelings. Findings support extending face and politeness theories to the computer-mediated space of online commenting. Results are discussed in relation to the impact on the public discourse.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, PRFLJ, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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