The environmental benefits of deliberative democracy are increasingly cited, but not well understood. Nor are the processes involved in arriving at deliberated policy preferences in contrast to those under the status quo. Analysis of the Far North Queensland Citizens’ Jury (FNQCJ) reveals that the difference reflects as much a move away from a non-deliberative status quo as toward a deliberativ...

BACKGROUND Deliberative public engagement is recommended for policy development in contested ethical areas. Scholars provide little guidance on how deliberative outputs can be translated to policy. This paper describes the processes we undertook to design a deliberative public forum for citizens to develop recommendations on biobanking that were adopted as health policy. METHOD The 4-day foru...

A computational model of emotion must explain both the rapid dynamics of some emotional reactions as well as the slower responses that follow deliberation. This is often addressed by positing multiple appraisal processes such as fast pattern directed vs. slower deliberative appraisals. In our view, this confuses appraisal with inference. Rather, we argue for a single and automatic appraisal pro...

OBJECTIVE To develop and implement a method for the evaluation of "evidence briefs" and "deliberative dialogues" that could be applied to comparative studies of similar strategies used in the support of evidence-informed policy-making. METHODS Participants who read evidence briefs and attended deliberative dialogues in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia were surveyed...

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...

Citizens'/community juries [CJs] engage members of the public in policy decision-making processes. CJs can be employed to develop policy responses to health problems that require the consideration of both community values and scientific evidence. Based on the principles of deliberative democracy, recent reviews indicate that findings from CJs have successfully been used to influence health poli...

[This work provides comparative insights into how deliberation on proposed constitutional amendments might be more effectively pursued. It reports on a new nationwide survey of public attitudes to constitutional reform, examining the potential in Australia of innovative Canadian models of reform led by Citizens’ Assemblies. Assembly members are selected at random and are demographically represe...