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The idea of citizens being mere spectators who "watch" politics is widespread in public and academic debates. Scholarship in relation to democratic theory tends to see spectatorship as a state in which citizens are politically uninterested, isolated, and passive. Although this understanding aptly captures the problems about the idea of spectatorship, it is only a partial awareness and prevents us from seeing that positive forms of spectatorship are also possible. I show that positive spectatorship occurs when citizens show an interest in one or more political problems and, together with others, strive to understand them better. I consider the distinctive elements of this form of spectatorship characterized by careful observance, relationality, and proactivity. I argue that it is normatively desirable, and I reflect on the ways in which positive spectatorship helps thinking about democratizing politics. Relatedly, I also revisit the theatrical metaphor of politics, which is often associated to the concept of spectatorship as something negative for democracy. I argue that, when combined with a proper understanding of spectatorship, the theatrical metaphor can be used originally to envisage ways forward in the democratization of our societies.

Aim: Explore the use of deliberative valuation to elicit relative weights for a set of capabilities identified as being important and relevant to those close to patients receiving supportive care at the end of life. Methods: Focus groups, involving the general UK population (n = 38) and policy-makers (n = 29) with experience of, and influence on, priorities for end of life care. Public participants completed two valuation tasks (budget pie and visual analogue scale (VAS)) individually, discussed their responses, and then recorded a final (individual) response. Policy-makers completed the VAS tasks in a separate series of focus groups. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of participants’ responses are reported. Results: Individual values were aggregated to form relative weights for the capabilities. Capabilities given greatest weighting were “good communication between care providers and close persons” and “practical support for close persons”. The quantitative impact of deliberation on weights overall was negligible, but qualitative findings indicated that disclosure of personal experiences did appear to prompt others to consider issues from new perspectives. Discussion: Deliberative valuation was found to be a potentially feasible method for generating weights. However, further consideration needs to be given as to how to optimise recruitment whilst ensuring that participants actively engage with the task.

Attempting to connect theoretical arguments for the primacy of ethics in teachers’ practice to real life experience we interviewed fifteen teachers from Greece and Iceland.The stories they told wer...

Many democratic countries around the globe guarantee some type of representation for various groups of recognized minorities and to various extents. Those governments enable and/or incentivize thei...

Cross-cutting communication among people of differing political views is essential because it embeds opportunities for deliberation in everyday life. Prior research indicates that people tend to av...

Accounts of public deliberation often refer to the notion of ‘facts’ or ‘accurate information.’ These epistemological notions, however, lack a stable, reliable definition used in research across di...

The possibility of predetermined choices raises a challenge for Causal Decision Theory [Ahmed 2014b]. Sandgren and Williamson [2021] have recently proposed a response—Selective Causal Decision Theo...

This article proposes an analytical framework on China’s engagement with international ideas that stresses the crucial role of Chinese bureaucracies’ deliberation. It argues that bureaucratic delib...

With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so-called mixed deliberations, is increas...

Democracy is in trouble. We have been reminded of its fragility. The rise of antidemocratic sentiment and actions highlight the extent to which autocratization endangers the lives of citizens, now ...

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decision-making, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the fi...

New media introduce mechanics in the news consumption and deliberation of public agenda capable of disrupting the democratic process's normative assumptions (echo chambers, filter bubbles). However...

Redundant deliberation is a cognitively demanding form of inertia in which a decision-maker fails to gain any additional advantage by thinking about a problem compared to the risk of failing to act and deal with the problem. It most commonly occurs where there is no standard operating procedure (to help provide guidance) or where experience is lacking. This article argues that training interventions, including ‘grim storytelling’, must focus on supporting decision-makers’ ability to imagine rare, high-impact events, and construct ‘least–worst’ scenarios to help them anticipate, prevent, mitigate, adapt to and recover from such threats.

Due to their potential influence on the individual and societal formation of opinions, the quality of online discussions has been a subject of widespread interest. From a deliberative perspective, rational argumentation and critical reflection are central criteria for good discourse. Drawing on research on the perception of arguments and the conditions of disagreement, we ask how argument strength is linked to the likelihood of receiving (reasoned) disagreement and whether the discussion norms and technical features set by the news organizations moderate this effect. Based on a manual content analysis of 14.690 user comments on nine German news websites, we find that comments with a higher argument strength are more likely to receive disagreement in general and reasoned disagreement in particular. Further, the levels of (reasoned) disagreement are higher on platforms with strong discussion norms and supporting technical features. The results show that the quality of a discussion can be related to both users’ argumentation and the decisions of the news organizations.

Climate Change Acts (CCAs) have become a key legislative tool to mitigate climate change. While various case studies have shown that ambition varies greatly, little is known about why this is the c...

Non-native tree plantations have become a significant presence on the landscape of northeastern Argentina. This study investigated perceptions of eucalyptus plantations in two Argentine communities...

This paper revisits the core concept of representation in light of democratic innovations and more specifically in the context of minipublics. We disentangle how representativeness is currently add...

A variety of forms and practices of citizenship in China has been well studied, but, unfortunately, studies on industrial citizenship are missing. Moreover, while there has been a growing literatur...

The rapid development of human genome editing (HGE) techniques evokes an urgent need for forward-looking deliberation regarding the aims, processes, and governance of research. The framework of anticipatory governance (AG) may serve this need. This article reviews scholarly discourse about HGE through an AG lens, aiming to identify gaps in discussion and practice and suggest how AG efforts may fill them. Discourse on HGE has insufficiently reckoned with the institutional and systemic contexts, inputs, and implications of HGE work, to the detriment of its ability to prepare for a variety of possible futures and pursue socially desirable ones. More broadly framed and inclusive efforts in foresight and public engagement, focused not only upon the in-principle permissibility of HGE activities but upon the contexts of such work, may permit improved identification of public values relevant to HGE and of actions by which researchers, funders, policymakers, and publics may promote them.

Based on a comparative content analysis of political talk in three popular Chinese online forums (government-run, commercial-lifestyle, and commercial-topical), this paper investigates how the private and public spheres are connected thru everyday talk about childcare concerns. Compared to the government-run (party-state) forum, the nonpolitical (lifestyle and topical) forums created open and inclusive ‘third spaces’ for citizens to engage in child welfare politics. In such spaces, the reason, rule-based deliberation was not the dominant communicative practice. Rather, political (narrative) acts of complaining and sharing personal concerns – grounded in citizens’ life experiences – were the norm, capturing and recognizing public problems in the private sphere. We argue that to understand the nature of political talk in Chinese third spaces, communicative acts that have not been considered central to deliberative reasoning, such as complaining and sharing personal concerns should be given more normative importance.

Although selective avoidance, commonly practiced as unfriending and muting on social media, has been assumed to be at odds with the democratic ideal of deliberation, academic literature says little...

Quality deliberation is essential for societies to address the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic effectively and legitimately. Critics of deliberative and participatory democracy are highly skeptical that most citizens can engage with such complex issues in good circumstances and these are far from ideal circumstances. The need for rapid action and decision-making is a challenge for inclusivity and quality of deliberation. Additionally, policy responses to the virus need to be even more co-ordinated than usual, which intensifies their complexity. The digitalisation of the public sphere may be seen as a further challenge to deliberating. Furthermore, these are stressful and emotional times, making a considered judgement on these issues potentially challenging. We employ a modified version of the Discourse Quality Index to assess the deliberative quality in two facilitated synchronous digital platforms to consider aspects of data use in light of COVID 19. Our study is the first to perform a comprehensive, systematic and in-depth analysis of the deliberative capacity of citizens in a pandemic. Our evidence indicates that deliberation can be resilient in a crisis. The findings will have relevance to those interested in pandemic democracy, deliberative democracy in a crisis, data use and digital public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Javnost-The Public is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper suggests the conception of the ‘political’ in Aristotle’s Politics as an alternative to the Hobbesian conception of the ‘political’. More specifically, I will develop two arguments in th...

Scholarly attention to authoritarian legislatures is steadily growing, and recent research suggests that there is substantial lawmaking activity and deliberation within these bodies. Does such acti...

Scholars of citizenship education have long regarded deliberation as the default framework for democratic discussion in the classroom and beyond. Turning to the history and theory of rhetoric, we q...

Participatory practices are prominent strategies for increasing the legitimacy and effectiveness of resource commons governance. Despite increases in participatory practices legitimacy of such governance is in decline. Remaining commons are sites of conflict echoing wider disillusionment in democratic governance across mature liberal democracies. Much participatory governance literature argues that more involvement of citizens in deliberation and decision-making is the solution, turning away from representative practices to strengthen direct participation in commons governance. In this paper we draw on seminal work in political representation theory to examine legitimacy and political agency in participatory governance practices. We develop a conceptual lens drawing on key elements of: Hannah Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation; Michael Saward’s Representative Claim; and, Vivan Schmidt’s throughput model of legitimacy. The lens comprises three ‘conditions’ for analyzing how political agency of participants is constituted through institutional processes: authorization, dissent and exit, and accountability. We argue that this conceptual lens can serve the participatory turn in commons governance by enabling explicit consideration of the links between political participation and representation as foundations of democratic legitimacy.

This article synthesizes previous literature on consumption, surrounding matters of aesthetic deliberation to offer a conceptual discussion of consumer-cultural aestheticization processes. Our main...

This paper considers resource coordination in production systems featuring the presence of enterprises and organizations pursuing social, health-related, educational, cultural, and environmental aims, or social enterprises (SEs). The resource coordination problem is one of allocating and distributing resources towards these aims. By their very nature, these goals are very close to the Polanyian idea of the primacy of society over the self-regulating market. We ask what the specificities of organisations that pursue social aims are, and what coordination mechanisms underpin their production. The premise is that individuals are driven by plural motivations, including pro-social motivations besides self-interested ones, thus requiring a plurality of coordination mechanisms. The paper suggests that SEs make principal use of cooperative pacts based on norms of reciprocity, but include also market and state-led coordination, both at organisational and systemic levels. We consider specific institutional solutions in support of cooperation and reciprocity. These are: combined rules on profit and asset distribution, surplus accumulation and redistribution, and multi-stakeholding.

This paper presents findings from a study of high school students (N = 165) engaged in discussions of controversial political issues within Close Up Washington’s civic education program. We report ...

Besides large-scale rallies on the streets, the Chilean estallido social that commenced in October 2019, was noteworthy by the sudden emergence throughout the country of local-based and largely imp...

Robust stakeholder engagement in health research requires broad communicative integration, not only of patients but also other stakeholders such as health system leaders, clinicians, and researcher...

The text presents the results of the external evaluation of the project: ‘Community Radio for Peace and Coexistence’ (CRPC), implemented between 2015 and 2017 by the community media network RESANDE...

This article situates spoken word poetry as a discussion-based practice for the social studies classroom. Similar to traditional forms of discussion like debate and deliberation, spoken word poetry...

What role can deliberative democracy mechanisms perform in relation to policy design? This article reports findings from an experiment which was conducted to answer that question. The experiment brought together a random sample of the public who debated public policy questions online and face-to-face. Three key findings emerged. First, deliberative democracy mechanisms are different from more typical participatory policy design tools because they offer something more dynamic than a ‘snapshot’ of public opinion. Second, public deliberation can contribute evidence to policy analysis processes that is more considered because it emerges from a process of citizen sensemaking. Finally, unique forms of policy relevant data can be produced by analyzing the justifications that citizens use to convince others during policy deliberations. These findings suggest that allowing citizens to “talk policy” through deliberative democracy mechanisms can produce unique forms of policy knowledge.

The core teachings of the Baha’i Faith are often summarized as the “Oneness of God, the Oneness of Religion, and the Oneness of Humanity.” Can such principles resonate with a pluralism based on the...

The word crisis comes from Ancient Greek κρίσις which can be translated as ‘power of distinguishing’ and is related to modern κρίνω which means ‘to pick out’. This is apt, because the pandemic of 2...

How closely should parliament ‘mirror’ the people it represents? Current preoccupations with the effective representation of diversity – gender and racial diversity especially – take it as read tha...

Public value management emerged as a response to the limitations of new public management, to incorporate notions of democracy and inclusive dialogue and deliberation. However, the contestation aro...

There have been two parallel views regarding the role of voting in deliberation. The first is that deliberation before the fabrication of balloting was completely devoid of voting. The second is th...

Despite increased recognition that a higher education sports coaching qualification plays an important role in shaping coaches’ ethical decision-making, few scholars have considered what ethics to ...

Mini-publics are institutions that invite a small group of citizens to deliberate on a specific political issue. Deliberation scholars find them attractive because they use random sampling techniqu...

The economic populism said to be represented by the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump and the breakdown in trade and investment following the COVID-19 outbreak have rekindled interest in the redistributive consequences of trade liberalisation. Against this backdrop, the authors in this Special Section consider the broader drivers of inclusion and exclusion in trade governance, focusing on the trade politics of Canada, the European Union and the United States. This short introduction spells out the importance of considering the interplay between redistributive and deliberative drivers of inclusion and exclusion in producing trade policy contestation. It focuses on the three key drivers of inclusion and exclusion that the authors subsequently draw on in their contributions: discursive factors; institutional mechanisms and inter-scalar and multi-level dynamics.

Students engage in a pedagogy that fosters deliberation on civic issues that illicit different perspectives relevant to a community through a semester-long project that culminates in the execution ...

Planners often use the phrase ‘hard-to-reach’ to describe youth, people of color, and people with low incomes, people from whom they need information but are unsuccessful in reaching. Consideration...