With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so-called mixed deliberations, is increasing too. While these are important steps towards more systems, deliberation setting nonetheless introduces certain risks regarding equality. Citizens have different capacities, which could affect proc...

In this paper we introduce the notion of decisiontheoretic deliberation, which studies the relation between classical game and decision theory on the one hand, and agent theories of deliberation on the other hand. We aim at modelling the commonsense notion of intention in systems which are self-aware of their bounded reasoning power concerning their decisions. We propose a transparent decision ...

BACKGROUND Recent work on cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder has focused on the roles played by various aspects of self-perception. In particular, moral self-ambivalence has been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive phenomena. AIMS In this study we used an experimental task to investigate whether artificially priming moral self-ambivalence would increase...

In February of 2001, Australia hosted its second national Deliberative Poll titled, Australia Deliberates: Reconciliation-Where from Here? As a social experiment, this Australian Deliberative Poll aimed to gauge the opinion of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous representatives on Reconciliation. Australian Reconciliation is a national cause in search of attaining cultural harmony and equality amongs...

We study the e¤ects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groups’preference distributions (between common and con‡icting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). Without deliberation, di¤erent institutions generate signi…cantly di¤erent outcomes, tracking the theoretical comparati...

In this paper, I argue that many recent interpretations of John Dewey’s vision of democracy distort that vision by fi ltering it through the prism of contemporary deliberative democratic theories. An earlier attempt to defend Dewey’s theory of moral deliberation is instructive for understanding the nature and function of this fi lter. In James Gouinlock’s essay “Dewey’s Th eory of Moral Deliber...

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...

This paper describes and analyses distinct patterns of 'governance conversation' observed in interactions on a discussion list that aims to support local, direct, governance in a geographically colocated community in South Africa. Although each pattern relates to governance, making 'binding decisions', which has been seen as a key attribute of deliberative democratic processes, is almost entire...

We present an empirical simulation-based study of the use of valuebased argumentation in two-party deliberation dialogues, investigating the impact that argumentation can have on the quality of the outcome reached. Our simulation allows us to vary the number of values, actions and arguments that appear in the system; we investigate how the behaviour of the system changes as these parameters var...

In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical. How then can we design a mechanism preferably decentralized, simple, scalable, and not requiri...