Deliberation and Forgiveness in the Public Sphere

A common objection to the argument for deliberative democracy is that it cannot provide mechanisms for achieving its ideal of all-inclusiveness. This does, however, not in itself refute the deliberative ideal. In a reading of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida’s writings on forgiveness, we argue that forgiving involves a renegotiation of our enemies and of ourselves. Hereby a renegotiation of the seemingly unbridgeable understandings of who our enemies are can be achieved. Forgiving involves a realisation that we have something in common with our foes. This opens the question: Why did our paths separate? We become puzzled and start to search for reasons. This does not mean that we have to accept ways of life that we detest. But it does mean that we need to be able to articulate counter arguments. Hereby limitations of prevailing understandings of who to include in deliberative processes can be overcome.     

Political Ambivalence as Praxis: The Limits of Consensus in Habermas's Theory of the Public Sphere

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Ko?akowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism.     

Thinking for Thousands: Emerson's Theory of Political Representation in the Public Sphere

This article develops Emerson's theory of representative democracy as it applies to a deliberative public sphere. By highlighting the democratic content of Emerson's thought, this article challenges tradition readings of Emerson that claim his thought to be elitist or antipolitical. According to Emerson, the public sphere is structured by representative individuals who are analogous to those representatives found in electoral institutions. These representatives make public the beliefs and values present in their "constituencies." They deliberate in the name of their constituencies, saying what their constituencies could and would say, were they to also directly engage in such deliberations. Representative individuals are tied to their constituencies through bonds of "sympathy and likeness." The moral consequences of a representative public sphere include the development of a sense of deliberative justice on the part of the citizenry and the reduction of the possibility of domination and oppression by ideologically oriented elites.     

微博设置大众议程及对公共领域建构的研究

主要立足于新的媒介生态环境,从微博在设置大众之议程方面所表现出的强大影响力这一事实出发,探讨微博对公共领域建构的可能性。由于传统媒体受制于单向传播的局限性,其议程设置功能相对于新媒体在逐渐减弱,而微博在设置大众议程上的功效则日益突出。议程设置作为舆论导向的第一个阶段,最终造就了公众舆论,而公共领域就是独立于政治权利之外的公共交往和公共舆论。所以说,微博所表现出的社会公器职能和权力制衡作用使得其具有重新建构哈贝马斯所言之公共领域的可能性。     

Mobilization in the European Public Sphere: The Struggle Over Genetically Modified Organisms

The objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which supporters and opponents at the European Union (EU) level strive to mobilize the public with regard the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). To this end, it addresses two research questions: First, to which concepts do GMO opponents and supporters refer when seeking to mobilize the public? Second, do GMO opponents and supporters differ in the coherence of the concepts they use to attain public mobilization? The empirical findings show that the pro‐GMO coalition is composed of biotechnology companies as well as representatives of Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the World Trade Organization. The anti‐GMO coalition consists of environmental nongovernmental organizations and representatives from most of the EU member states. Altogether, the anti‐GMO coalition has been more coherent in the concepts they invoke in the last few years.     

Self-Reflexivity: A Place for Religion and Spirituality in Public Administration

This article describes an empirical study of a select set of mid-level managers in the federal government. The study examined the participant's capacity to engage in the kind of self-reflexivity that Michael Harmon calls for in his 1995 book Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government. Specifically, it focuses on the reflections of two participants, both of whom asserted a direct relationship between their religious beliefs and their work as public administrators. Three implications for the discipline and practice of public administration are developed.     

Religion, Spirituality, and the Workplace: Challenges for Public Administration

The relationship between religion and politics in the United States is a much-studied academic area, particularly evident in political institutional and behavioral venues such as interest groups, electoral behavior, and political culture. One academic area that has not received much attention is the influence of religion on public administration. Recently, however, public administration scholars have begun to mimic their counterparts in the business world by examining the role of religion and spirituality in the public workplace, especially with regard to organizational performance, ethical behavior patterns, decision making, and the personal spiritual health of employees. This article examines the role and impact of religion and spirituality in the workplace, reviews court cases and political measures regarding religious expression in the public sector, explores a private sector model to explain the interrelationship between religion and spirituality in the public workplace, and challenges public administrators to consider the positive role that religion and spirituality can play in the public workplace.     

Best Laid Plans … The Institutionalisation of Public Deliberation in Scotland

Despite increasing support for participatory and deliberative principles amongst academics, practitioners and parliamentarians alike, efforts to infuse political systems with more inclusive and consensual forms of debate often founder. This article explores this conundrum by examining institutional reforms through the lens of deliberative democracy. More specifically, we scrutinise attempts to institutionalise forms of civic deliberation within the Scottish political system via the Scottish Civic Forum and the Scottish Parliament's committee system. Our analysis tells the story of how these two types of institutional reform, both designed to facilitate the move towards a more participatory and deliberative model of democracy in Scotland, have fared over a ten‐year period. In turn, this analysis allows us to comment on the ways in which deliberative and parliamentary democracy may be integrated.     

The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention

Territorial autonomy is one aspect of power-sharing in multi-ethnic societies. Nevertheless, the multi-ethnic countries of Central and Eastern Europe are still among the most centralised in the European Union. This article analyses the failure of any attempts to establish (symmetric) federalism or (asymmetric) autonomy, creating self-governed regions by the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia. The analysis focuses on the positions of the main parties of the ethnic majorities and the Hungarian minority parties in the two countries. In both cases, the parties representing the Hungarian minorities have favoured territorial autonomy along ethnic lines, but this demand has been rejected by the parties of the ethnic majority. Against the historical legacy of unstable borders, the parties of the ethnic majority argue that territorial autonomy or federalisation might be a first step for a revisionist agenda and separatism. Instead, supported by the European integration, the parties have been able to agree on decentralisation as a half-hearted compromise.     

Democratic Theory and the Public Sphere Project: Rethinking Knowledge,Authority, and Identity

This paper is concerned with the problem of academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the United States. Noting current tendencies for the university to operate as another transnational corporation, the argument targets and probes post-communal professionalism which as a sub-ideology is linked to the dualistic social imaginary of the corporate state. Discussing works by Rieff and Lasch, the critique situates this ideology in the liberal-progressivist middle-class culture that is much more bound to the transnational corporate state's consumer culture than many academics wish to acknowledge. A theoretical critique of the subjectivization of postmodern "resistance" is presented as one way of facilitating democratic Left intellectual interest in pursuing a true "border politics" between academic and general cultures. Disembodied, placeless visions of professionalism must be replaced with perspectives and projects foregrounding agency rather than "identity" and political action rather than "self-fulfillment." Scholars critical of the university's role in corporate globalization should take a lesson from John Dewey's "civic professionalism" and envision a post-professional politics projecting democratic public spheres that connect with recent political forms of grassroots globalization aiming at more sustainable ways of life.     

Federal Jurisprudence in the Public Sphere of the Early Cape Settlement, 1652-1708

This study investigates the tenability off. Wayne Baker's viewsof theological and political federalism and the origins thereofin the thought of Heinrich Bullinger within the jurisprudentialcontext of the early Cape settlement (1652–1708). Mostauthors commenting on the ideological roots of this Dutch settlementof the middle of the seventeenth century advanced the uncriticalnotion that Dutch Calvinism determined the nature of the communityat the Cape. A critical analysis shows that the Reformed approachof federalism, flowing from Henrich Bullinger's views of thecovenant, played a much more fundamental role in this earlyformative phase of typical Cape jurisprudence. This federaljurisprudence provided a vision of legality based on the lawof God and legitimacy involving the whole of society bound tothe precepts in the Decalogue. In the final analysis, the underpinningsof the rule of law applied at the Cape settlement confirm Baker'sconclusions about the fundamental impact Bullinger's federalviews had on the Reformed world of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies.