Governing Sex Work: An Agonistic Policy Community and its Relational Dynamics

Few policy scholars have analyzed prostitution laws and the governance of sex work.  This is unfortunate because the policy area is associated with societal problems, and the systematic study of public policy was initially conceptualized to address such problems.  Moreover, this dearth is problematic for reasons related to how we conceptualize policy processes, actors involved in them, relationships among them, power structures characterizing them, and ultimately the significance of the policy. Prostitution laws in Canada, in terms of recent policy changes through constitutional challenges to criminal provisions and through practices of implementation in local governance, suggest the analytical usefulness of the policy community heuristic in capturing important relational dynamics.  With a focus on relationships and not merely on structural and strategic linkages, it can capture many nuances in why dynamics change and what the implications of this change are for policy.  Conceptually, this study suggests that agonistic relations emerge within policy communities that may be deeply divided when members experience or perceive catalyst events, cannot easily refute the evidence concerning factors contributing to these events, and converge on a clearly defined response to address problems associated with these events

A Question of Respect: A Qualitative Text Analysis of the Canadian Parliamentary Committee Hearings on The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act

We evaluate the Canadian parliamentary hearings on The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act to determine whether respectful and fair deliberation occurred.  Our focus is on the content, tone, and nature of each question posed by committee members in hearings in both chambers.  We find that, on the whole, the vast majority of questions met this baseline, but that committee members were biased toward witnesses in agreement with their position and against witnesses in opposition to it.  In addition to our substantive findings, we contribute methodological insights, including a coding scheme, for this kind of qualitative text analysis

Research Openness in Canadian Political Science: Toward an Inclusive and Differentiated Discussion

In this paper, we initiate a discussion within the Canadian political science community about research openness and its implications for our discipline.  This discussion is important because the Tri-Agency has recently released guidelines on data management and because a number of political science journals, from several subfields, have signed the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement requiring data access and research transparency (DA-RT).  As norms regarding research openness develop, an increasing number and range of journals and funding agencies may begin to implement DA-RT-type requirements.  If Canadian political scientists wish to continue to participate in the global political science community, we must take careful note of and be proactive participants in the ongoing developments concerning research openness

Mini-Public Replication: Emotions and Deliberation in the Citizens' Initiative Review Redux

Scholars have increasingly urged researchers to evaluate prior findings through replication studies that can help test, refine, and extend claims made in previous research. We agree that this is an important aspect of social science that deliberative scholarship has underutilized. To help fill this lacunae, we test our previous findings from an analysis of data from Citizen Initiative Reviews (CIRs) in 2016 by replicating our methodology on data from CIRs in 2018. We set out to determine if the patterns we discovered earlier and developed into the Deliberative Procedures Frame theory appeared again in 2018 CIRs. We find repeating across the two sets of data, including consistent levels of enthusiasm, slow rising happiness, and the relationships between certain emotions on the final day and participants’ evaluations of deliberative quality, and these indicate that our theory remains a viable explanation for emotions in mini-public deliberation. We remain confident that the sources of anger and frustration identified in our previous analysis remains correct. On the basis of this replication, we clarify that what we call the Procedures Frame enables the identification of the most likely time points during deliberation when the threat to democratic legitimacy and the risk to quality deliberation will most likely arise and result in expressions of emotion. Finally, our study reinforces how important deliberative design is to the role of emotions in the success of mini-publics

And, I mean every word of it: Comments on Francis Dupuis-D�ri�s �Global Protesters Versus Global Elite: Are Direct Action and Deliberative Politics Compatible?�

Focusing on how recent protests centered on global economic and environmental injustices can contribute to furthering deliberative politics and realizing deliberative democracy, Francis Dupuis- D � ri examines the important and historical tension between force and persuasion. However, casting protest as legitimate in the framework of deliberative politics and as serving deliberative democracy obscures its own value in endeavors to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. Being sympathetic to Dupuis- D � ri � s work, I wish to make several, interrelated conceptual and practical clarifications in order to bring back to the fore the fundamental importance of protest, in terms of contributions not to deliberative politics and deliberative democracy but to public discourse

And, I mean every word of it: Comments on Francis Dupuis-Déri’s “Global Protesters Versus Global Elite: Are Direct Action and Deliberative Politics Compatible ?”

Focusing on how recent protests centered on global economic and environmental injustices can contribute to furthering deliberative politics and realizing deliberative democracy, Francis Dupuis-Déri examines the important and historical tension between force and persuasion. However, casting protest as legitimate in the framework of deliberative politics and as serving deliberative democracy obscures its own value in endeavors to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. Being sympathetic to Dupuis-Déri’s work, I wish to make several, interrelated conceptual and practical clarifications in order to bring back to the fore the fundamental importance of protest, in terms of contributions not to deliberative politics and deliberative democracy but to public discourse.À partir d’une analyse de la manière dont les actions directes s’opposent aux injustices économiques et environnementales et peuvent contribuer à faire avancer et à réaliser la politique délibérative, Francis Dupuis-Déri examine la tension historique et importante entre la force brute et le pouvoir de persuasion. Cependant, le fait de chercher à légitimer la protestation dans le cadre de la politique délibérative et comme un moyen pour les fins d’une démocratie délibérative obscurcit la valeur propre des protestations pour réaliser la justice sociale, économique et environnementale. Étant sympathique aux travaux de Dupuis-Déri, je tiens à faire plusieurs clarifications conceptuelles et pratiques en vue de ramener à l’avant-scène l’importance fondamentale des protestations, en terme de contributions non pas à la démocratie délibérative, mais au discours public

Deliberative Democracy and Precautionary Public Reasoning : Exploratory Thoughts

Because public policy is legally binding and, perhaps more pointedly, can have pervasive social and environmental consequences for the autonomy of persons, it should be justifiable to those it could so affect. What is much more controversial, and what constitutes the basic intuitive claim of this exploratory paper, is that certain public policies should be morally justifiable to both existing and future persons. My concern is with policies in such areas as energy, climate change control, nuclear waste management, natural resources management, and genomics research and commercialization, which can no doubt improve our lives and our descendant’s lives, but which can also result in tremendous adverse effects for centuries to come. In this short paper, I suggest that the ideal of deliberative democracy provides a way of morally justifying such policies to both existing and future generations. If we take seriously the requirements of this ideal, we may have to modify our public reasoning so that it includes reasons that are generally acceptable among contemporaries as well as reasons that would be acceptable to posterity. The suggestion I make in this paper is thatintegral to the ideal of deliberative democracy in the transgenerational contextis a future-oriented and precautionary public reasoning

How Universities Gaslight EDI&I Initiatives: Mapping Institutional Resistance to Structural Change

Despite the visibility of equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenization (EDI&I) discourses within large institutions, such as post-secondary institutions, research has chronicled only modest advancements on these stated values. Blocks to advancements in EDI&I stem, in part, from the structural nature of racist and sexist domination, and especially its embeddedness in both formal and informal norms of institutions. Based on a close examination of two EDI&I initiatives in university contexts, and direct experiences of “pushback” against these initiatives, this article conceptualizes institutional gaslighting, whereby universities paradoxically both embrace EDI&I discourse, on the one hand, while simultaneously deploying strategies that prevent dismantling systemic inequalities, on the other. A conceptualization of this dynamic is designed to help others identify and address forms of resistance, especially in settings of high stated value, and ultimately advance these values within large institutions.Malgré la visibilité de discours sur l’équité, la diversité, l’inclusion et l’indigénisation (EDII) dans de grandes institutions telles que les établissements postsecondaires, la recherche n’a relevé que des progrès modestes dans l’instauration de ces valeurs pourtant prisées. Les entraves à ces progrès ont pour cause le caractère structurel de la domination raciste et sexiste et surtout la persistance de cette domination dans les normes formelles et informelles des institutions. Cet article, en se fondant sur un examen attentif de deux initiatives EDII dans un contexte universitaire ainsi que sur un témoignage direct de résistance contre ces initiatives, décrit le détournement cognitif paradoxal par lequel les universités appuient d’une part les discours sur EDIItout en employant d’autre part des stratégies qui perpétuent les inégalités systémiques. Cet article présente une conceptualisation de cette dynamique afin d’aider les personnes impliquées à identifier et appliquer des moyens de résistance, surtout dans des contextes reconnus comme étant importants, et, au bout du compte, à promouvoir EDII au sein de grandes institutions