The past decade has seen intensified calls for the reform of democratic political institutions in Canada, on the grounds that there is a “democracy deficit” at the level of federal politics. Some commentators have even begun to describe the country as a “banana republic,” or a “friendly dictatorship.” Yet any attempt to assess the state of democracy in Canada must naturally presuppose some theo...

Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant axioms for approval-based multi-winner elections. We observe a rich landscape with respect to the computational complexity of identifying proportional budgets and...

Research ethics committees are entrusted with implementing guidelines to protect both scientists and human subjects of research from harm. These guidelines are often based on western contexts and may not resonate with the local moral traditions of the communities that they seek to protect. In this essay, we discuss how using principles of deliberative democracy with a “local derivation” approac...

Theologically informed positions are grounded in core beliefs and may be rationally discussed. We analyze Dr. Norko's suggestion on how, in the public square, to address moral disagreements. We point out the dangers of "deliberative democracy" as an approach to resolving conflicts over basic values. We suggest an alternative approach, better grounded in reason, as a way of bringing religious an...

We propose one possible set of criteria for evaluating software – specifically search engines – according to their usefulness for deliberative democracy. We then describe a user study of the search capabilities of three, existing, online archives (Google Groups, Omgili, or Technorati) of threaded, conversational data. Our study measures the capabilities of these search engines according to the ...

A major part of politics is the conveying of ideas. This is the function of political communication. Of the multitude of ways this conveying can take place, deliberation in a public sphere is one that Habermas (1994) termed optimal. Both public spheres and deliberative democracy presuppose an equality of all participants in a debate and the superiority of good arguments. Presently, both feature...

In June 2004, members of LogoLink, an international consortium (largely based in “southern” or developing countries) dedicated to promoting learning about how to strengthen citizen participation in local governance, came together with members of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, a network largely made up of representatives from “northern” or developed countries, to share their experiences....

A full consideration of deliberative democracy depends upon analyzing both normative and empirical considerations. But is there a common language accessible to both the political philosopher and the empirical researcher, a language that can bridge the tension between the factual and the normative? Heretofore, much of the dialogue between the two has been plagued by methodological clashes and co...