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...

As part of the self-reflective movement in which green politics has been engaged for the last decade, the construction of green democracy has been submitted to increasing scrutiny. Relationship between democracy and environmentalism has traditionally been problematic, but once green committment to democracy has proven to be firm enough, the search for that model of democracy more suitable for t...

How should open agent societies be organized? Should they be democracies, and, if so, what types of democracy? We present three normative models of democracy from political philosophy and consider their relevance for the engineering of open multi-agent systems: democracy as wise rule by an elite; democracy as the exercise of rational consumer choices by voters; and democracy as deliberative dec...

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...

The environmental benefits of deliberative democracy are increasingly cited, but not well understood. Nor are the processes involved in arriving at deliberated policy preferences in contrast to those under the status quo. Analysis of the Far North Queensland Citizens’ Jury (FNQCJ) reveals that the difference reflects as much a move away from a non-deliberative status quo as toward a deliberativ...