Beyond “Political” Communicative Spaces: Talking Politics on the Wife Swap Discussion Forum

Net-based public sphere researchers have examined online deliberation in numerous ways. However, most studies have focused exclusively on political discussion forums. This article moves beyond such spaces by analyzing political talk from an online forum dedicated to reality television. The purpose is to examine the democratic quality of political talk that emerges in this space in light of a set of normative criteria of the public sphere. The analysis also moved beyond an elite model of deliberation by investigating the use of expressives (humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgments). The findings reveal that participants engaged in political talk that was often deliberative. It was a space where the use of expressives played a significant role in enhancing such talk

Equal Partners in Dialogue? Participation Equality in a Transnational Deliberative Poll (Europolis)

By gathering a representative sample of citizens from all 27 EU Member States, the deliberative poll Europolis created the opportunity for the inclusion of a wide variety of European voices. Taking up claims of difference democrats who argue that informal hurdles to participation can endure even after individuals gain formal access to the floor, this article argues for an extended approach to evaluate equality in deliberative minipublics. Specifically, it assesses whether participants contributed in roughly equal measures to the discussion and whether their discussion partners considered their contributions on equal merits. In doing so, the article adds to the small but growing literature on deliberation that expresses reservations about taking the willingness to engage with others' claims for granted. In order to account for the intrinsically relational aspect of interpersonal communication, measures of social network analysis are introduced as possible tools to evaluate participation equality in deliberative encounters

Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy

Epistemic democracy is standardly characterized in terms of “aiming at truth”. This presupposes a veritistic conception of epistemic value, according to which truth is the fundamental epistemic goal. I will raise an objection to the standard (veritistic) account of epistemic democracy, focusing specifically on deliberative democracy. I then propose a version of deliberative democracy that is grounded in non‐veritistic epistemic goals. In particular, I argue that deliberation is valuable because it facilitates empathetic understanding. I claim that empathetic understanding is an epistemic good that doesn't have truth as its primary goal