New Directions in Micro Research

Chapter four assesses a series of proposals in the literature for refinements to, and escape routes from, the dilemmas posed in chapter three. They reject a series of amendments that contextualize deliberation in somewhat crude ways, often through simple typologies that link communicative and setting types. Such approaches fail to appreciate the fact that deliberative acts can mean different things given goals and contexts, and underplay both agency and social creativity in complex settings. Instead, the authors recommend disentangling deliberation from other communicative modes and deploying a much broader range of methods to understand meanings in context, as well as a broader understanding of what contextual awareness entails.

Unpacking Deliberation

This chapter sets out a series of issues in the concept of deliberation, distinguishing it from the deliberative quality more generally. It starts by resisting the recent tendency to inflate the concept of deliberation in response to critics; instead, it advances a narrow although more ‘cultural’ definition, one that concedes that deliberation is just one communicative mode in a democracy, and not always the most important one, dependent on goals and contexts. Rejecting an ‘ideal institutions’ approach, it shows how different goals—epistemic and emancipatory goals among them—alter the balance between appropriate communicative modes; then turns to contextual differences to show how the very meaning of a communicative act can change, especially in settings with large power imbalances. Our resulting definition is thus sensitive to dynamics, a ‘shape-shifting’ account that stresses contingency, performance, and distribution of deliberative acts.

Assessing and Measuring Deliberativeness

Chapter seven takes the results of the four previous chapters and discusses their implications for the analysis of deliberation per se (a micro phenomenon) and the deliberative quality of democratic systems (a macro one). After specifying contrasting implications of the additive and summative views, it then looks at what kinds of methods can address the key research questions that have arisen in the discussion, recommending a problem-led, pluralist approach rather than insisting that deliberative democracy can only be studied by either qualitative or quantitative means. The chapter then surveys a number of novel methods that can be used to map and measure deliberative quality, from formal indicators to more qualitative tools, including new computer-aided methods developed in corpus linguistics and psychology, and gives examples from a current project on Scottish independence.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the key themes by noting that many empirical studies of deliberative democracy appear to study neither deliberation, nor democracy. The authors set out two ways of thinking about the deliberative quality of democracies. The first is additive: there are procedures and institutions that insert deliberation into a democratic forum or system. The second is summative: the deliberative quality may emerge from the complex interactions of many practices and institutions rather than an input generated by one or two of them. Drawing mainly on additive ideas, it sets out a fairly standard account of what the deliberative quality adds to democratic goods like inclusion, representation, and will-formation; but that quality can also conflict with democratic goals and functions. One of the book’s goals is to redemocratize deliberation by placing democratic agents at the centre of its study.

Conclusion

The book concludes with a call to repoliticize deliberative democracy by moving away from an exclusive focus on ‘safe havens’ like minipublics, or environments in which administrative imperatives dominate, and engage more effectively with mass democracy, and thus with comparative political science. It shows how the authors’ reconceptualization of deliberative democracy—its contingent, performative, and distributed nature—is directed to that goal, reconnecting deliberation with democratic principles without denying the importance of direct citizen deliberation. It closes by imagining a deliberative society that is challenged by ‘post-truth’ politics, but argues that an account that puts citizens’ practices of meaning-making at the heart of deliberation reveals effective routes out of the challenges.

Locating ‘Deliberativeness’

Chapter six takes the systems account from chapter five and develops its empirical implications. It begins by setting out again the definition of the deliberative quality before returning to the additive and summative distinction set out in the introduction, testing how far one can push the summative idea before it, settling on a weak rather than strong account that insists on a role for citizen deliberation. It then develops the empirical cues of the resulting account through a series of linked questions about the nature of agency and inclusion; venues; memes and storylines; transmission and coupling; transformation and deliberative education; and decision-making and implementation. It argues that faithful transmission is often an unreasonable goal, depending on the context of power relations; but that the tensions can be managed by representation relationships and, thinking laterally, education that trains people to operate in multiple contexts.

Deliberative Systems

This chapter picks up where chapter four left off, fleshing out three major accounts of deliberative systems: discursive, spatial, and sequential, each of which has useful foci and important blind spots in both descriptive and normative terms. Along the way it raises a number of challenges for each of the models, including questions about how each treats democratic norms of inclusion and legitimate decision-making, as well as specifying a ‘memetic’ account of democratic communication rather than a preference-based one. The chapter then focuses on four key steps in an ideal sequence: listening to the narratives and claims of the informal public sphere; structuring those claims and connecting them with reasons; making collective decisions; and doing so in a context of representation as relationship building.

Dissecting the Micro-Deliberative Approach

Chapter three distils lessons about deliberation from two decades of standard, quantitative political science methods in two contexts: deliberative minipublics and parliaments. The discussion reveals that while such pioneering research has generated rich results about preference transformation and citizens’ capacities to engage in quite sophisticated deliberation, it has also tended to treat such venues as closed systems, isolated from their social and political contexts; to over-generalize from what are rare conditions. Related problems with research on parliaments are then discussed. The picture that emerges is highly ambiguous: the classic elements of deliberation turned out not to be a single phenomenon but several, which did not vary in the same direction; and there are trade-offs between deliberative and democratic standards. But there are also important methodological problems that, the chapter argues, means the results give less comfort to sceptics about the value of deliberation.