Within democratic theory, rational choice theories have for some time been challenged by approaches of ‘deliberative democracy’. I argue that the central analytical contrast between these theories consists in their differing focus on preferences: while rational choice takes them to be stable for the time frame in question and exogenous to the decision process to be analysed, deliberative theory...

Deliberative democracy by the people themselves is a distinctive form of democratic practice. It can be distinguished from deliberative democracy practiced by elites or representatives as well as from other forms of democracy that do not emphasize deliberation. In this article I explore ways this kind of democracy can be realized and then inserted into our current democratic institutions. The i...

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this paper, we present a branching-time possible-worlds model for representing and reasoning about, beliefs, goals, intentions, time, actions, probabilities, and payo...

Individuals often form more reasonable judgments from complex information after a period of distraction vs. deliberation. This phenomenon has been attributed to sophisticated unconscious thought during the distraction period that integrates and organizes the information (Unconscious Thought Theory; Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006). Yet, other research suggests that experiential processes are st...

This article takes issue with Steiner's polemic against the usage of “deliberation” in rational choice scholarship. I show that i) the reproach that rationalists do not allow for preference change is mistaken; ii) that Steiner does not sufficiently distinguish between normative and positive contributions and iii) that he shields his preferred model against systematic comparisons with strategic ...

It seems to be an established fact that social media multiplies the possibilities for civil society express its points of view and intervene in debate about matters public interest. However, this greater participation political discourse through such platforms does not always translate into improvement quality democratic deliberation. The aim research is examine characteristics comments convers...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how experiencing virtual violence might lead to changes in our moral judgments through a process of rational deliberation. This perspective is proposed as a complementary alternative to the dominant tendency in current research to exclusively focus on how virtual violence affects our emotions as behavioural dispositions. I will propose and consider a rati...