The Future of Deliberative Democracy in Light of its Expanding Engagements

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy provides an occasion to reflect on where this field has gone over the past two decades, with a view to where it can and should go in the future. One striking finding from the Handbook is that deliberative democracy has been ‘discovered’ (if not always by that name) in multiple areas that were sometimes loosely if at all connected with each other. These areas include not just political theory and philosophy, but also law, international relations, negotiation, political psychology, interdisciplinary environmental studies, media studies, planning, science and technology studies, development studies, and communications. The purpose of this roundtable is to reflect upon the core of deliberative democracy in light of actual and potential engagements that are now revealed. What do they reinforce, and what do they call into question? For example, how should we now think about the role of publics in deliberative systems in light of the identification of the importance of cultural cognition by psychologists (judgments about facts and arguments are processed through identity) and the way that cultural cognition can be both reinforced and undermined by different social media technologies? How do the aesthetics of deliberative practices identified by planning scholars affect the core question of how deliberative communication should be defined? What does that mean for the deliberative generation of political legitimacy? Does biosemiotics enable new ways of thinking about how deliberative human systems can be located more effectively in communicative non-human (and trans-human) systems? These and other specific questions can be connected to orient reflection on the condition of and prospects for deliberative democracy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

Presenters

• Andre Bächtiger Universitat Luzern

• John S. Dryzek University of Canberra

• Mark E. Warren University of British Columbia

• Simone Chambers University of California, Irvine

• Nicole Curato University of Canberra

• ANTONIO FLORIDIA TUSCANY REGION