scholarly journals Practicing Democracy from Childhood

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Meaningful Participation ◽  
Deliberative Processes

Democracy manifests itself in a range of ways and is an imperfect, dynamic struggle for collective decision-making. This article discusses the multifaceted processes of deliberative democratic praxis found in traditional Māori society. Central to decision-making in te ao Māori, hui provide formal and informal structures for deliberative democracy, precedent setting, learning, and transformation through consensus making, inclusive debate, and discussion across all levels of society. Rather than coercion and voting, rangatira relied on a complex mix of customary values and accomplished oratory skills to explore issues in family and community meetings and in public assemblies. Decisions made through inclusive deliberative processes practiced in hui established evident reasoning and responsibility for all community members to uphold the reached consensus. This article claims that practicing deliberative democracy as a fundamental way of life, learned through ongoing active and meaningful participation throughout childhood, improves the integrity of democratic decision-making.

Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Krakowski
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Social Resources ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Dual Effect ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Game Theoretic

The paper examines conditions under which communities threatened by armed groups amid the Colombian civil war are most likely to resist displacement. Using a game-theoretic framework and quantitative data, the paper shows that the threatened communities which expect rescue from an armed actor are more likely to resist displacement than those communities which expect no help. Community cohesion has a dual effect on displacement. The amount of peer support among community members reduces their chances to resist displacement, but the extent to which community members are involved in collective decision-making processes makes them less likely to displace. These findings reveal that both displaced communities and those that resisted displacement possess crucial social resources for their post-conflict recovery and development, such as cohesion and strong bonds of solidarity. The paper stresses the importance of local-level organisation coordinating collective decision-making to guarantee the most efficient use of these resources.

The Field and Study of Deliberative Democracy in Australia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Practical Project ◽  
Australian Context ◽  
Democratic System

Australia is recognized globally as an important hub for the study and practice of deliberative democracy. Both a normative and practical project, the field of deliberative democracy aims to improve the quality and inclusivity of public reasoning in collective decision-making. This chapter explores deliberative democracy in Australia from two angles. First, it discusses how a nation typically characterized by its adversarial and more majoritarian democratic system has become a significant international hotspot for scholars and practitioners of deliberative democracy. Second, the chapter examines how deliberative democracy has been applied as a lens to empirically study aspects of Australian politics. There is, the author argues, much more work for deliberative democrats to undertake in the Australian context, particularly in assessing and strengthening the deliberative capacity of the nation’s key political institutions.

Legitimacy Problems in Deliberative Democracy

2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parkinson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Complex Societies ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Driving Current ◽  
Electoral Representation

The classic accounts of deliberative democracy are also accounts of legitimacy: ‘that outcomes are legitimate to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation by all those subject to the decision in question’ ( Dryzek, 2001, p. 651 ). And yet, in complex societies deliberative participation by all those affected by collective decision-making is extremely implausible. There are also legitimacy problems with the demanding procedural requirements which deliberation imposes on participants. Given these problems, deliberative democracy seems unable to deliver legitimate outcomes as it defines them. Focusing on the problem of scale, this paper offers a tentative solution using representation, a concept which is itself problematic. Along the way, the paper highlights issues with the legitimate role of experts, the different legitimate uses of statistical and electoral representation, and differences between the research and democratic imperatives driving current attempts to put deliberative principles into practice, illustrated with a case from a Leicester health policy debate. While much work remains to be done on exactly how the principles arrived at might be transformed into working institutions, they do offer a means of criticising existing deliberative practice.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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