The Use of Deliberative Democracy in Public Policy Making Process

A common thread weaving through the current public participation debate is the need for new approaches that emphasize two-way interaction between decision makers and the public as well as deliberation among participants. Increasingly complex decision making processes require a more informed citizenry that has weighed the evidence on the issue, discussed and debated potential decision options and arrived at a mutually agreed upon decision or at least one by which all parties can abide. We explore the recent fascination with deliberative methods for public involvement first by examining their origins within democratic theory, and then by focusing on the experiences with deliberative methods within the health sector. In doing so, we answer the following questions ''What are deliberative methods and why have they become so popular? What are their potential contributions to the health sector?'' We use this critical review of the literature as the basis for developing general principles that can be used to guide the design and evaluation of public involvement processes for the health-care sector in particular. r

Human Affairs, 2008

Introducing Deliberative Democracy: A Goal, a Tool, or Just a Context?The concept of deliberative democracy is presented within a wide spectrum of variety of its operationalizations. Since the applicability of the principle of deliberation to the functioning of human society is of the author's primary interest, dilemmas of deliberative democracy related to different problems associated with deliberation in practice are described in some detail. The key questions raised aiming at elucidating the "ontology" of deliberativeness are as follows: is it only a tool for solving the problems of society and politics? Is it a context within which other processes decide on the running of society? Or does it embody a goal of democracy?

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIETY, 2022

Participation in deliberative arenas is often lauded for its transformative impact on citizens' attitudes, sense of agency and ability to formulate concrete policy proposals. The focus of this paper is the first ever deliberative mini public in Belgrade, centred on the topic of expanding the pedestrian zone and rerouting traffic in the city core. By relying on a set of qualitative and quantitative data collected before and after the deliberation, we aim to explore the effects of the public deliberation on the participants' knowledge, attitudes and preferences. Our hypothesis was that participation in this deliberative process led to better understanding (enhanced knowledge) of the discussed topic and change in attitudes and preferences regarding its realization. The scope of this study is limited, given the non-experimental design and small sample. Overall, the results indicate that participants` knowledge on the topic of deliberation is enhanced, becoming more precise, elaborate and encompassing different perspectives. As for the attitudes and preferences, in most cases, around two-thirds of the sample changed their positions, while about a third of the sample changed sides, mostly agreeing less with the expansion of the pedestrian zone. The findings support the conclusion that, on a local level, deliberation has the capacity to inform and enhance competence for greater political participation.

Human Affairs, 2011

Deliberative democracy, as a dominant paradigm in contemporary democratic theory, offers a new, attractive conception of democratic legitimacy, which represents an alternative to a democracy that functions through the mechanism of political competition. A major problem with deliberation is the issue of its institutionalisation, as the theories of deliberative democracy have not produced a more specific institutional framework or form in which it could be used in political practice. Parliaments appear to be particularly suitable places for its potential implementation. Moreover, deliberative democracy could contribute to a change in discourse quality and the way decision-making is conducted in parliaments, which is often considered problematic. Due to its incompatibility with competitive democracy, the opportunities for introducing deliberative democracy into parliaments are very limited. The study also outlines three ways of reconciling deliberative democracy and parliaments.

Deliberative democracy is embedded in different theories and approaches and represents a focal point for most current democratic theory. This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the theory of deliberative democracy from various theoretical roots, each focusing on a different level or sphere of deliberation. I will consider how each theoretical perspective understands the role of the state, civil society and the individual. Based on a review of the literature , I theorise that the often overlooked combination of micro, mezzo and macro levels of deliberation must all be included for any deliberation to be successful in terms of political equality and democratic decision-making. In my view, critical theory has the greatest potential to include all three spheres of deliberation.

2012

W hen assigned the task of describing and updating essential health benefits for qualified health plans in the Affordable Care Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services turned to the Institute of Medicine for advice. An IOM committee recommended that "structured public deliberative processes be established to identify the values and priorities of those citizens eligible to purchase insurance through the exchanges, as well as members of the general public." 1 The IOM argued that "the inevitability of limitsetting requires a nonpartisan, transparent process for eliciting the core values of key players, including taxpayers and health plan enrollees. Health care has always been steeped in tradeoffs . . . Incorporating an informed citizen perspective can make these tradeoffs more responsible, responsive, and acceptable to the public." Even this brief excerpt mentions numerous ways-transparency, informativeness, acceptability-by which the success of public deliberations might be judged.

Veritas (Porto Alegre), 2010

O artigo reexamina as concepções habermasianas de política deliberativa e democracia procedimental à luz de outras teorias deliberativas, de forma a explorar as suas semelhanças e diferenças e investigar o quanto devem à ideia de razão pública e as implicações práticas daquela ideia.

This article essentially discusses the necessity for widening the scope of electoral/representative democracy by discussing the process of deliberation and how that can lead to a better system of governance.

Deliberation is the process of gathering and assessing reasons that ground the preference for some course of action over others. In its political specification, the process is aimed at drafting and issuing collectively binding authoritative decisions. After its initial conceptualization in classical Greece, in the republican Rome, and the fixation of its canons in the Middle Ages, the role of deliberation as a politico-theoretical tool has progressively lost its centrality due to the growing interest modern scholars have developed in democratic representation within large-scale societies. It was not until the 1980s that political theorists restarted discussing the virtues of deliberation in democracy. The idea of democratic deliberation nowadays plays a crucial role in the definition of political legitimacy.

The potential advantages and disadvantages of a deliberative democratic body have been the subject of a number of works of political theory. Its likely rationalising influence has been referenced as the possible solution to deep social disputes, while the inclusion of regular citizens in the deliberative process could potentially help re-enfranchise those disillusioned with purely representative politics. Nevertheless, a number of possible obstacles to such a body have been identified, from impracticalities of scale, to the distorting effect of the media, the commitment required by citizens, and the possible domination of deliberation by rhetoric.

Srpska politička misao

With all its flaws, a deliberative democracy presents a very important democratic concept – a concept that needs to be improved, but also a concept that needs to be understood. This article aims to present basic concepts of both deliberative democracy and its critiques, providing an updated basic for further discussion, development, and evolution of the concept. Reviewing all relevant concepts, streams, and critics is a demanding and time-consuming task, but hopefully, this article will be able to help researchers as a starting point for the research of this impressive concept – a concept that certainly is not flawless but its importance is beyond doubt.

2018

1. The art and craft of inclusive policy decisions The discussion begins by highlighting some aspects of Luigi Bobbio's distinctive contribution to deliberative policy-making (Hajer, Wagenaar 2003), which advocates approaches , techniques and methods for inclusive decision-making (Bobbio 2004) according to the clearly value-oriented thesis that inclusive decision processes in complex contemporary societies foster democratic governmental policy-making and the effectiveness of public choices. The author's focus on deliberative democracy lies within the sphere of policy analysis that likens the construction of public policy to the goal of public decision-making. This position is coherent with the disciplinary tradition of political analysis, largely established and related to a well-rooted political culture in Italy. This tradition emphasizes the "de-cision" as the basic stage for the political process, analytically disjointed from implementation taken as the effective and concrete execution of decisions. Even in common discourse , public policies are socially understood as decisions and rarely as implementing actions. One of the consequences is a kind of analytical "hyper-attention" to the problem of the decision in and of itself: its context, location, and effectiveness. This explains both

Democracy is not the rule of the elite over the rest. If a society truly believes in Lincoln's ideal of democracy as a government 'of the people, by the people and for the people', the participants of the society cannot solely rely on their elected representatives. If democracy has to thrive in a society, citizens need to engage themselves actively in the law making process. This paper analyses deliberative democracy as a model form of government, wherein law-making is not just a voice of the majority. It focuses on the importance of consensus, rather than on the majority vote. At the same time it focuses on providing reasons for political decisions. However, informed decisions cannot be made without access to information. The role of media reporting of legislative proceedings becomes sine qua non in a deliberative democracy set-up in order to ensure that citizens are informed and involved in the law making process. The paper focuses on the importance of the reporting of the legislative process by the media in order to ensure deliberativeness.

April 2019 Conference: PSA ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2019: (UN)SUSTAINABLE POLITICS IN A CHANGING WORLD 15- 17 APRIL 2019,At: NOTTINGHAM, UK, 2019

A practically implementable model of participatory governance is proposed, combining normative qualities of universal suffrage with epistemic qualities of presumably elitist open deliberation. I call it "Direct Deliberative Democracy" (abbr. "D3"), or, alternatively, "Direct Deliberative Participatory Governance". This multidisciplinary research is based on a number of concepts at different levels of advancement; some of them are first introduced here. The model defines direct public participation in governance, esp. in policy-, law-and decision-making, as a multi-stage process comprising the stage of open public online deliberation on a given issue, designed in a way as to satisfy the basic requirements of fairness, productiveness, self-regulation, and time-and effort-efficiency. A special IT system (still awaiting its software implementation) manages the whole process by "orchestrating" a number of "house-keeping" activities collaboratively performed by the participants. The stage of large deliberation is followed by a stage of collaborative editing of a number of competing proposals, and then by the final stage of their aggregation into one "optimal" solution. A number of AI-and NLP-based techniques, in particular the so-called Computer-Assisted Argumentation, will help participants all along the process. To take into account non-participants' preferences, a special method is proposed, derived from the VAA (Voting Advice Applications) concept.

2012