Many theorists have long extolled the virtues of public deliberation as a crucial component of a responsive and responsible democracy. Building on these theories, in recent years practitioners from government officials to citizen groups, nonprofits, and foundations have increasingly devoted time and resources to strengthening citizen engagement through deliberative forums. Although empirical re...

This project continues a strong record of research in the Department of Bioethics that is aimed at facilitating fair and effective allocation of resources to promote health. The research involves a variety of methodologies including conceptual analysis and empirical methods including survey research, focus groups to promote democratic deliberation, secondary analysis of large datasets, and meta...

This manuscript aims to assess the potential of social media as a channel to foster democratic deliberation. It does this by examining whether the types of discussions that citizens maintain in two of the most used social media channels managed by the White House – Facebook and YouTube – meet the necessary conditions for deliberative democracy. For this purpose 7230 messages were analyzed and a...

At the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the science and technology communities, along with other nonstate actors, were singled out as major partners in the quest for sustainability. This is in line with calls for refashioning scientiac expertise into a more transparent, accountable and democratic enterprise. Participatory, civil, citizen, civic, stakeholder and democratic s...

I argue that different argumentative practices require participants to categorize themselves in modes. Accordingly, distinguish four types of argumentation: rational argumentation, intergroup intragroup and, finally, personal argumentation. An inescapable implication my approach deliberation is presupposes the self-categorization same ingroup. Deliberation does not require, however, group antec...

Commonsense psychology seems to have it that most morally significant decisions arise through practical reasoning and moral delibaeration. No doubt, there are social psychological data that put pressure on reflective views of human agency. However, even on the assumption that non-rational and irrational processes are implicated in many morally significant decisions (cf., Doris, 2002, forthcomin...

Thanks to the work of J. Rawls, J. Cohen and J. Habermas, philosophy and political science have contributed to the elaboration of a political theory of deliberation which considers the relationship of legitimacy between citizens and politics from the perspective of procedure and discourse. These theoretical approaches configure a normative conception of deliberation which hardly engages with re...

in what follows, i would like to contribute to a defense of deliberative democracy by giving an affirmative answer to the question in the title. the goal is admittedly humble. For the coherence of an ideal says nothing about its desirability, feasibility or overall appropriateness.1 and, indeed, i will not address these further issues here. but, though humble, the goal of assessing the coherenc...

[This work provides comparative insights into how deliberation on proposed constitutional amendments might be more effectively pursued. It reports on a new nationwide survey of public attitudes to constitutional reform, examining the potential in Australia of innovative Canadian models of reform led by Citizens’ Assemblies. Assembly members are selected at random and are demographically represe...

One kind of deliberation involves an individual reassessing the strengths of her beliefs in the light of new evidence. Bayesian epistemology measures the strength to which one ought to believe a proposition by its probability relative to all available evidence, and thus provides a normative account of individual deliberation. This can be extended to an account of individual judgement by treatin...