There is No Pill for Deliberation: Explaining Discourse Quality in Post‐conflict Communities

Recent experimental research suggests that ordinary citizens are capable of behaving in a democratic and deliberative way in controversial political debates, when given the right instructions. In this study, we test the potential of such instructions in contexts where levels of polarization, conflict and social marginalization are high. Using a randomized controlled experimental design, we test the effect of encouraging members of marginalized and conflict‐affected communities in Colombia to live up to the deliberative ideal, including free participation, mutual respect, justification of arguments, and contributing to the common good. Results indicate that deliberative instructions have a positive effect on intervention levels, but fail to increase discourse quality. We also find that socio‐economic differences (especially education and gender), as well as inter‐group trust dynamics, explain much of the variation in discourse quality. Promoting deliberative democracy under unfavorable conditions might therefore require a combination of short‐term policy measures aimed at increasing communal trust, long‐term efforts to improve schooling levels, and ensuring constraint‐free participation. There is, however, no treatment yet that can ensure deliberation success.     

Deliberative Capacity in the Political and Civic Sphere

In an evolving deliberative system, a crucial question is how deliberation of ordinary citizens differs from that of professional politicians. This study compares the deliberative capacity of citizens and political elites on exactly the same issue, namely a direct democratic initiative in Switzerland on the expulsion of criminal immigrants. In concrete, I perform a quantitative content analysis of the quality of citizen deliberation in an online poll and compare this to the quality of deliberation in representative politics, namely in the non‐public committee and public floor debates in the Swiss parliament. The findings show that political elites reach much higher levels of justification rationality than ordinary citizens, but achieve lower levels in terms of respect. I conclude that citizen deliberation, while useful as an advisory tool, cannot replace serious deliberative scrutiny in representative politics.     

Family Disputes: Diversity in Defining and Measuring Deliberation

Interdisciplinary deliberative research has grown tremendously over the last decade. Theorists are attending more carefully to the findings of empirical research. And empiricists are framing their research in ways that are tailored to track normative‐theoretical concerns. The recent surge in empirical work on deliberation, however, has led to a huge proliferation of research designs, general measurement strategies, operational criteria, and even definitions of the phenomenon. The diversity in these approaches has become sufficiently great that it seems worthwhile to step back and take stock lest the expanding deliberative research community dissipate its energies in an ironic lack of effective communication across theoretical and methodological approaches. I survey the main sources of theoretical diversity among normative theories of deliberation, along with the diversity of basic strategies for measuring deliberation that follow from them.     

Deliberation and Complexity of Thinking. Using the Integrative Complexity Scale to Assess the Deliberative Quality of Minipublics

The quality of deliberative conversations are dependent on citizens compliance with deliberative norms yet there is a lack of methods to assess norm compliance in discussions. Here, the psychological construct of complexity of thinking is claimed to conceptually correspond to the deliberative conversational ideal and adopted as a measurement of deliberative norm compliance. The hypothesis that citizens' complexity of thinking increases as a result of participation in deliberative conversations was tested in a minipublic case study in Sweden. Participants' complexity of thinking was assessed before and after deliberation by responding to an open‐ended question about the topic of debate. Manual coding was used to rate participants integrative complexity. The result confirms the hypothesis, which serves as an indicator of deliberative quality. The study also demonstrates that women get higher increases in complexity, as do highly agreeable individuals and those who hold more liberal views. The findings demonstrate the potential usefulness of integrative complexity as a measurement of deliberative quality.     

Scaling up Deliberation: Testing the Potential of Mini‐Publics to Enhance the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens

This paper tests the possibility of embedding the benefits of minipublic deliberation within a wider voting public. We test whether a statement such as those derived from a Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) can influence voters who did not participate in the pre‐referendum minipublic deliberation. This experiment was implemented in advance of the 2018 Irish referendum on blasphemy, one of a series of social‐moral referendums following the recommendations of a deliberative assembly. This is the first application of a CIR‐style voting aid in a real world minipublic and referendum outside of the US and also the first application to what is principally a moral question. We found that survey respondents exposed to information about the minipublic and its findings significantly increased their policy knowledge. Further, exposing respondents to minipublic statements in favour and against the policy measure increased their empathy for the other side of the policy debate.     

Groups and Deliberation

We present a group‐based approach to the study of deliberation. Deliberation occurs in groups, yet many studies of deliberation do not take the group as a unit of analysis. We argue that group composition and the attendant social dynamics to which they give rise are an important aspect of deliberation. We offer several examples of ways to study these effects, including the interaction of gender composition and the group's decision rule in the context of an experimental study of decisions about justice, the effect of racial composition in simulated juries, and the effect of ideological composition in local meetings. We examine the consequences of these factors on a variety of outcomes, including individuals' private opinion, individuals' behaviour, and group decisions. In conclusion we discuss the implications that group effects have for empirical and normative theories of deliberation.     

When War Adversaries Talk: The Experimental Effect of Engagement Rules on Postconflict Deliberation

A set of discussion groups including leftist ex‐guerrillas and rightist ex‐paramilitaries in Colombia shows the limits for democratic deliberation in postconflict societies, but also points to ways that outcomes closer to the deliberative ideal might be obtained. A total of 342 ex‐combatants agreed to sit down and talk politics under a number of experimental conditions, using three different protocols of engagement. Results show that consensus rule fosters simultaneously a more reasoned and common‐good–oriented, and less self‐interested type of discussion when compared to majority rule and unstructured “free talk.” Nevertheless, while it might be desirable to promote a better quality of deliberation in divided societies, it does not necessarily prevent antagonists’ tendency to polarize.     

Referendums Are Never Merely Referendums: On the Need to Make Popular Vote Processes More Deliberative

While there is much to command about Cheneval and el‐Wakil's ( 2018 ) proposal in favor of a nuanced and fine‐grained approach to popular vote processes as well as their specific defense of optional, bottom‐up, and binding referendums as democratic supplements to our existing representative institutions, I argue that their approach does not pay sufficient attention to the pre‐voting phase of the process that has to do with the laundering of raw preferences into generalized and informed ones, namely deliberation. I offer two suggestions to render the voting occuring in referenda more deliberative, namely the pre‐voting use of what I call “open mini‐publics” and that of Citizens’ Initiative Review. I also defend the use of top‐down and mandatory referenda in the context of a more open and technologically empowered deliberative democracy.     

Institutional Foundations of Legislative Turnover: A Comparative Analysis of the Swiss Cantons

Abstract: The rate of turnover within parliaments remains an understudied area of research. The present paper contributes to filling this gap by presenting the first comparable macro‐level data on legislative turnover in the 26 Swiss cantonal legislatures. In examining the strikingly different levels of turnover in sub‐national Swiss parliaments between 1993 and 2011, the focus is on politico‐institutional features. Multilevel models reveal that two hitherto neglected institutional variables are correlated with legislative turnover. In addition to the reduction of parliamentary size, we find the strength of a cantonal parliament to affect turnover rates on the Swiss sub‐national level. Moreover, we show that proportional representation significantly promotes parliamentary elite circulation. Among the non‐institutional covariates, we find that electoral volatility is also relevant in explaining legislative turnover rates.     

Strength through Weakness: State Executive Power and Federal Reform in Austria

Due to the absence of a strong constitutional veto player, comparative research uses to classify Austria as country with weak federal structures, occasionally even as a “federation without federalism”. From an institutional perspective, the assessment is definitely correct, in particular with regard to the nearly insignificant status of the second chamber Bundesrat. Apart from constitutional provisions, however, there are informal forces at work in decision‐making processes. Our thesis is that any approach ignoring the fact that the nominal constitution is paralleled by a real one falls short. Instead, we focus on the Conference of State Governors which, though not established by law, is a strong player in Austria's multi‐layered system qualifying the picture of “weak” federalism. The paper gives on overview of origin and function of the conference and its ambivalent role in making up for the shortcomings of the federal structures. Taking recent attempts of reorganizing fiscal equalization between states and federation as an example, the need of reforming the allocation of rights and duties between the different levels and, at the same time, the obstacles blocking the reform is outlined and analyzed.     

Contested Territoriality: Ethnic Challenges to Colombia's Territorial Regimes

This article studies ethnic social movement autonomy claims in three regions of Colombia. It maintains that place‐based and regime‐specific political processes condition institutional change affecting common property regimes. The article finds that to assert local self‐determination and territorial control, ethnic social movements (a) respond to territorial regimes threatening local autonomy; (b) use innovative tactics to negotiate autonomy; and (c) engage in deliberation to redefine identities and understand the conditions limiting local autonomy.     

Why Give Reason? Measuring Arguing and Bargaining in Survey Research

This article addresses the question of how to define, operationalise and measure empirically the concepts of arguing and bargaining, which are central to the normative theories of deliberative democracy. It points at, and proposes a solution to, one particularly difficult problem with respect to operationalisation, namely the distinction between arguing and cooperative forms of bargaining. The key to capturing this distinction is to look not only at whether, but also at why, actors give reasons for their positions. Motivations partly define arguing and bargaining as types of social decision procedure and it is difficult for researchers within the “empirical turn” of deliberative democratic theory to distinguish the two without studying the motives of the actors. The most straightforward way of analysing motives is asking people about them in interviews. An illustration of how the survey method can be used in practise is given from an ongoing research project on the Council of the European Union.     

The impact of organisational attributes on political participation: results of a multi‐level survey from Switzerland

Abstract: The notion of civil society associations as schools of democracy has resulted in models of political participation that place an emphasis on membership in civic associations as a means of developing personal skills that are conducive to political participation. These suppositions seem well established. It is still contested, however, to what extent the particular characteristics of the associations that offer such membership have an impact on civic engagement. Expanding recent research that mainly builds on group characteristics aggregated from the characteristics of the associations’ members, we apply the Swiss part of a unique multi‐level data set, the CID‐data, which provides information about approx. 1000 activists from about 400 associations. This data allows us to measure group characteristics, such as the function of an association and its connection to the local elite, directly and thus provides us with a special opportunity for a multi‐level analysis of activists nested in organisations.     

Emile Durkheim zwischen Republikanismus und deliberativer Demokratie

Emile Durkheim has written only a few sociological texts on democracy, but they seem to remain important both for neo-republican theories and for the idea of deliberative democracy. The paper tries to explain this paradox through a reconstruction of Durkheim’s conception of political democracy, which implies three channels of communication: within the state, between the state and civil society and within civil society. The first one is the only one which rests upon deliberation, in the two meanings of this word in French (collective discussion and decision). The paternalist dimension of Durkheim’s conception clearly appears in the way he understands the typical pathologies of democracy. This paternalist dimension is also to be found in neo-republican theories. Conversely, the absence of the notion of public sphere distances Durkheim from the concept of deliberative democracy, even though he develops a non-substantialist notion of democracy and gives an important role to reflection in political communication. However, discussing Durkheim makes it possible to underline some of the problems and challenges which a conception of deliberative democracy has to face.     

The ‘New Right' Vote: An Analysis of the Gender Gap in the Vote Choice for the SVP

Studying the Swiss national elections 2003, we find a pronounced gender gap in the SVP vote ‐ women are significantly less likely to vote for this party than are men. In order to explain this gender gap, this article combines two innovative approaches. On the one hand, it links the literature on gender gaps with research on the New Right. On the other, it makes a distinction between the conditional and compositional effects of explanatory factors. Our analysis reveals that conditional effects are of greater relevance than compositional ones. Explanatory factors regularly applied in research on the New Right have a conditional effect inasmuch as they only have an effect on male voters, but cannot explain the behaviour of women. This, in turn, also highlights the importance of a gender‐specific focus for further research.     

The Ends of Deliberation: Meta‐consensus and Inter‐subjective Rationality as Ideal Outcomes

Normative deliberative theory has contributed much to an understanding of ideal procedural standards, but there is considerable uncertainty regarding the appropriate nature of desired deliberative outcomes. In this paper we identify two inter‐related concepts of meta‐consensus and inter‐subjective rationality as outcomes that an authentic deliberative process ought to produce. Importantly, these deliberative ends are consistent with ideal deliberative procedure. They are also empirically tractable, where preference transformation can be described in terms of underlying values, and judgments. Methods for assessing deliberative ends are provided and demonstrated using a case study.     

Social Processes of Antagonism and Synergy in Deliberating Groups

The first goal of this article is to explain the social and psychological mechanisms inherent in reaching an agreement within groups with highly divergent initial opinions. The second goal is to diagnose possible antagonistic processes in such groups. The empirical data used were obtained from recordings of focus group interviews, conducted with parents of school age children discussing the issue of sexual education in schools. The results suggest that revealing world views that justify claims made in the debate can foster agreement when the following conditions are met: (1) There exists at least some common ground in the group to serve as a starting point for agreement in other areas; (2) The articulation of different world views is not negatively evaluated or diminished by others in the group; (3) Disputants argue in their opponents' way of thinking. Another result observed is that processes other than rational analyses of the controversy can take place and can lead to agreement.     

Reshaping EU Attitudes? The Case of Social Democratic and Radical Left Parties in Spain and Italy

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, the issue of European integration has become increasingly salient in many European polities. The European left has adopted a different stance toward European integration, both in terms of economic and welfare‐state integration. On the one hand, radical left parties (RLPs) have always opposed a process of integration dominated by neoliberal logic; on the other hand, the social democratic parties (SDPs) have appeared as one of the main pro‐EU party families, identifying the EU as a privileged space in which to promote the building of a European social model. In this paper, we propose a binary comparison between RLPs and SDPs in Italy and Spain with a qualitative content analysis methodology. Our results show that albeit the crisis brought SDPs closer to a Eurocritical stance vis‐à‐vis the social‐Europe, this dimension along with the political integration are still dividing issues for the RLPs and SDPs families.     

Does Associational Involvement Spur Political Integration? Political Interest and Participation of Three Immigrant Groups in Zurich

This article looks at the determinants of the political integration of migrants at the local level, focusing on two dimensions of political integration: political interest (attitudinal dimension) and political participation (behavioral dimension). Based on a representative survey among Italians, Kosovars, and Turks in the city of Zurich, we tested the thesis advanced by the social capital approach which posits a link between membership in voluntary associations and political integration. Our findings suggest that membership in voluntary associations favors the political integration of the three groups under investigation. Furthermore, we find an impact of both ethnic and cross‐ethnic membership. However, while the effect of associational involvement on the behavioral dimension of political integration is strong and consistent across national groups, the attitudinal dimension displays a weaker and differential impact. Political attitudes and socio‐demographic characteristics play a less important role, except for the effect of the former on political interest, and also tend to have a differential impact on the three groups.