Democratic Deliberation in a Multinational Federation

Modelling Democratic Deliberation

Deliberative democracy is a political theory that places deliberation at the heart of political decision making. In a deliberation, people justify their preferences to one another. They are confronted with new information and new perspectives, which might lead them to change their preferences. Therefore, deliberative democracy, unlike social choice theory, takes preferences to be secondary (der...

Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy

Joshua Cohen In this essay I explore the ideal of a 'deliberative democracy'.1 By a deliberative democracy I shall mean, roughly, an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members. I propose an account of the value of such an association that treats democracy itself as a fundamental political ideal and not simply as a derivative ideal that can be explained in t...

Does democratic deliberation change minds?

Discussion is frequently observed in democratic politics, but change in view is rarely observed. Call this the ‘unchanging minds hypothesis’. I assume that a given belief or desire is not isolated, but, rather, is located in a network structure of attitudes, such that persuasion sufficient to change an attitude in isolation is not sufficient to change the attitude as supported by its network. T...

Democratic Secession from a Multinational State *

When Woodrow Wilson advanced the principle of self-determination in a series of speeches in 1918–19, his assumption seemed to be that acknowledging the claims of self-determination was a simple corollary of respect for democracy. Contemporary secessionists, and many who write and theorize about secession, share Wilson’s intuition about this. It is widely claimed that a ‘people’ has the right to...

Rational Actors , Political Argument , and Democratic Deliberation