From the local level to international politics, deliberation helps to increase mutual understanding and trust, in order to arrive at political decisions of high epistemic value and legitimacy. This ...book gives deliberation a dynamic dimension, analysing how levels of deliberation rise and fall in group discussions, and introducing the concept of 'deliberative transformative moments' and how they can be applied to deeply divided societies, where deliberation is most needed but also most difficult to work. Discussions between ex-guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries in Colombia, Serbs and Bosnjaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and police officers and locals in Brazilian favelas are used as case studies, with participants addressing how peace can be attained in their countries. Allowing access to the records and transcripts of the discussions opens an opportunity for practitioners of conflict resolution to apply this research to their work in trouble spots of the world, creating a link between the theory and practice of deliberation.
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that ...scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from previous studies. The book hopes to inspire scholars to undertake methodologically robust, intellectually creative, and politically relevant research. It fills a significant gap in a rapidly growing field of research by assembling diverse methods and thereby expanding the range of methodological choices available to students, scholars, and practitioners of deliberative democracy.
Changes to the landscape of higher education in the United States over the past decades have urged scholars grappling with issues of privilege, inequality, and social immobility to think differently ...about how we learn and deliberate. Thinking Together is a multidisciplinary conversation about how people approached similar questions of learning and difference in the nineteenth century.
In the open air, in homes, in public halls, and even in prisons, people pondered recurring issues: justice, equality, careers, entertainment, war and peace, life and death, heaven and hell, the role of education, and the nature of humanity itself. Paying special attention to the dynamics of race and gender in intellectual settings, the contributors to this volume consider how myriad groups and individuals—many of whom lived on the margins of society and had limited access to formal education—developed and deployed knowledge useful for public participation and public advocacy around these concerns. Essays examine examples such as the women and men who engaged lecture culture during the Civil War; Irish immigrants who gathered to assess their relationship to the politics and society of the New World; African American women and men who used music and theater to challenge the white gaze; and settler-colonists in Liberia who created forums for envisioning a new existence in Africa and their relationship to a U.S. homeland. Taken together, this interdisciplinary exploration shows how learning functioned not only as an instrument for public action but also as a way to forge meaningful ties with others and to affirm the value of an intellectual life.
By highlighting people, places, and purposes that diversified public discourse, Thinking Together offers scholars across the humanities new insights and perspectives on how difference enhances the human project of thinking together.
The assumption that journalists who have professional values perform in ways that better serve their communities is embedded in the scientific literature on journalism. This notion is also ...incorporated into journalism education. Professionalism creates a distance between those believed to hold expert knowledge and those who do not. This essay argues that this gap is likely to make it harder for journalists to understand and serve their communities and provides evidence from participant observation that supports that argument.
Illuminating a critical gap between deliberative democratic theory and its applications, this timely and important study shows what needs to be done to ensure deliberative processes offer more than ...the illusion of democracy.
Mini-publics are institutions that invite a small group of citizens to deliberate on a specific political issue. Deliberation scholars find them attractive because they use random sampling techniques ...to generate representativeness. However, analysts have different interpretations of what exactly mini-publics should represent, and why. In this paper I distinguish between three conceptualizations of descriptive representation in the mini-publics literature. I argue that these conceptualizations do not fully support the interpretative and exploratory aspects of forming considered opinions in the course of deliberations. Instead, they tend to primarily address concerns about the democratic legitimacy of a political institution involving unelected participants. However, I show that mini-publics can be considered legitimate if the notion of legitimacy is detached from elections. I then propose an argument for descriptive representation that better serves the mini-publics' aim of achieving high-quality deliberation.
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.
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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