Deliberation for Development: Ghana’s First Deliberative Poll

Deliberative Democracy and the Deliberative Poll on the Euro

Focus on the concept of deliberative democracy has increased rapidly within recent decades. However, the concept is weakly defined, if at all. ‘Deliberation’ is defined as an unconstrained exchange of arguments that involves practical reasoning and potentially leads to a transformation of preferences. Throughout the 1990s several innovative democratic experiments have flourished focusing on cit...

National Deliberative Poll Reveals Citizens’ Informed Views on Healthcare, Education

Arlington, VA— In September and October 2005, more than 1,000 adult Americans engaged in a national scientific experiment to see what the public would think about education and health care--if people became more informed about the issues and talked about them together. For five weeks, participants engaged online in weekly small group dialogues with trained moderators, discussed balanced briefin...

How deliberation makes better citizens: The Danish Deliberative

This article presents results from a Danish national Deliberative Poll on the single European currency. A representative sample of 364 Danish citizens assembled to deliberate on Denmark’s participation in the single currency. As a quasi-experiment, the Deliberative Poll is an example of deliberative democracy. Four research questions regarding these deliberative processes are analyzed: openness...

Disrupting deliberation: The impact of political protest on deliberative systems

Applying Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Uganda’s First Deliberative Polls

Practical experiments with deliberative democracy, instituted with random samples of the public, have had success in many countries. But this approach has never before been tried in Sub-Saharan Africa. Reflecting on the first two applications in Uganda, we apply the same criteria for success commonly used for such projects in the most advanced countries. Can this approach work successfully with...