The Empirical Study of Deliberative Democracy: Setting a Research Agenda
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The Empirical Study of Deliberative Democracy: Setting a Research Agenda Shawn Rosenberg University of California, 4119 Social Sciences Plaza A, Mail Code: 5100, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Deliberative democracy has emerged as a leading concern of political theory and its principles have guided over a 1,000 experiments in citizen participation in local governance. Despite its importance, very little systematic empirical research has been conducted. Here an attempt is made to enumerate the key questions that should guide empirical research on the deliberative capacities of ordinary citizens, the qualities of the deliberative processes in which they participate and the effects of deliberation on collective outcomes and on individual participants. The paper closes with a discussion of the likely results of this research and their implications for a possible reconstruction of the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. Acta Politica (2005) 40, 212–224. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500105 Keywords: deliberation; democracy; political psychology; participation
Introduction Despite strong theoretical interest among political theorists and a growing reliance on deliberative practices across many of the Western democracies, relatively little systematic research has been done on citizen deliberation.1 With interest in this topic now emerging among empirically oriented political scientists, my aim in this paper is to offer direction for this nascent research effort. In so doing, I suggest that the research must begin by identifying the key assumptions of deliberative democratic theory and treating these assumptions as hypotheses to be explored. This must be followed by an attempt to use any disconfirming results of the empirical research as a basis for reconstructing deliberative democratic theory and for offering new guidelines for deliberative democratic practice. At its core, deliberative democratic theory depends on a very specific psychology of the citizen participant and a complementary social psychology of discourse. A key psychological assumption of deliberative democratic theory is that if an institutional arrangement is made that creates the opportunity for free and equal deliberation, the citizen participants will be able to engage one another in the manner required. At issue here is the capacities and inclinations of the individuals involved. Clearly, even the creation of ideal conditions of
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discourse will be a vain exercise if individuals lack the ability to take advantage of the opportunity provided. Furthermore, if individuals have sufficiently limited capacities to understand themselves and their circumstances or to be the authors or their own preferences and aspirations, the individualist emphasis on autonomy of most normative democratic theory is itself called into question. A related and equally critical assumption speaks to the quality of the discursive interaction between individuals. The assumption here is that discou
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