An exploration of competing electoral systems-single-member district plurality systems (predominant in the U.S.) versus proportional representation systems (STV in particular)-and competing theories of participatory democracy: J.S. Mill's optimistic deliberative democracy model, and Richard Posner's more pessimistic elite democracy model. Mill assumes voters are politically educable, capable of...

We contend that, with a suitably broad notion of rationality and a diverse set of motivations, the game-theoretic tradition is particularly well suited for generating insights about effects of deliberative institutions and that progress in the development of deliberative democratic theory hinges on making proper sense of the relationship between game-theoretic and normative theoretic approaches...

There is currently a diversity of understandings of digital democracy being deployed within popular commentary, research, policy making, and practical initiative. However, there is a lack of resources clearly outlining this diversity; this article undertakes such an outline. It provides a reconstruction of four digital democracy positions. These four positions are referred to here as liberal-in...

The possibilities for promoting an expanded conception of democratic political participation through information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been widely observed. Potential synergies between ICT developments and democratic renewal arise from the two-way, interactive nature of new digital media, and their technical enhancement of citizen capacities to access, produce, distribute,...

Within democratic theory, rational choice theories have for some time been challenged by approaches of ‘deliberative democracy’. I argue that the central analytical contrast between these theories consists in their differing focus on preferences: while rational choice takes them to be stable for the time frame in question and exogenous to the decision process to be analysed, deliberative theory...

Public Sphere The third kind of public sphere, named by Habermas as the “abstract public sphere”, is produced by media, which connects singular and globally spread readers, listeners and spectators (BFN, 1996: 308). In the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas conceives the small press as an important institution for the conveyance of ideas and the establishment of the rationa...

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Geoforum In Press 2 ABSTRACT Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of ...