The Difference in Design: Participatory Budgeting in Brazil and the United States

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is conceptually powerful because it ties the normative values of non-elite participation and deliberation to specific policymaking processes. It is a democratic policymaking process that enables citizens to allocate public monies. PB has spread globally, coming to the United States in 2009. Our analysis shows that the types of institutional designs used in the United States are quite different from the original Brazilian programs. What explains the variation in PB institutional design between Brazil and the United States? Most PB cases in the US are district-level whereas in Brazil, PB cases are mainly municipal. We account for this variation by analyzing the electoral system; configuration of civil society; political moment of adoption; and available resources. We use case study analysis to account for this variation in institutional design. We then assess how the different rule design is likely to create a different set of institutional outcomes

With Habermas against Habermas. Deliberation without Consensus

Habermas’s conception of deliberative democracy combines two concepts—deliberation and consensus—which, I argue, draw his theory in two opposite directions. While deliberation and the focus on communication can be read as a predominantly open element of his theory, consensus stands for closure. The process of deliberation contrasts Habermas’s normative aim of deliberation, i.e., consensus. In other words, a realized consensus (in the strong, monologic formulation that Habermas favors) would put an end to the idea of continuous public justification of validity claims, i.e., deliberation. The article argues that in order to fully use the potential of deliberation in politics, we should leave behind the notion of consensus through deliberation. Instead, understanding should be the telos of deliberation, and voting after deliberation is put forth as the optimal institutional design for decision-making settings

Negotiated Rulemaking for U.S. Higher Education Regulatory Policy: A Process of Deliberative Democracy?

The rulemaking process through which higher education regulatory policy is created in the U.S. Department of Education has received critical attention in recent years. One concern is that this important policymaking process takes place in an agency of unelected officials, sometimes with the help of select interest groups. How, then, does this process maintain its democratic legitimacy? An important aspect of the process – known as negotiated rulemaking – may help to promote democratic legitimacy through open deliberations and broad stakeholder participation. Through the lens of deliberative democratic theory, this article draws on dozens of interviews and documentary data regarding a number of higher education regulations to analyze the ways in which negotiated rulemaking for U.S. higher education regulatory policy reflects (and does not reflect) aspects of deliberative democracy

Democratic Self-Determination and the Intentional Building of Consensus

This paper defends two fundamental but under-theorized insights coming from the theory of deliberative democracy. The first is that consensus is valuable as a precondition of democratic collective self-determination, since it ensures that democratic decisions display an adequate degree of integrity and consistency and therefore that the polity can act as a unified agent. The second is that consensus in this integrity-building role is essential if citizens need to act as decision-makers; it ensures that the decisions that issue from the exercise of their political rights are meaningful, and that they are so as the intended result of their joint agency. Aggregative approaches, which do not acknowledge this role of consensus, offer an atomistic account of voting and other political rights, and model the outcomes of democratic decision-making as unintended aggregative consequences of individual votes. In these models, democratic political agency and the decision-making power of citizens are curtailed, because citizens do not exert any intentional control on the final outcome of the decision-making process in which they participate. Although the insight on these shortcomings comes from the deliberative camp, I show that the most prominent accounts of how deliberation is supposed to further consensus in its integrity-building role can be subject to the same criticisms. In fact, in these models consensus is achieved as a by-product of people\u27s engaging in deliberation. Although interactive, these approaches are still atomistic and unintentional. As an alternative, I propose a model of democratic decision-making that acknowledges the role played by the citizens\u27 intentional consensus-building through the strategic use of their political rights

How to Arrive at Peace in Deeply Divided Societies? Using Deliberation to Refine Consociational Theory

In the 1960s, consociational theory was developed to explain how deeply divided societies can arrive at peace. The theory had, on the one hand, an institutional component with an emphasis on power-sharing institutions and, on the other, a cultural component stressing the importance of a spirit of accommodation. Initially, the theory was based on case studies of countries like Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, which allowed dealing with both institutional and cultural aspects. Later on, when the theory was tested with a large sample of countries, the cultural aspect was increasingly neglected, because it was difficult to empirically operationalize. The key argument of the article is that the concept of deliberation helps emphasize the cultural aspect of consociational theory, in the hopes of refining, not replacing, consociational theory

A ‘Peaceable and Orderly Manner’: Town Meetings and other Popular Assemblies in the American Founding

The New England town meeting has often been seen as the archetypical deliberative citizen forum (see, e.g., Mansbridge 1980). More recently, political theorists have begun to appreciate the way in which any particular public forum might be better understood as part of the larger deliberative system (Parkinson, Mansbridge, 2012). Much of this work draws on modern-day examples (Parkinson 2006). But a return to the American founding era reveals that while town meetings are often praised and have many democratic virtues, they also embody a limitation on popular action generally and especially on democratic dissent

Venue Coupling and Actor Circulation in Deliberative Systems: Health Care Governance in Ontario

The “systemic turn” has been one of the most important developments in deliberative democracy in the past decade. Through a deliberative systems approach, scholars and practitioners are challenged to think about ways in which various venues and institutions interact together to produce a healthy democratic subsystem. One major challenge to this approach, however, is its methodological weakness. How exactly are various venues and institutions connected? How do they interact with each other? What conceptual tools are available in making sense of the deliberative system? This article proposes the use of “venue coupling” and “actor circulation” to operationalize some of the key concepts of the deliberative system. Through the case of the Local Health Integration Networks in Ontario, Canada, this article maps the governance system, its institutional and interpersonal components, and their interconnections (or lack thereof). By drawing together key concepts in deliberative democracy and network governance, this article sketches out a framework that can be used to analyze governance contexts in which deliberative practices are fused with traditional political institutions like legislative bodies and bureaucracies

Participatory and Deliberative Practitioners in Australia: How Work Context Creates Different Types of Practitioners

Public institutions in Australia are subject to increasing statutory requirements to engage their communities, and consequently the number of practitioners has increased. These participatory and deliberative practitioners design, deliver, and evaluate democratic processes on behalf of public institutions. This article argues that the practitioner body has broadened, where different types of practitioners can now be identified in Australia. This broadening is the result of three main variables: (1) whether practitioners are employed by or contracted to public institutions; (2) whether they are engaged to work on projects with limited or considerable scope; and (3) whether they are focused on limited time frame processes or entire programs. Drawing on the results of a mixed method study, including survey and semi-structured interviews, this article explores the work contexts that shape the contemporary Australian practitioner, drawing lessons that can inform their practice in other contexts

Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings

As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees

Deliberative Democracy in the Context of Town Meetings in Seventeenth-Century New England

From Alexis de Tocqueville onward, the seventeenth-century New England town has been associated with political and social practices that nurtured the making of a “democratic” society. Myth or reality? And where does the religion of the English people who founded the New England colonies figure in this story? A close examination of town and church records—which Tocqueville was unable to accomplish—reveals a powerful commitment to the core values of transparency, equity (fairness and justice), and broad participation. The “Congregational” system of church government transferred authority from any centralized hierarchy to the laymen of each local congregation. Similarly, the central governments in the colonies gave generous allocations of land to groups of immigrants, empowering them to set up self-governing towns. A crucial question for these towns was deciding how to distribute this land; another, was who could share in the decision-making. No formal or explicit “democratic” ideology accompanied the making of this civic culture, but in the context of the seventeenth century, the outcome was something unusually akin to a democratic societ