Interaktionsmuster in einem Diskursverfahren zur Indikatorenentwicklung im Umweltbereich

"Informelle Diskurse haben Konjunktur: Runde Tische, Mediationsverfahren, partizipative Dialoge und Beratungsgremien aller Art begleiten die politische oder gesellschaftliche Entscheidungsfindung. Durch geordnete und faire Kommunikation sollen sachgerechte Entscheidungen ermöglicht werden. Gleichwohl gibt es nur wenige Studien, in denen Kommunikationsstruktur und -verlauf in politikbezogenen Diskursen systematisch beschrieben werden. Dieser Bericht versteht sich als Beitrag zur systematischen Analyse politischer Diskurse. Empirischer Beispielfall ein Diskursverfahren zur Entwicklung von Umweltindikatoren. Mit Hilfe der Konferenzkodierung wurden die sprachlichen Äußerungen der Beteiligten ausgewertet. Es konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass im Verlauf eines viertägigen moderierten Diskurses die Art der Auseinandersetzung versachlicht werden kann. Die Besonderheit des hier untersuchten Diskurses, Wissenschaftler befragen Vertreter gesellschaftlicher Interessengruppen, spiegelt sich in den Interaktionen wider. Es war durch entsprechende Einstimmungen vorab sowie durch eine gezielte Moderation möglich, forschungsrelevante Fragen in einer politischen Fachöffentlichkeit konstruktiv zu diskutieren. Parallelen mit anderen Studien der empirischen Diskursforschung sowie Implikationen für die Moderation von Diskursverfahren werden diskutiert." (Autorenreferat)"Informal discourses are a current trend. Roundtable discussions, mediation procedures, state-of-the-future workshops and consultative bodies of every sort accompany political decision-making. Proper decisions are supposed to be ensured through ordered and fair communication. At the same time, however, only very few studies are available, which describe systematically communications structures and procedures directly related to a policy discourse. On the basis of surveyed verbal indicators gathered in the course of a four-day, moderated debate on the development of environmental indicators, the researchers were able to show that it was possible to objectify the form of the dispute. The characteristic feature of the discourse under investigation here (scientists posing questions to representatives of various organizations and associations) is reflected in the interactions, as was revealed by means of an interaction process analysis. Thus, as a result of corresponding preparations and well-directed moderation, it was possible to hold a constructive discussion of research-relevant issues within a political setting among an expert public. Parallels with other findings in small group and discourse research as well as implications for the practice of moderators are discussed." (author's abstract

The Potential of Participedia as a Crowdsourcing Tool for Comparative Analysis of Democratic Innovations

For two reasons, our capacity for systematic comparison of innovative participatory democratic processes remains limited. First, the category of participatory democratic innovations remains relatively vague when compared to more traditional democratic institutions and practices. Second, until recently there existed no large-sample databases that captured relevant variables in the practice of democratic innovation. The lone exception to these patterns is the Participedia database, located online. Participedia is well placed to respond to the two obstacles to systematic comparative research on democratic innovation. First, its crowdsourced data collection strategy means that many of the cases on the platform are not well known and have not been the subject of sustained academic analysis. Second, the data captured in the articles provides the basis for systematic comparative analysis of democratic innovations both within type (e.g., participatory budgeting, mini-publics) and across types. The platform allows for systematic content analysis of text descriptions and/or statistical analysis of the datasets generated from the structured data fields. This article describes the data about innovative participatory democratic processes available from Participedia, and furnishes examples of the kinds of quantitative and qualitative insights about those processes that Participedia enables