Overview

Deliberative democracy has challenged two widely-accepted nostrums about democratic politics: that people lack the capacities for effective self-government; and that democratic procedures are arbitrary and do not reflect popular will; indeed, that the idea of popular will is itself illusory. On the contrary, deliberative democrats have shown that people are capable of being sophisticated, creative problem solvers, given the right opportunities in the right kinds of democratic institutions. But deliberative empirical research has its own problems. In this book two leading deliberative scholars review decades of that research and reveal three important issues. First, the concept 'deliberation' has been inflated so much as to lose empirical bite; second, deliberation has been equated with entire processes of which it is just one feature; and third, such processes are confused with democracy in a deliberative mode more generally. In other words, studies frequently apply micro-level tools and concepts to make macro- and meso-level judgements, and vice versa. Instead, Bächtiger and Parkinson argue that deliberation must be understood as contingent, performative, and distributed. They argue that deliberation needs to be disentangled from other communicative modes; that appropriate tools need to be deployed at the right level of analysis; and that scholars need to be clear about whether they are making additive judgements or summative ones. They then apply that understanding to set out a new agenda and new empirical tools for deliberative empirical scholarship at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

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9780199672196

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this book offers a valuable framework from which we can renew informed scholarly discussion and bring together the wise and visionary minds of advocates and skeptics alike to reexamine the shifting prospects for deliberative democracy * Edwina Barvosa, University of California, Perspectives on Politics *

Author Information

André Bächtiger holds the Chair of Political Theory at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. His research focuses on the challenges of mapping and measuring deliberation and political communication as well as understanding the preconditions and outcomes of high-quality deliberation in the contexts of both representative institutions and mini-publics. His research has been published by Cambridge University Press and in the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Political Science Review, Political Studies, and Acta Politica. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (with John S. Dryzek, Jane J. Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren, forthcoming 2018, OUP), John Parkinson is Professor of Politics, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra. He is an applied democracy theorist who works on the relationships between formal law and policy making and the broader public sphere, crossing boundaries between normative political theory, interpretive political analysis, cultural theory, and public policy. His current research project compares the deliberative quality of two starkly contrasting cases: a campaign to recognize indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution, and the Scottish independence debate of 2012-2014, using novel electronic social science tools. A former editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science, his research has been published by Oxford University Press and in the British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Public Administration, and Political Studies.

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