Five arguments in favour of deliberative democracy are considered. These focus on its educative power, on its community-generating power, on the fairness of the procedure of public deliberation, on the epistemic quality of its outcomes and on the congruence of the deliberative democratic ideal ‘with whom we are’. The first four arguments are shown to be inadequate. The fifth argument, it is cla...

This article presents an overview of our ongoing research in reactive sensing. Reac-tive sensing allows sensing processes at both the behavioral and deliberative levels to act as autonomous specialists in maintaining the most robust and eecient perception for the given behavior, state of the robot, and state of the world. Two basic reactive sensing mechanisms are presented. One is a method for ...

The complexity of municipal waste management decision-making has increased in recent years, accompanied by growing scrutiny from stakeholders, including local communities. This complexity reflects a socio-technical framing of the risks and social impacts associated with selecting technologies and sites for waste treatment and disposal facilities. Consequently there is growing pressure on local ...

Theories of cognitive processes, such as decision making and creative problem solving, for a long time neglected the contributions of emotion or affect in favor of analysis based on use of deliberative rules to optimize performance. Since the 1990s, emotion has increasingly been incorporated into theories of these cognitive processes. Some theorists have in fact posited a “dual-systems approach...

This article presents results from a Danish national Deliberative Poll on the single European currency. A representative sample of 364 Danish citizens assembled to deliberate on Denmark’s participation in the single currency. As a quasi-experiment, the Deliberative Poll is an example of deliberative democracy. Four research questions regarding these deliberative processes are analyzed: openness...

Mindset theory (Gollwitzer, 1990) proposes that deliberative mindsets are marked by more open-minded processing of information, whereas implemental mindsets are characterized by more closed-minded processing. Accordingly, deliberative and implemental mindsets should diVer in selective processing of incidental information when performing a central task. In three experiments, participants in deli...

The case for institutional deliberative reform does not go through unless we assume that it changes opinions via mechanisms congruent with normative theories of deliberation. Yet little research addresses this assumption head-on. I bridge deliberative theory and practice by making explicit several causal claims implicit in the theory literature, and then testing them in three policy domains. I ...

The ethical, social and political dimensions of legislative regulations of issues concerning the citizens’ health are generally recognized to be of increasing significance in modern deliberative democracies. However, nanotechnologies in health have raised extra difficulties in deliberative democracies’ procedural justice arrangements. Could a deliberative model of democracy based on substantive...