Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.

Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.

ABSTRACTIlya Somin, like several other political epistemologists, effectively exposes the extent of public ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance may damage democratic outcomes. This underpins his case for a more streamlined state, leaving more to individual “foot voting”—where citizens are better incentivized to choose knowledgeably and rationally. One cannot dispute the fact of deep public ignorance. However, one can question the widespread assumption that ignorance is necessarily ethically significant, always productive of undesirable outcomes, or otherwise implicitly dangerous for (...) democracy. The sheer lack of individual efficacy in mass democracies not only incentivizes ignorance, but also creates conditions wherein such ignorance is individually harmless and unlikely in the aggregate to greatly contribute to one or another outcome. Beyond this, there may be no way to attain meaningful knowledge in the areas where democratic decision making is most fraught. Indeed, ignorance may at times lead to better outcomes than would knowledge. The seemingly unassailable status of democracy itself, and the valuable institutional stability that this status ensures, seem to be founded upon a bedrock of public ignorance as to the real nature of democracy. (shrink)

Stakeholder engagement is a crucial conceptof extension education. Engagement expressesdemocratic values of the land-grant mission byproviding opportunities for stakeholders to influenceprogram planning, including setting the agenda andnegotiating resource allocations. In practice, theconcept of engagement guides the formation ofpartnerships among extension, communities, industry,and government. In the area of sustainableagriculture, however, stakeholders may conflict,presenting challenges to the engagement process.Results from a study of a Canadian sustainableagriculture program, produced using culturalanthropology and participatory action research, detailchallenges of the engagement process that led toreconstruction of (...) a farmer-extension partnership.Notable in the early phase of the reconstructionprocess were critical reflection, stakeholder forums,exclusion through caucusing, and coalition building.An argument for a neo-pragmatist view provides atheoretical basis for understanding counterintuitivedimensions of engagement revealed by the study. (shrink)

_Examines the implications of Aristotle’s political thought for contemporary political theory._.

Epistemic Responsibility and Democratic Justification Content Type Journal Article Pages 297-302 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9147-1 Authors Andrew F. Smith, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765 Journal Volume Volume 17 Journal Issue Volume 17, Number 3.

Jon Shields's finding—that certain evangelical pro‐life activist groups are more interested in deliberative discussions about abortion than are pro‐choice activists—is wrong on methodological, normative, and philosophical grounds. He generalizes about pro‐life civility from a small, trained sample group, and ignores possibly important variables that would explain pro‐choicers' incivility. Further, politeness is not necessarily a requirement of democratic deliberation—which entails not forcing one's own beliefs on the public, as pro‐lifers manifestly are trying to do, despite their calm demeanor. Conversely, some pro‐choicers' (...) refusal to engage in debates is not a deliberative failure, as Shields suggests, as deliberation includes such things as campaigning and canvassing. Lastly, Shields, and the pro‐lifers he has observed, use the weakest of the pro‐choice arguments, instead of focusing on the best academic work in the field. (shrink)

This article provides two empirical evaluations of deliberation. Given that scholars of deliberation often argue for its importance without empirical support, we first examine whether there is a "deliberative difference"; if actors engaging in deliberation arrive at different decisions than those who think on their own or "just talk." As we find a general convergence within deliberation scholarship around reasons and inclusion, the second test examines whether these two specific mechanisms are central to deliberation. The first evaluation looks at outcomes (...) within a laboratory setting; the second at videotapes of decision-making processes within this setting. Our results show two things. First, in terms of outcomes, deliberation differs from other forms of interaction. Second, reasons and inclusion are central to the deliberative process. The more reasons provided within each group, the more likely participants were to change their position; similarly, the more inclusive groups were, the more likely participants were to change their position. We conclude by arguing that more work needs to be done, both in evaluating the deliberative difference and in disaggregating deliberation and examining its central explanatory mechanisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJack Knight and James Johnson argue in The Priority of Democracy that democracy should be theorized and justified pragmatically: Democratic deliberations should be given a central coordinating role in society not because they realize any particular abstract ideal, but because they would elicit the information needed to solve real-world problems. However, Knight and Johnson rely on a naïve economic understanding of knowledge that assumes implausibly that individuals know what they need to know and need only aggregate thier separate beliefs. It (...) is precisely because we may not know what we need to know that we need to continually test our ideas. Contra Knight and Johnson, moreover, we ought to accept that our ability to interpret social experiments properly is questionable. A pragmatic approach to social inquiry, therefore, ought to investigate what beliefs political actors actually bring to collective decisions rather than how theoretically perfect beliefs ought to be elicited and aggregated. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) to trace the idea of deliberation back in the history of philosophy and establish the link to the Kantian concept of public reason; (ii) to pave the way for rhetoric as a constituent part of public deliberation; (iii) to undertake an applied ethical approach to worldwide deliberation online. The two former aims are treated in part one of the paper, whereas the applied analysis is undertaken in part two. One important task is (...) to demonstrate in what ways the internet as a new and powerful venue for deliberation both challenges the old theories of public deliberation, and also points in the direction of certain revisions of our basic ideas about deliberation. (shrink)

Discourse between pupils represents a core element of citizenship education in England. However, as it is currently presented within the curriculum, discourse adopts the form of the rather broad terms of 'discussion' and 'debate'. These terms are diffuse, and in themselves offer little pedagogical guidance for teachers implementing the curriculum in schools. Moreover, there has been little academic reflection in England as to how theoretical ideas on civic dialogue may usefully inform approaches to pupil discourse. For this reason, how pupils (...) experience discursive learning activities is likely to depend on how individual schools and teachers understand the terms 'discussion' and 'debate' and the way in which this understanding is translated into pupil learning activities. This article explores how recourse to deliberative democratic theory, and in particular to the principle of contestatory deliberative democracy found within recent republican writing, may be useful in helping educators to consider critically the capacities needed for effective civic discourse as a well as the outcomes of pupils' dialogical engagement. (shrink)

Public deliberation about health policy in the United States often hinges on two untenable basic assumptions about political legitimacy. The first assumption, common in public debate throughout the United States, is that federal oversight of health care is justified under a federal compact binding all citizens. This assumption is false because the federal compact precludes such oversight. Indeed, the ascendancy of national government (and demise of federalism) over the past 70 years was engineered through the subversion of the federal compact, (...) creating an expansive legitimation gap. The second assumption—that political legitimacy can be established through appeals to expert consensus about fundamental conceptions of justice or human rights—is prevalent among bioethicists. I argue that this assumption is illicit because it hinges on a weak, rationalistic form of majoritarian democracy that conflates public acquiescence with public approval. If the public mission of academic bioethics involves protecting the integrity of public deliberation, then these two basic assumptions should be challenged. (shrink)

(2001). Association and deliberation in risk society: Two faces of ecological democracy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 85-104.

The field of political psychology, like the social sciences more generally, is being challenged. New theoretical direction is being demanded from within and a greater epistemological sophistication and ethical relevance is being demanded from without. In response, an outline for a reconstructed political psychology is offered here. To begin, a theoretical framework for a truly integrative political psychology is sketched. In the attempt to transcend the reductionist quality of cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary inquiry, the theoretical approach offered here emphasizes the dually (...) structured quality of social life as the singular product of both organizing social structures and defining discourse communities on the one hand and motivated, thinking individuals on the other. To further this theoretical effort, meta-theoretical considerations are addressed. The modernist-postmodernist debate regarding the status of truth and value is used as a point of departure for constructing the epistemological foundation for political psychology. In this light, structural pragmatic guidelines for theory construction, empirical research and normative inquiry are presented. While the focus remains on political psychology in particular, it is assumed that the criticisms of present research and the suggestions for future inquiry apply to the social sciences more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is often held that disagreement over non-normative facts is less significant to the project of public justification than disagreement over relevant moral norms. But this dismissal of non-normative factual disagreement is unjustified—an ad hoc attempt to save the ideal of public justification from the endemic actual disagreement that threatens it. Disagreement over norms is relevant to political legitimacy; so, too, is disagreement over facts. I draw two implications from this point. First, inasmuch as accounts of public justification typically involve (...) a unanimity condition, public justification should not be thought a desideratum of political legitimacy. Second, virtuous political praxis will often involve enforcing legislation in spite of unresolved non-normative factual disagreement. That is, with respect to legitimacy, there is nothing morally amiss about such legislation. Clearly these last claims presuppose some basis for legitimacy other than agreement; I will only gesture at what this might be. Assuming that much actual legislation is indeed legitimate, though—in spite of extant normative and non-normative disagreement—I go so far as concluding that such a basis, whatever it is, must exist. (shrink)

La ética del discurso es un óptimo fundamento para la ética cívica de una sociedad moralmente pluralista, pero siempre que no se contente con su dimensión procedimental, sino que saque a la luz su dimensión cordial. Sólo que entonces pasa de ser ética del discurso a ethica cordis. El presente trabajo intenta dar ese paso, y con ese fin cubre tres etapas: 1) en qué medida son necesarios los vínculos, 2) en qué consiste el vínculo discursivo, 3) cómo el vínculo (...) comunicativo incluye el discursivo y va más allá, dando lugar a una ética de la razón cordial. (shrink)