This article critically examines Jürgen Habermas’s theory of democracy as developed in Between Facts and Norms. In particular, it focuses on the concept of communicative power and argues that there is a crucial ambiguity in Habermas’s use of this concept. Since communicative power is the key normative resource that is supposed to counter the norm-free steering media of money and administrative ...

Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining potential interests concerns future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms democracy with majority voting help support at maintaining IS by representing generations’ conce...

Since at least the mid-1980s, some scholars of United States administrative law have touted deliberative democracy as a promising theory to justify the modern administrative state. Those who advocate deliberative administration, however, have not easily incorporated the role of democratic politics into their models of that state. This Article begins by reviewing the historical development of th...

The past decade has seen intensified calls for the reform of democratic political institutions in Canada, on the grounds that there is a “democracy deficit” at the level of federal politics. Some commentators have even begun to describe the country as a “banana republic,” or a “friendly dictatorship.” Yet any attempt to assess the state of democracy in Canada must naturally presuppose some theo...

Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant axioms for approval-based multi-winner elections. We observe a rich landscape with respect to the computational complexity of identifying proportional budgets and...

Research ethics committees are entrusted with implementing guidelines to protect both scientists and human subjects of research from harm. These guidelines are often based on western contexts and may not resonate with the local moral traditions of the communities that they seek to protect. In this essay, we discuss how using principles of deliberative democracy with a “local derivation” approac...