Decision-making in a democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests. Decisions made in an epistemic democracy must also take into account relevant knowledge about the world. Neither aggregation of independent guesses nor deliberation, the standard approaches to epistemic democracy, offers a satisfactory theory of decision-making that is at once time-sensitive and ...

Using a Santiago, Chile, health group as an ethnographic case study, I propose ‘‘accountable democracy’’ as an alternative normative project to the theory of deliberative democracy outlined by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Accountable democracy has at its center the impact of public-sphere opinion formation on decision making by officials in elected governments. [accountability, Chile, d...

A formal two-phase model of democratic policy deliberation is presented, in which in the first phase sufficient and necessary criteria for proposals to be accepted are determined (the ‘admissible’ criteria’) and in the second phase proposals are made and evaluated in light of the admissible criteria resulting from the first phase. Argument schemes for both phases are defined and formalised in a...

BACKGROUND There is a longstanding concern about the accuracy of surrogate consent in representing the health care and research preferences of those who lose their ability to decide for themselves. We sought informed, deliberative views of the older general public (≥50 years old) regarding their willingness to participate in dementia research and to grant leeway to future surrogates to choose a...

We study the impact of deliberation time on intertemporal choice. Using studies in an online labor market, the laboratory, and a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that the introduction of waiting periods – designed to prompt deliberation by temporally separating news about choice sets from choices themselves – cause a shift towards substantially more patient decision...

There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both “democratic deliberation” and “aggregative voting” into our processes. But how the two mechanisms of deliberation voting interact? In this article, introduce new axiom, which call “Nonnegative Response toward Successful Deliberation” (NNRD). The basic idea if some individuals change their preferences oth...

Deliberation is considered to produce positive effects on public opinion, in that it exposes participants to alternative perspectives and rational arguments. However, whereas benefits of face-to-face deliberation have been supported by many empirical studies, the effects of online deliberation remain unclear to date. This research compares the effects of online and face-to-face deliberation in ...

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. Abstract This paper describes and analyses patterns of 'governance conversation' observed in interactions on email lists that aim to support local, direct ...

While pure deliberation has still not been found online, the field of online deliberation research is blossoming. Born out of the “frustrations and possibilities” of the 1990s, a current theme in the field is to re-link deliberative theory with empirical political science. The aim of this systematic literature review is to sort out and examine important features of this development; to identify...

An important aspect of agent autonomy is the decision making capability of the agents. We discuss several issues that agents need to deliberate about in order to decide which action to perform. We assume that there is no unique (rational or universal) deliberation process and that the deliberation process can be specified in various ways. The deliberation process is investigated from two perspe...