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Rhetorical entrapment plays a key – but often overlooked – role in the theory and practice of international relations. In this article, we develop a new pathway and mechanisms of rhetorical entrapment. Our key argument is that current literature has focused too much on normative forms of rhetorical entrapment. Although insightful, this misses empirical forms of rhetorical entrapment. Drawing on Habermasian theory, we suggest that normative and empirical validity claims give rise to alternate pathways and mechanisms of rhetorical entrapment: the normative pathway encapsulates framing, identity and legitimacy; whereas the empirical pathway is mediated by information, reputation and trust. To explore this theoretical argument, we engage in a plausibility probe of international investment agreement negotiations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with various state negotiators, we find that empirical rhetorical entrapment is pervasive. We document this pathway and mechanisms. We conclude by developing the broader causal and normative implications of our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal (N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys (N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that deliberative theory provides an important contribution in the debate about the legitimacy of an Islamic influence within the British education system. The contribution is a timely one, in light of the tendency to view issues involving Islam and Muslims through the distorting prism of Islamophobia. The contribution of deliberative theory is developed and explained through a constructive comparison with two positions within debates about the legitimacy of religion and the accommodation of minority claims within education: ethical liberalism and ethical pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I argue that we have a non‐inferential way of knowing particular explanations of our own actions and attitudes. I begin by explicating and evaluating Nisbett and Wilson's influential argument to the contrary. I argue that Nisbett and Wilson's claim that we arrive at such explanations of our own actions and attitudes by inference is not adequately supported by their findings because they overlook an important alternative explanation of those findings. I explicate and defend such an alternative explanation of how we can know such explanations in a non‐inferential way, drawing on recent work in the philosophy of self‐knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the scholarship on online deliberation has recently witnessed remarkable growth, most studies have focused on different parts of deliberation, thus neglecting other parts of the theorized process. This paper presents a case study of online deliberation in academia using a framework including three analytical parts: a design fostering deliberation (institutional inputs), the quality of the communication process (communicative throughput), and the expected benefits of deliberation (productive outcomes). Each level addressed in the framework is both rooted in deliberative theory and complemented by empirical findings. Applying the framework to a case study on online deliberation about new PhD guidelines in a German science faculty demonstrates that the framework is viable for empirical research. In analyzing 435 comments and an online survey completed by 230 participants, the case study reveals that if deliberative standards at the institutional input level are met there is considerable deliberative quality at the level of communicative throughput, and expected outcomes could thus emerge. This example makes a case for further online deliberation initiatives in similar contexts such as parties or organizations that must decide on important issues or legally binding norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central goal of this article is to advance the theoretical debate about the relationship between protest actions and public deliberation, problematizing a recent conception that advocates for an analytical conciliation between actions and deliberation and that understands protest as part of the deliberative process. The main conclusion is that theoretical approximation between protest and deliberation is problematic for two main reasons: i) it excessively stretches the concept of deliberation, taking away much of its explanatory power and ii) it eliminates the cleavage between disruptive politics and conventional politics. In this sense, the text seeks to give continuity to a theme that has gained increasing attention from theorists in the deliberative school, questioning what the best way is to think about the relationship between deliberative practices and protest actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages Jacques Rancière's politics of speech. On one familiar story, the ideal of democratic inclusion is betrayed when groups are blocked from participation and thus are rendered voiceless. The normative task, then, is to eliminate these blockages, so as to open the broadest possibilities for unfettered critical dialogue. However, Rancière helps to reveal that deliberative approaches are not sufficiently attuned to democratic processes of marginality or the kind of agency necessary to contest them. The essay, accordingly, intervenes within ongoing debates on dialogue and democracy. By the end, however, I propose that Rancière's model is not fully sensitive to the range of difficulties at play, which means that his model of political agency must be expanded if it is to succeed in its own aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agonist theorists have argued against deliberative democrats that democratic institutions should not seek to establish a rational consensus, but rather allow political disagreements to be expressed in an adversarial form. But democratic agonism is not antagonism: some restriction of the plurality of admissible expressions is not incompatible with a legitimate public sphere. However, is it generally possible to grant this distinction between antagonism and agonism without accepting normative standards in public discourse that saliently resemble those advocated by (some) deliberative democrats? In this paper we provide an analysis of one important aspect of political communication, the use of slippery-slope arguments, and show that the fact of pluralism weakens the agonists' case for contestation as a sufficient ingredient for appropriately democratic public discourse. We illustrate that contention by identifying two specific kinds of what we call pluralism slippery slopes, that is, mechanisms whereby pluralism reinforces the efficacy of slippery-slope arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The judicial supremacy can be characterized as the doctrine that underlies the possibility of the supreme court to say, according with its vision of the constitutional text, what the law is conclusively. This paper assumes that the theory of deliberative democracy, by to postulating a decentralized model of society, constructed intersubjectively through an open discussion among the various political and social actors, can also be used as a critical theory to judicial supremacy. Thus, using the Gargarella studies this article will look, based on his vision of deliberative democracy to demonstrate that judicial supremacy is harmful to democracy, because the it removes citizens from the final decision of most important social issues, and transfers them to a supreme political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender scholars have found that democratization is rarely associated with advances in women’s rights and offer a range of reasons why. This article offers a new explanation that targets the quality of democracy in the leading institutions in the public sphere. The author argues that open and inclusive debate conditions, or women’s access, voice, and capacity for contestation in the legislature, civil society, and the media, enable them to shape debate content and pressure the state to respond with legislative reform. The author tests this claim through a structured, focused comparison of Chile and South Africa during the period prior to the transition to democracy, when the public sphere expanded and debate conditions were dynamic. The author finds that different levels of openness and inclusiveness coincide with different outcomes in women’s rights. This suggests that the quality of democracy in the public sphere shapes women’s rights and that it may shape the outcomes of rights for other marginalized groups and in long-standing democracies as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reviews the potential contribution of deliberative theory and actor-network theory to the practice of social impact assessment (SIA). With reference to a case study of the World Commission on Dams, it argues for an approach to SIA that goes beyond documenting social change and that (1) targets consensus building among those impacted by planned interventions as a basic starting point for social scientific investigation; (2) places greater emphasis on the ways in which peoples' values, aspirations, perceived interests, and political coalitions change throughout the life of a proposal and shape their experience of project outcomes; (3) seeks to unravel the often unstated assumptions about who and what is important that are built into social data and stakeholder representative structures; and (4) challenges the separation of the "social" and the "natural" by fostering a more productive engagement between scientific and lay knowledges about the processes and impacts of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]