public deliberation

Do People Use Stories or Reasons to Support their Views?

policypressblogLeave a comment

holdo et al

 

 

 

 

 

 

Markus Holdo, Per Ola Oberg & Simon Magnusson

Political debates often become dominated by the same kind of people: pundits, lobbyists, politicians, and experts, who know how to grab people’s attention and articulate their viewpoints convincingly. These people persuade viewers and listeners, shape public opinion, and influence political decision-makers more than other people do. But debating skills are not necessarily matched by knowledge, nor by a concern about the interests and views of ordinary citizens. In that sense, it could be viewed as a democratic problem that the public conversation is usually shaped by the narrow perspectives of a privileged few.

But how, then, could our public discussions become more inclusive and responsive to ordinary citizens? To this question, political theorists have given two very different answers.   Continue reading →

Autumn Highlights Collection from Policy & Politics

policypressblogLeave a comment

BROWN_SarahSarah Brown,
Journal Manager of Policy & Politics

Policy & Politics Autumn Highlights collection free to access from 1 August – 31 October 2019.

This quarter’s highlights collection focuses on some of our recent articles looking at public participation in the political process through a range of different lenses. Our first article, the Use and Abuse of Participatory Governance by Populist Governments challenge the notion prevalent in academic literature that participatory governance is a panacea for all ills in Western democracies. Based on a case study of Viktor Orban’s national consultations in Hungary, the authors use their case as evidence of how not to run a public consultation and why asking the public is not always such a great idea. 

Continue reading →

New research articles on democracy from Policy & Politics: free to download until 20 September

policypressblogLeave a comment

BROWN_SarahSarah Brown,
Journal Manager of Policy & Politics

In celebration of APSA’s Conference theme this year on democracy and its discontents, we bring you the latest and best of our research on that topic which is free to access until 20 September 2018. Just click on the hyperlinks below to go straight to the download page for each article.

To whet your appetite, here are three highlights from our range of articles on democracy, all of which aim to enhance our understanding of its importance.

Continue reading →

Policy & Politics announces the 2018 winners of the Best Paper prize and best Early Career paper prize published in 2017

policypressblogLeave a comment

Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews, co-editors of Policy & Politics

We are delighted to announce that the winners of our Ken Young prize for the best paper published in 2017 are Selen Ercan, Carolyn Hendriks and John Boswell for their article on Studying public deliberation after the systemic turn: the crucial role for interpretive research (free to access until 24 May 2018).

In this excellent article, the authors seek to make sense of the complex nature of deliberation and the complexity of deliberative democratic systems.  In doing so, they bring together two hitherto separate strands of literature – the empirical turn and the systemtic turn – which have previously ‘pulled in different directions.’  In seeking to bring the two turns together, the authors highlight a number of important methodological questions.  They ask: ‘how can we identify and portray the sites, agents and discursive elements that comprise a deliberative system, how can we study connections and transmissions across different sites of a deliberative system, and how can we understand the impact of the broader socio- political context on both specific deliberative sites and the entire deliberative system?’ Continue reading →