Discursive representation

Democracy can entail the representation of discourses as well as persons or groups. We explain and advocate discursive representation; explore its justifications, advantages, and problems; and show how it can be accomplished in practice. This practice can involve the selection of discursive representatives to a formal Chamber of Discourses and more informal processes grounded in the broader public sphere. Discursive representation supports many aspects of deliberative democracy and is especially applicable to settings such as the international system lacking a well-defined demos

Gender equality in Parliament: how random selection could get us there

Would choosing the second chamber by sortition be an effective way to achieve a 50:50 balance between men and women? John Dryzek argues that the upper chamber – in Australia as in the UK, a deliberative forum – would be a good place to start, and looks at ways to ensure women sitting in deliberative assemblies get an equal voice and hearing

Revolutions without enemies: key transformations in political science

American political science is a congenitally unsettled discipline, witnessing a number of movements designed to reorient its fundamental character. Four prominent movements are compared here: the statism accompanying the discipline's early professionalization, the pluralism of the late 1910s and early 1920s, behavioralism, and the Caucus for a New Political Science (with a brief glance at the more recent Perestroika). Of these movements, only the first and third clearly succeeded. The discipline has proven very hard to shift. Despite the rhetoric that accompanied behavioralism, both it and statism were revolutions without enemies within the discipline (other than those appearing after they succeeded), and therein lies the key to their success

Designs for environmental discourse revisited: a greener administrative state?

In this chapter I will try to navigate a path through these thickets. I will begin by setting out the administrative state and a discursive democratic alternative in ideal-type terms, and examine their strengths and weaknesses in a way that is comparative but static. This comparison will come down in favor of discursive democracy as being intrinsically more likely to promote ecological values. However, diagnosis of the faults of the administrative state can be instructive, not just by pointing to the qualities that any institutional alternatives should seek, but also in identifying traps into which these alternatives might themselves fall. I then move to a more nuanced and analysis of the relationship between the administrative state and democracy, showing that green democratization of the administrative state is a worthwhile project but exactly how and when it can take place depends crucially on the political-economic context

Legitimacy and economy in deliberative democracy

Deliberative democracy is usually presented as a polity in which legitimacy is achieved by deliberative participation on the part of those subject to a collective decision. But cast in these terms, the theory runs headlong into the long-recognized impossibility of directly involving more than a few members of any large-scale democracy in decision making. After canvassing the available solutions to this problem, an argument is made for conceptualizing deliberative democracy in terms of the contestation of discourses in the public sphere, and public opinion as the provisional outcome of this contestation as transmitted to the state. Legitimacy is then achieved to the degree collective outcomes respond to the balance of discourses in the polity, to the extent this balance is itself subject to dispersed and competent political control

Transnational Democracy in an Insecure World

If global governance is consequential, its legitimacy ought to rest on principles of democracy. However, unilateral action such as that taken by the USA in Iraq and elsewhere has hurt the most visible such project, cosmopolitan democracy, by undermining its liberal multilateralist foundations. Other democratic projects have not been quite so badly damaged, in particular, the idea of a transnational discursive democracy grounded in the engagement of discourses in international public spheres. The discourse aspects of international affairs are important when it comes to issues of war and peace, conflict and security, no less so here than elsewhere. Democracy faces competition in the informal realm of discourses from both the "war of ideas" and "soft power" projections, but can hold up well against them, and can more easily pass the test of reflexivity. Discursive democracy can help constitute effective responses to global insecurity

Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics

Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as citizen's panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, and deliberative polls at the center of their hopes for deliberative democratization. In light of experience to date, the authors chart the ways in which such mini-publics may have an impact in the "macro" world of politics. Impact may come in the form of actually making policy, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debates, market-testing of proposals, legitimation of public policies, building confidence and constituencies for policies, popular oversight, and resisting co-option. Exposing problems and failures is all too easy. The authors highlight cases of success on each of these dimensions

The Ambitions of Policy Design

Public policy is concerned with solving or ameliorating social problems. Public policy design involves conscious invention, development, and application ofpatterns of action in problem resolution. Contemporary perceptions of widespread (if not wholesale) failure in purposive public policy should warn us that would-be policy designers face no easy task. Certainly, there has been no shortage of cautions against excessive ambition in consciously- pursued public policy. Our contention is that these critics have missed the target. Based on a correction of their aim, we will suggest there is little reason to eschew ambition in policy design, provided only that one attends closely to the conditions of policy formation. This is not to say that ambition should be pursued for its own sake, or that it is always appropriate, merely that fear of ambition should not act as a constraint. We warn the reader in advance that our survey of the critics is brief, in order to provide space for fuller articulation of our own position