Concluding Comments on Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Politics
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Concluding Comments on Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Politics Ju¨rgen Habermas Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Senckenberganlage 31, Frankfurt am Main 60325, Germany.
Acta Politica (2005) 40, 384–392. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500119
I am grateful for the privilege to add some thoughts on the contributions to this volume (although I was not able to participate in the actual conference). Far from being capable of writing a kind of review, my comments only resonate some reactions to the inspiring reading of papers from a field of research I am not familiar with. It will not come as a surprise that I am most satisfied with the operationalization of online Deliberation that D. Janssen and R. Kies extract from Lincoln Dahlberg’s research (2002). One set of criteria for measuring the quality of discourse refers to structural features: the reciprocity of raising and responding to validity claims; the connection of this exchange with justifying reasons; the direct or indirect inclusion of all those affected; and the absence of interfering pressures with the exception of the ‘forceless force of the better argument’. The remaining three criteria concern required dispositions of participants: a reflexive attitude towards one’s own claims and background assumptions; ideal role taking or willingness to take the demands and counterarguments of the others seriously; and sincerity or the absence of manipulation and self-deception. At first glance, it might appear puzzling that a list of criteria for evaluating internet discussions should fit best to my own description and presuppositional analysis of practical discourse (Habermas, 1983, 93–119; 1991, 152–66; 1996a, 56–64). However, issue-oriented chat rooms provide the researcher with selfdefined, weakly institutionalized, spontaneous and rather isolated discourse units, which can be analysed apart from any larger political context. These abstract units invite an empirical analysis of how informal yet focused deliberations deviate from the model of rational discourse. Experimental groups, such as S. Fishkin’s focus groups for deliberative polling, provide another approach to discourse analysis. The conception of rational discourse serves as standard for an evaluation of the cognitive potential of actual communications, in the first case, and as design for the construction of cognitively enhanced communications in the second case.1
Ju¨rgen Habermas Some Comments
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These examples might suggest that ‘rational discourse’ is a kind of philosophical ‘ideal’ belonging to what Rawls calls ‘ideal theory’. This is not how I understand the term. The conception of rational discourse results from the reconstruction of an actual practice and captures just those pragmatic features of a communicative setting that anybody tacitly presupposes once he seriously enters an argumentation in order to check a problematic validity claim by either supporting or denying the truth or rightness of some statement with reasons pro and con. This rather demanding practice of ‘giving and taking reas
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