Deliberative Systems

Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale

John Parkinson, Jane Mansbridge

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781107025394
• eBook ISBN: 9781139534659
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Deliberative democracy' is often dismissed as a set of small-scale, academic experiments. This volume seeks to demonstrate how the deliberative ideal can work as a theory of democracy on a larger scale. It provides a new way of thinking about democratic engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation states, and from local networks to transnational, even global systems. Written by a team of the world's leading deliberative theorists, Deliberative Systems explains the principles of this new approach, which seeks ways of ensuring that a division of deliberative labour in a system nonetheless meets both deliberative and democratic norms. Rather than simply elaborating the theory, the contributors examine the problems of implementation in a real world of competing norms, competing institutions and competing powerful interests. This pioneering book will inspire an exciting new phase of deliberative research, both theoretical and empirical.

Table of contents

• Cover
• DELIBERATIVE SYSTEMS
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1: A systemic approach to deliberative democracy
• 2: Rational deliberation among experts and citizens
• 3: Deliberation and mass democracy
• 4: Representation in the deliberative system
• 5: Two trust-based uses of minipublics in democratic systems
• 6: On the embeddedness of deliberative systems: why elitist innovations matter more
• 7: Democratizing deliberative systems
• References
• Index