Listening and Deliberation

2018 ◽  
pp. 236-250
Author(s):  
Michael Morrell
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Agonistic Democracy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Studies

One key idea in the history of deliberative theory is that citizens must listen to one another, though the fullest accounts of listening come from the broader field of democratic theory. Bickford’s (1996) theory is enlightening, but more compatible with agonistic democracy. Dobson’s (2014) exhortations to take listening seriously are important, even if he distances himself from deliberation. In practice, scholars of mini-publics have examined the importance of moderators, structures, and dispositions, including empathy, for outcomes related to listening. Studies using the Deliberative Quality Index reveal factors that improve listening in legislatures. Research examining reciprocity utilize measures that could help us better understanding deliberative listening. Work by Hendriks and Sercan (2017) has even directly examined listening in deliberation. Notwithstanding these developments, we must continue refining the conceptualization and operationalization of listening if we are to understand this aspect of a successful deliberative democracy.

Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Mara
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Democracies

This book examines how ideas of war and peace have functioned as organizing frames of reference within the history of political theory. It interprets ten widely read figures in that history within five thematically focused chapters that pair (in order) Schmitt and Derrida, Aquinas and Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, and Thucydides and Plato. The book’s substantive argument is that attempts to establish either war or peace as dominant intellectual perspectives obscure too much of political life. The book argues for a style of political theory committed more to questioning than to closure. It challenges two powerful currents in contemporary political philosophy: the verdict that premodern or metaphysical texts cannot speak to modern and postmodern societies, and the insistence that all forms of political theory be some form of democratic theory. What is offered instead is a nontraditional defense of the tradition and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory. Though the book avoids any attempt to show the immediate relevance of these interpretations to current politics, its impetus stems very much from the current political circumstances. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century , a series of wars has eroded confidence in the progressively peaceful character of international relations; citizens of the Western democracies are being warned repeatedly about the threats posed within a dangerous world. In this turbulent context, democratic citizens must think more critically about the actions their governments undertake. The texts interpreted here are valuable resources for such critical thinking.

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.

Rom e Sinti, cittadini senza patria?

2009 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Maurizio Cermel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Economic Democracy ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
History Of

- The condition of the Rom and Sinti peoples represents very well the contradictions present in European society and the problems that Europe has to tackle if it is to pursue the path of political integration. There are several million people in the Rom and the Sinti population, distributed in small communities all over the continent. Because of their lifestyle and different language and customs, they are in practice denied access to the civil, political and social rights due to other citizens, both in Italy and in the majority of other European countries. This denial of their cultural identity sometimes verges on racial discrimination: as they lie on the margins of civil society, the authorities often treat them in ways that are incompatible with the principles of freedom, equality and solidarity on which today's modern democracies are founded. What the institutions in the various states ought to do, on the other hand, is work together with the Rom and Sinti organisations and with the international organisations to safeguard a cultural identity that enriches Europe as a whole just as much as its national identities do, while at the same time contributing at making these people fully entitled European citizens. Eligio Resta, God and the Majority Award The history of the principle of majority is still a powerful indicator for interpreting contemporary developments in economic democracy and in political democracy. The work by F. Galgano that led to these notes illustrates a line of commentary about the form and the contents of the rule of the majority that is pursued right up to the decline perceived in the present day. Overwhelmed by the crisis afflicting the concept of representation today, the principle of the majority has come back to question us about the space reserved for deliberative democracy.

Two regimes of the symbolic: radical democracy between Romanticism and structuralism

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Warren Breckman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Constructed Dialogue ◽  
History Of

The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism and poststructuralism. This paper seeks to expose the deeper history of the symbolic in the legacy of Romanticism. It argues that crucial to the concept of the symbolic is a polyvalence that was first theorized in German Romanticism. The linguistic turn that so marked the twentieth century tended to suppress this polyvalence, but it has returned as a crucial dimension of contemporary radical political theory and practice. At stake is more than a recovery of historical depth. Through a constructed dialogue between Romanticism and the thought of both Žižek and Laclau, the paper seeks to provide a sharper appreciation of the resources of the concept of the symbolic.

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.

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