Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: Insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens

Deliberação online em consultas públicas? O caso da assembleia legislativa de Minas Gerais

Este artigo busca analisar uma consulta pública online sobre reforma política promovida em 2011 pela Assembleia Legislativa de Minas Gerais. Embasado pela teoria deliberacionista, o estudo de 752 posts guiou-se pela discussão de seis tópicos: (1) inclusividade; (2) provimento de razões; (3) reciprocidade; (4) respeito mútuo; (5) orientação para o bem comum; e (6) articulação entre arenas. Os resultados indicam: (1) uma sobrerepresentação de participantes masculinos e oriundos da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte, embora não tenha havido concentração de posts em alguns comentadores; (2) o predomínio de posts on topic e que apresentam justificativas para as posições advogadas; (3) índices muito baixos de reciprocidade entre posts e de uso de marcadores de interatividade; (4) graus muito elevados de respeito; (5) diferentes formas de ligação das justificativas a ideias de bem comum; (6) o baixo impacto decisório e a conexão com outras arenas da esfera pública, destacando-se a relação com uma matéria publicada em jornal de grande circulação. Os achados são ambivalentes para os defensores da deliberação, indicando baixa probabilidade de deliberação interna ao fórum, mas algum potencial deliberativo quando se adotam lentes mais amplas. Os cruzamentos entre variáveis sugerem que as pessoas tendem a prover mais justificativas em discussões mais controversas, embora tendam a dialogar menos nesses casos. Assim, a hipótese da preferência por conversas entre like-minded encontra respaldo nos dados analisados

Small Differences that Matter: The Impact of Discussion Modalities on Deliberative Outcomes

An experiment on the extension of the political rights of foreigners in the Swiss city of Geneva used three different procedural ways to structure deliberation: participants take positions at the outset, do not take positions, and reflect first. Most opinion change occurred when participants did not have to take a position at the outset. However, no learning effects were recorded, the deliberative quality was poor and group influence had the greatest impact. When participants had to take a position at the outset, opinion change and group influence were least, but there was significant learning, and the deliberative quality was better. These results indicate a potential trade-off between opinion change – which many scholars equate with deliberative success – and good procedural deliberative quality