Contesting a tradition deeply ingrained in media studies, which conceives of news and current-affairs programming not only as a reliable, but also a sufficient platform for a mediated enhancement of the democratic ideal of plurality (in a representational realm which many members of society find devoid of enjoyment and consequently ignore), this paper seeks to explore how ‘mass’ entertainment t...

Although there has been much speculation regarding the strengths and weaknesses of face-to-face versus online deliberative settings, no studies have systematically compared the two. Drawing on a national sample of Americans who reported deliberating faceto-face and/or online, we examine these two deliberative settings with regard to the participants, the motivations, the process, and the effect...

Many scholars believe that electronic rulemaking has great but largely untapped potential to expand the public's democratic input and improve federal agency regulatory rules. The existing federal rulemaking process, however, elicits many redundant and poorly considered comments, and some participants challenge the legitimacy of agency rulemaking decisions. This Deliberative ERulemaking (DeER) p...

In Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philip Kitcher develops the notion of well-ordered science: scientific inquiry whose research agenda and applications (but not methods) are subject to public control guided by democratic deliberation. Kitcher’s primary departure from his earlier views involves rejecting the idea that there is any single standard of scientific significance. The context-dependenc...

Although recent debates surrounding the relationship between commitments to gender equality and cultural justice have given a renewed impetus to feminist critiques of liberal conceptions of the public realm, prominent interventions by Martha Nussbaum and Monique Deveaux have continued to affirm one of two long-standing, yet controversial, feminist strategies for reconceptualising the public rea...

This text analyzes the relationship between political deliberation and democracy. Its content differs both from a scarcely normative idea of competitive politics, predominant in contemporary Political Science, and from a philosophical defense of the deliberation, founded on an idea of common reasonability or on an ideal of communicative speech. The central argument of the author is that deliber...