Deliberative Democracy in India

This chapter traces the evolution of deliberative institutions in India, as well as the ways in which deliberative bodies influence, and are in influenced by, entrenched social inequality. The paper first unpacks the historical roots of Indian deliberation, emphasizing the ways in which religious traditions fostered a culture of debate and dialogue. The paper then explores the interplay between Western liberal philosophers, most notably Henry Maine, and Indian political thinkers, including Gandhi and Ambedkar, on participatory democracy in India. The discussion then highlights the continued dialogue between Indian and Western ideas in the push for greater participatory development. Finally, the chapter probes the current incarnation of state-sponsored deliberation in India—namely, village assemblies known as gram sabhas under the constitutionally mandated system of Indian village democracy or Panchayati Raj, and reviews the growing empirical scholarship about these village assemblies.

Deliberative Democracy and Science

What might a deliberative politics of science look like? This chapter addresses this question by bringing together science studies and the theories and practices of deliberative democracy. This chapter begins by discussing the importance of considering the role of deliberation within scientific communities and institutions, particularly as it bears on the production of scientific judgments and decisions at the boundary between science and politics. The chapter then discusses the emergence of institutions for communicating scientific knowledge to policy-makers, public officials and citizens, which include not only expert tribunals but also the development of citizen panels, consensus conferences, and other forms of mini-publics. Finally, the chapter considers the role of “uninvited” ’ participation in science, emphasizing the role of social movements and critical civil society in both challenging and informing scientific knowledge production.

Africa and Deliberative Politics

This chapter shows that deliberative democracy is an important consideration for African nations, especially with an eye on the divisive effects of aggregative politics on democracies involving multi-ethnic groupings. The chapter explores Wiredu’s plea for democracy by consensus as an alternative model better suited than multi-party politics for an African context, and concludes that we need further research to determine where we could institute consensual mechanisms in African countries. Furthermore, it proposes that research on deliberation in Africa needs to go beyond philosophical discussions, and that empirical scholars need to begin testing various arguments in the philosophical and theoretical debates about deliberation.

Deliberation in Protests and Social Movements

The chapter addresses the relations between social movements and deliberative democracy, pointing at opportunities but also at tensions in theorization and practices of democracy. While social movements are important for deliberative democracy, and vice versa, activists and deliberative democrats alike have addressed a number of tensions between deliberative democracy and protest. The global diffusion of deliberative norms, practices, and experiences of democracy in social movements is discussed in the light of the growing literature on deliberative democracy. In particular, faced with challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of representative democracy, social movements’ democratic innovations, such as the Forum and the Camp, represent important experiments in cooperation in settings of deep diversity and inequality. In addition, the reflections on social movements’ conceptions and practices help in specifying some conceptualization of deliberative politics.

Deliberation and Justice

Discussions of the relationship between justice and democracy are generally premised on the assumption that they are two different things, only contingently and externally related. As a result, genuine conflicts seem possible whereby we are forced to decide whether democracy should trump justice or whether justice has priority over democracy. By focusing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, this chapter aims to show that deliberative democracy can provide a constructivist conception of justice which challenges this premise by explaining the internal relationship between justice and democracy. There is no justice without democracy in the sense that only citizens can democratically determine the specific content of justice. At the same time, there is also no democracy without justice in the sense that democratic outcomes are legitimate only to the extent that they can be understood as proper elaborations of the substantive but abstract ideal of justice-as-impartiality.

Deliberation and Equality

Political systems are democratic to the extent that people are empowered to participate in political practices—such as voting, representing, deliberating, and resisting—that contribute to self-and collective-rule. There is a close relationship between equality and democracy, as equality distributes symmetrical empowerments that enable people affected by collective endeavors to participate in political practices that contribute to self- and collective-rule. This chapter elucidates the relationship between equality, inclusion, and deliberative practices in democratic systems. It describes two distinguishable values of equality required for distributing empowerments that enable deliberation: the value of universal moral equality, and the value of equity. The chapter then outlines different institutional arrangements that promote the values of universal moral equality and equity in deliberative practices.

Deliberative Democracy and Public Dispute Resolution

Deliberative democracy and public dispute resolution (PDR) have the same goal—to inform and determine the public interest—but they involve different skills and practices. This article considers the ways in which deliberative democratic approaches to policy-related decision-making can be supplemented with tools used in public dispute resolution—specifically, the use of an independent mediator, the well-developed technique of stakeholder assessment, and a new strategy called joint fact-finding, where stakeholders with different interests work together with outside experts to identify common assumptions, gather information together, and formulate and clarify opinions. All are designed to achieve fairer, wiser, more stable and more efficient outcomes.

Deliberation in Communication Studies

The discipline of communication encompasses a broad spectrum of humanistic, interpretive, and social scientific approaches to studying public deliberation. Early work engaged Habermasian theories of the public sphere, and rhetorical scholarship has foregrounded the deliberative threads running back to the discipline’s earliest history in ancient Greece. The bulk of contemporary work, however, has examined the dynamics of deliberation, particularly in the context of face-to-face discussions and dialogues in small groups. These studies have revealed the importance of narrative and dialogic exchanges during deliberation, as well as the critical role of facilitation and the maintenance of deliberative norms. Research has also assessed the practical consequences of participating in deliberation. The discipline’s practical orientation has led some scholars to seek ways to optimize deliberative designs to maximize simultaneously the quality of their decision outputs and their civic impacts on participants.

Deliberative Law

The “systemic turn” in deliberative democractic theory builds off the critical insight that one instance or site of deliberation does not legitimate an entire political system. But accepting too easily that non-deliberative parts can contribute to a deliberative sum can risk deliberative democracy’s aspirations for reform. This chapter examines three evolving areas of deliberative lawmaking—administrative lawmaking, districting commissions, and deliberative plebiscites—that underscore the ongoing relevance and promise of “second wave” deliberative democratic institutional design. The “notice and comment” structure of administrative rule-making, for instance, can invite the admission of multiple voices into the lawmaking process, especially when combined with the court’s role in incentivizing such practice. The trend toward nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions establishing legislative district lines can also generate powerful deliberative democratic dividends. Similarly, practices in plebisicitary democracy—whether through instances such as citizen policy juries or other directly democratic mechanisms—can contribute toward the deliberative democratization of law and society.

Online Deliberation

This chapter provides an overview of the empirical research on online deliberation, focusing on three aspects: the preconditions of online deliberations, the communicative processes of online deliberations as well as the central outcomes of online deliberations. Regarding preconditions, we provide an overview of sampling choices and use of incentives in recruitment. We also demonstrate the ways in which scholars have designed online deliberations. We gauge elements such as whether online deliberations are asynchronous or synchronous, allow for anonymous participants or not, employ facilitators or not, and how information materials are used. Regarding the communicative processes, we pinpoint a gap in the research since there are still rather few studies actually measuring discursive quality in online deliberation. Concerning outcomes of online deliberations, the chapter focuses mainly on how taking part in online deliberation affects participants. We also provide a brief overview of how online deliberations have been tied to actual policy-making.