The Legal Construction of Power in Deliberative Governance

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 728-754
Author(s):  
Henrique A. Castro
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Building Block ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Strategic Action ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Legal Construction ◽  
Deliberative Governance

Deliberative democracy has grown into an influential normative paradigm for political theory and reform programs alike, but doubts persist about its desirability in a world where strategic action and inequality are prevalent. This problem has spurred efforts to understand the empirical dynamics of power relations in institutionalized participation. This article argues that sociolegal scholarship has yet to join this turn to power but that doing so can help it to specify law’s causal and normative relevance in deliberative governance. This is because the legal environment within which actors interact affects causal mechanisms by distributing opportunities for the exercise of power between potential participants, actual participants, and participants and government. The utility of a power-distributional perspective is illustrated through a study of São Paulo’s health councils, one of the world’s largest experiments in deliberative governance. The study demonstrates that the councils’ trajectory and current functioning—including some of their normatively problematic aspects—cannot be understood without reference to legal arrangements. This article is meant as a building block for sociolegal scholarship to continue investigating deliberation.

Measuring Democratic Listening: A Listening Quality Index

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292198944
Author(s):  
Mary F. Scudder
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Democratic Deliberation

Recent political theory in the area of deliberative democracy has placed listening at the normative core of meaningfully democratic deliberation. Empirical research in this area, however, has struggled to capture democratic listening in a normatively relevant way. This paper presents a new, theoretically informed instrument for measuring and assessing listening in deliberation. Here, I tackle the observational challenge of measuring the act of listening itself, as opposed to either the preconditions or outcomes of listening. Reviewing existing measures, I show that each, in isolation, fails to capture the most democratically meaningful aspects of listening. The paper argues, however, that existing and novel measures can be usefully combined to allow researchers to capture different degrees of democratic listening. Using Rawls’s concept of “lexical priority,” I aggregate relevant components of listening into a normatively significant lexical scale. The paper describes this novel measurement and highlights how it can be used in empirical research on democratic deliberation.

Human Nature, Non-human Nature, and Needs

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Biro
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Communicative Rationality ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Needs

This chapter assesses the relevance of Frankfurt School critical theory for contemporary environmental political theory. Early Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse developed a critique of instrumental rationality that provides a powerful framework for understanding the domination of nature in modernity, including an inability to articulate and defend human needs. Habermas subsequently attempts to mitigate this totalizing critique, countering instrumental rationality with a focus on communicative rationality. This Habermasian turn both provides new openings and forecloses certain possibilities for environmental political theory; deliberative democracy is emphasized, but with a renewed commitment to anthropocentrism. The chapter then explores whether Habermas’s communicative turn could be “greened,” either through an expansion of the subjects of communicative rationality, or by critically examining the extent to which human beings themselves can articulate their genuine needs.

scholarly journals Should Judges Make Climate Change Law?

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Burgers
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Sound Environment ◽  
Judicial Lawmaking ◽  
Near Future

AbstractWhat scholars referred to as a climate change litigation ‘explosion’ in 2015 has today become an established movement which is unlikely to stop in the near future: worldwide, over a thousand lawsuits have been launched regarding responsibility for the dangers of climate change. Since the beginning of this trend in transnational climate litigation scholars have warned that the separation of powers is threatened where judges interfere with the politically hot issue of climate change. This article uses Jürgen Habermas's political theory on deliberative democracy to reconstruct the tension between law and politics generated by these lawsuits. This reconstruction affords a better understanding of the implications of climate change litigation: while the role of the judiciary as such remains unchanged, the trend is likely to influence the democratic legitimacy of judicial lawmaking on climate change, as it indicates an increasing realization that a sound environment is a constitutional value and is therefore a prerequisite for democracy.

Participatory Democracy Revisited

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Pateman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Active Area ◽  
Democracy Promotion ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Form

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.

Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Muirhead
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Median Voter ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Positive Theory ◽  
Median Voter Theorem ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Models Of Democracy

Anthony Downs’s Economic Theory of Democracy has been marginalized in normative democratic theory, notwithstanding its prominence in positive political theory. For normative theorists, the “paradox of voting” testifies to the reality of moral motivation in politics, a species of motivation foreign to Downs’s theory and central to the ideals of deliberative democracy that normative theorists developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The deliberative ideal displaced aggregative conceptions of democracy such as Downs’s model. The ensuing segmentation of normative democratic theories that assume moral motives (like deliberative democracy) and positive models of democracy that assume selfish motives (like Downs’s theory) leaves both without the resources to diagnose the persistence of ideological partisanship and polarization that beset modern democracies. Engaging Downs’s theoretical contributions, especially the median voter theorem, would constitute a salutary step toward a democratic theory that integrates normative and positive theory.

The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Rational Choice Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
History Of

Deliberative democracy has been the main game in contemporary political theory for two decades and has grown enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines, and in political practice. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, as well as exploring and creating links with multiple disciplines and policy practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought while also discussing their philosophical origins. It locates deliberation in a political system with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliament and courts but also governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It documents the intersections of deliberative ideals with contemporary political theory, involving epistemology, representation, constitutionalism, justice, and multiculturalism. It explores the intersections of deliberative democracy with major research fields in the social sciences and law, including social and rational choice theory, communications, psychology, sociology, international relations, framing approaches, policy analysis, planning, democratization, and methodology. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution. It documents the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world, in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and global governance. And it provides reflections on the field by pioneering thinkers.

Constituting Politics: Power, Reciprocity, and Identity

Hypatia ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 96-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

This essay considers whether liberal political theory has tools with which to count gender, and so gender relations, as political. Can liberal political theory count sub-ordination among the harms of sex inequality that the state ought to correct? Watson defends a version of deliberative democracy—liberalism—as able to place issues of social inequality in the form of hierarchical social identities at the center of its normative commitments, and so at the center of securing justice.

Affektpolitik und Freundschaft in Saber del mal y el bien von Calderón de la Barca

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-214
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Komorowska
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Strategic Manipulation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Calderón De La Barca ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyses the relationship between friendship and politics in the comedia de privanza Saber del mal y el bien by Calderón de la Barca. It claims that Calderón addresses the controversial discussion in 17th-century political theory on whether monarchs should have friends by staging three different models of power: First, the comedia presents a monarch, whose wise analysis and strategic manipulation of the feelings of his courtiers turn him into the ideal sovereign. Secondly, the play unfolds a cosmology of power in analogy to the constellation of the sun and the stars. The position of the king as the sun is challenged by the ascendant power of his favourite. Thirdly, Calderón questions the relevance of mundane power relations through the metaphor of the theatrum mundi. It is through friendship as a dialogic form of knowledge that these three models of power unfold. [J]untemos hoy dos caudales: yo pondré contentos míos, poned vos vuestros pesares; yo venturas, vos desdichas; y así vendremos iguales a saber los dos a un tiempo de glorias y adversidades, porque quiero que seamos los dos amigos tan grandes que dejemos admiradas a las futuras edades.

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