We quantify the effect of pre-vote deliberation on the decisions of US appellate courts. We estimate a model of strategic voting with incomplete information in which judges communicate before casting their votes, and then compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no pre-vote communication. The model has multiple equilibria, and judges’ preferenc...

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Abstract This paper describes and analyses patterns of 'governance conversation' observed in interactions on email lists that aim to support local, direct ...

This paper presents an argumentation based framework to support an agent’s deliberation process for drawing conclusions under a given policy. The argumentative policy of the agent is able to take into account the roles agents can have within a context pertaining to an environment of interaction. The framework uses roles and context to define policy preferences at different levels of deliberatio...

A formal two-phase model of democratic policy deliberation is presented, in which in the first phase sufficient and necessary criteria for proposals to be accepted are determined (the ‘admissible’ criteria’) and in the second phase proposals are made and evaluated in light of the admissible criteria resulting from the first phase. Argument schemes for both phases are defined and formalised in a...

This article explores the assemblage of voting: electoral systems, Direct Recording Electronic voting machines (DREs), ballots and ballot booths, and the central role of secrecy. Its aim is to argue that the contemporary political subjectivity of deliberation is intimately tied up with this assemblage. Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how controversies around DREs can reveal t...