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Rousiley C. M. Maia
Department of Social Communication, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

A great number of studies on deliberative democracy have paid particular attention to a renewed relevance accorded to everyday talk, emotions, personal storytelling, and the so-called pre-political experience. Much of the debate has involved scholars contrasting their work with Habermas’ theoretical framework to explore different sorts of expressions that can enhance critical reflection and conditions to enable members of disadvantaged groups to be heard and have their particular experiences, values, and interests ​​understood. These studies typically argue that focusing only on argumentation and justification is restrictive. In this vein, a number of scholars – such as Andre Bächtiger, Jane Mansbridge, John Gastil, John Parkinson, Jürg Steiner, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher Karpowitz, among others – have searched ways to build institutional initiatives and structure incentives for people and marginalized groups to deliberate, concentrating on mechanisms that can compensate for less than optimal conditions.

Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition – considered the third generation of critical theory – helps analyzing power and inequalities by taking account of meaning-making from the perspective of participants in social conflicts. Despite sharing several premises within the Frankfurt School tradition, Habermas’ and Honneth’s  research programs have developed side by side and have rarely intertwined in studies on deliberation. Recognition theory, by placing the notion of conflict between social groups and social struggle at the center of social philosophy, enables researchers to develop new interpretations and explanations of a number of issues in deliberative theory.  

For example, Axel Honneth’s research agenda can be regarded as a continuation of Habermas’ effort to provide access to a pre-scientific realm of moral critique. The need of citizens to more or less freely articulate their aspirations and interests, to acknowledge commonalities and differences and their commitment to others’ aims and the common good have long been a cornerstone of research on deliberation.  Deliberative scholars who investigate everyday talk and story-telling –  such as Jane Mansbridge, Laura Black, and Francesca Polletta (see also Steiner, Jaramillo, Maia, & Mameli, in press) to quote just a few –  are particularly concerned with what Habermas calls  “discovery of problems,” “interpretation of needs,” and “discourses aimed at achieving self-understanding” by  affected individuals and groups. In a book recently published by Palgrave Macmillan (Maia, 2014), I investigate how Honneth moves from Habermas’ work to construct a theory of recognition that links normative reflection and the concept of intersubjective conditions that are necessary for autonomy. Honneth’s political philosophy helps deepening and refining the understanding of individuals’ reactions to feelings of injustice, which are tied to plexuses of negative experiences in intimate, juridical, and social spheres. By articulating a broader notion of self-realization and inter-subjective dependency, the recognition-theoretical approach is particularly relevant to deliberative scholars concerned with emancipation of disadvantaged groups and political praxis aimed at achieving justice.  This book, developed in collaboration with six former doctoral students or postdoctoral fellowships and now colleagues, investigates some of the interfaces that the theory of recognition establishes with political communication and media studies.

In particular, the recognition-theoretical approach paves the way for researchers to tap into pre-political experience. In a study published in the European Political Science Review, my collaborator and I (Maia & Garcêz, 2014) explore how Honneth’s theory of recognition opens promising venues for exploring the role of emotion in politics and discursive engagement in deliberation. It investigates storytelling of deaf people gathered from two digital environments: a website sponsored by social movement organizations and an online social network site. While endorsing Honneth’s view that “feelings of injustice” are an important source for intelligibility of injustice, and that disadvantaged individuals need to build a “shared interpretative framework” in struggles for recognition, we argue that a more nuanced account of discursive justification is needed to deal with dissent and moral disagreement. This study shows how Habermas’ and Honneth’s theoretical frameworks can be jointly applied in empirical research to better equip researchers concerned with practices that aim to overcome injustice.

While most scholars support the view that deliberation is a rare phenomenon, critics should be more attentive to people’s motivations to engage in discussion and deliberation. Insofar as Honneth’s theory produces insights into various levels of individuals’ struggles to be seen by others as self-determining agents, not to be looked down upon, not to be considered as second-class citizens or treated unjustly in the sphere of work, one can find new explanations for why a person feels compelled to make oneself understood, and dispute conflicting values and interests. By re-appraising how individuals’ self-respect and self-esteem are linked to social conflict embedded in norms and political institutions, the recognition-theoretical approach aids in observing the critical potential for discussion and citizens’ willingness to deliberate in everyday life.  In previous studies concentrating on conflicts related to racism and homophobia (Maia & Rezende, 2016), we investigated how individuals engage in “moments of deliberation” not only with the “other,” but with “multiple others,” in a complex web of relations in society. Findings show that platforms with distinct affordances (YouTube, blogs, and Facebook) provide different opportunities and constraints for people to frame personal expressions and engage in discussion, in a conflictive field of respect as well as disrespect. While individuals are not completely free to decide what order of justification they will use in order to attempt to solve a certain problem, or challenge a particular judgment, results of this study published in the Journal of Computer-mediated Communication (Maia & Rezende, 2016) suggest that attacks on a personal level have a more deleterious impact on deliberation than offenses to others’ opinions. Disrespectful commenters are more likely to justify their claims; and depending on the targets of profanity, disrespect has varying effects on deliberation.

Honneth’s research program can also provide new insights to articulate domains that typically tend to be treated separately, such as critical sociology and political theory. Like Habermas, Honneth identifies a pre-theoretical basis to critique everyday life, but starts with the practical relationships of disrespected subjects and morally motivated struggles for expanded forms of recognition. Therefore, the recognition-theoretical approach captures the complexity of the interrelated dynamics of everyday talk, deliberation, mobilization, and activism, which are likely to be treated in separate fields of study. In an article published in the Journal of Political Power (Maia & Cal, 2014), we analyze patterns of recognition that are conveyed in legal rules and institutions as well as in actions of advocacy agents before they find expression in practices in a given lifeworld. In our case study, media professionals acted as agents of advocacy, following discourses against domestic child labor vocalized by NGOs and local social movements as well as nationwide and transnational entities. Prompted to reflect on them, women who worked in domestic labor in their childhood challenged the discourse of newspapers and defended this practice as useful for their self-development.  This study contributes to better understanding the conflictive assessment of justice and injustice by advocacy agents or political representatives and affected individuals. In this case, deliberative theory allows learning about how to achieve mutual understanding and clarifies what is to be taken into account and recognized in each particular social situation.

In yet other research (Maia & Vimieiro, 2015), we investigate the role of advocacy agents, social movements, and moral entrepreneurs to readjust cultural notions of the individualization and social inclusion of disabled people; and in bringing an ever-greater range of differences of values or ways of living to the public sphere. We analyze how the production and reproduction of public reasons help to re-arrange institutions in terms of recognition. Even when institutionalized, norms, rights, and policies are open to permanent contestation with the aim of disclosing flaws, limitations, and inadequate interpretations.

In summary, Honneth’s contributions can revitalize studies on everyday talk and deliberation within a network of governance (see also Mendonça & Maia, 2014). We have learned from political communication studies that in an increasingly hybrid media environment connections across governmental networks and social spaces are more intricate in contemporary societies. Therefore, everyday talk is arguably becoming ever more relevant for processes of politicization regarding the discovery of problematic situations, the conversion of topics into issues of public concern, and the public review of political decisions within deliberative systems (Maia, 2012, in press-a, in press-b).  I believe that the theory of recognition provides powerful insights for advancing research on deliberation; and that it poses a challenge to engage in more theory building and empirical investigation in the field of political communication.

Notes on contributor

Rousiley C. M. Maia (PhD, Nottingham) is a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her scholarship focuses on political communication, deliberative democracy, theory of recognition and justice. 

References

Maia, R. C. M. (2012). Deliberation, the media and political talk. New York, NY: Hampton Press.

Maia, R. C. M. (2014). Recognition and the media. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Maia, R. C. M. (in press-a). Politicization, new media, and everyday deliberation. In P. Fawcett, M. Flinders, C. Hay, & M. Wood (Eds.), Anti-politics, depoliticization, and governance. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Maia, R. C. M. (in press-b). Deliberative media. In A. Bächtiger, J. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge, & M. Warren (Eds.), Oxford handbook of deliberative democracy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Maia, R. C. M., & Cal, D. (2014). Recognition and ideology: Assessing justice and injustice in the case of child domestic labor. Journal of Political Power, 7(1), 63–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.887543

Maia, R. C. M., & Garcêz, R. L. O. (2014). Recognition, feelings of injustice and claim justification: A case study of deaf people’s storytelling on the internet. European Political Science Review, 6(3), 359–382. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773913000143

Maia, R. C. M., & Rezende, T. A. S. (2016). Respect and disrespect in deliberation across the networked media environment: Examining multiple paths of political talk. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(2), 121–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12155

Maia, R. C. M., & Vimieiro, A. C. (2015). Recognition and moral progress: A case study about discourses on disability in the media. Political Studies, 63(1), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12083

Mendonça, R. F., & Maia, R. C. M. (2014). Recognition without struggles: The reporting on leprosy in Brazilian daily Newspapers.  In R. C. M. Maia, Recognition and the media (pp. 199-219). Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Steiner, J., Jaramillo, M. C., Maia, R. C. M., & Mameli, S. (in press). Deliberation across deeply divided societies: Transformative moments. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud
Department of Communication Studies and Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

Deliberative isn’t exactly the term one would use when thinking about news comment sections. Although optimists originally conceived of news comment sections as a space where people would come together and engage in civil discussions, the reality of the space is far from this ideal. In reality, comment sections are filled with incivility, irrelevance, intolerance, and a whole host of less-than-deliberative content. Just because many comment sections are this way, however, does not mean that they have to be. Over the past several years, I’ve been working with a team of faculty, students, and staff members at the Engaging News Project. The broad mission of the Project is to evaluate digital tools and strategies that improve news organizations’ digital presence. As part of this endeavor, we’ve conducted several analyses of news comment sections (an overview of this work is here).

News comment sections are important both practically and theoretically. Practically, comment sections are both a blessing and a curse for newsrooms. On the positive side, comment sections can provide feedback that can be useful for journalists and can be a source of revenue. Newsrooms that value their comment section often say that their commenters tend to be among the most loyal site visitors. On the negative side, comment sections can hurt the news brand, can affect what people take away from the journalism, and can demoralize news staff. Although several high profile news organizations have turned off their comments, others continue to invest in the space. We’ve talked to several news organizations that are thinking about what to do with the space, making scholarship about comment sections relevant to practitioners.

Theoretically, comment sections are important because they provide a real world context in which to examine many important communication theories without turning to the artificiality of the lab experiment or the unreliability of self-reports in a survey. Theories such as spiral of silence, motivated reasoning, and gatekeeping, for instance, can be investigated in these spaces. The shortcomings of comment sections as a deliberative space and ways to encourage interaction that more closely resembles deliberation also can be analyzed.

At the Engaging News Project, we have conducted several research projects with relevance to the practical questions facing newsrooms about how to manage comment sections and the theoretical questions attracting scholarly attention about what practices increase deliberation. Two steams of research most relevant to assessing deliberative outcomes are:

1. How a Comment Section is Designed Affects Commenting Behavior. We’ve analyzed how comment sections are designed and whether different layouts can affect how people engage. A three-column comment section that more directly shows arguments for, against, and neither on an issue (a layout that draws inspiration from research on argument repertoire) can increase engagement in the comment section.¹ We also have analyzed how a change in layout of the New York Times comment section affected behavior in the comment section. The prominence of abuse flags, for instance, affects the extent to which people engage with them.
2. How a Newsroom Interacts Affects Commenting Behavior. In one study, we found that having a prominent reporter engage in the comment section by answering and asking questions and encouraging deliberative conversation improved the civility of comments by around 15 percent. Although not a panacea, this practice does affect the tone of the conversation. We also have been surveying commenters to understand what practices they would like to see in the space. We’ve seen consistent support for having journalists answer factual questions or having experts involved in the comment section. This also could improve the deliberativeness of the space.

We are by no means the only scholars looking at comment sections and how they can be improved to create more deliberative experiences. Research on anonymity (Halpern & Gibbs, 2013; Rowe, 2015; Santana, 2014), moderation (Lampe & Resnick, 2004; Park, Sachar, Diakopoulos, & Elmqvist, 2016; Ruiz et al., 2011; Wise et al., 2006), the factors that inspire interactivity (Ziegele, Breiner, & Quiring, 2014), and news organizations’ policies (Ksiazek, 2015) is adding depth to our understanding. And this brief list of other research is only a small subset of the many interesting projects that are strengthening our understanding of creating more deliberative spaces online. I’m encouraged to see what new research takes place critically examining deliberation in comment sections (or in other online discussion spaces) in the coming years.

¹ Note that more design work is needed to ensure that the rightmost column doesn’t see diminished engagement due to its placement.

Notes on contributor

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud (PhD, Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Engaging News Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on political communication, media effects, and public opinion.

References

Halpern, D., & Gibbs, J. (2013). Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1159–1168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.008

Ksiazek, T. B. (2015). Civil interactivity: How news organizations’ commenting policies explain civility and hostility in user comments. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(4), 556–573. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1093487

Lampe, C., & Resnick, P. (2004). Slash(dot) and burn: Distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 543–550). New York, NY: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985761

Park, D., Sachar, S., Diakopoulos, N., & Elmqvist, N. (2016). Supporting comment moderators in identifying high quality online news comments. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1114–1125). New York, NY: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858389

Rowe, I. (2015). Deliberation 2.0: Comparing the deliberative quality of online news user comments across platforms. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(4), 539–555. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1093482

Ruiz, C., Domingo, D., Micó, J. L., Díaz-Noci, J., Meso, K., & Masip, P. (2011). Public sphere 2.0? The democratic qualities of citizen debates in online newspapers. International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(4), 463–487. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161211415849

Santana, A. D. (2014). Virtuous or vitriolic: The effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards. Journalism Practice, 8(1), 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.813194

Wise, K., Hamman, B., & Thorson, K. (2006). Moderation, response rate, and message interactivity: Features of online communities and their effects on intent to participate. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(1), 24–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00313.x

Ziegele, M., Breiner, T., & Quiring, O. (2014). What creates interactivity in online news discussions? An exploratory analysis of discussion factors in user comments on news items. Journal of Communication, 64(6), 1111–1138. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12123

Hartmut Wessler
Institute for Media and Communication Studies, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

“Deliberative democracy is like a Diesel car,” John Parkinson aptly remarked in a talk once. “You don’t expect to find the Diesel fuel in the glove compartment or the trunk, you expect to find it in the fuel tank.” What he meant, I think, is that deliberation is not supposed to be an all-encompassing quality of every aspect of democracy, but a particularly salient feature of a particular normative model of democracy. It is OK for really existing democracies to feature institutions in which decisions are taken by majority vote (and even institutions that are not democratically legitimated themselves such as independent central banks) – as long as the division of labor in the system as a whole ensures that all major policy proposals and the legitimacy of government are regularly subjected to inclusive, reasoned debate.

This state-of-the-art systemic view of deliberation (Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012) puts normative weight on the quality of news and discussion in media ranging from newspapers, through TV and radio talk shows all the way to Facebook, Twitter & Co. None of these diverse forums needs to mimic the ideal speech situation devised by Jürgen Habermas (a concept, incidentally, that Habermas has not used anymore after 1972!). Nor should open mediated deliberation have to conform to the discourse rules that facilitate deliberative discussion in small-group settings. Instead media forums should collectively offer citizens, collective actors and decision-makers ways to express themselves in, and listen to, public debates imbued with a plurality of perspectives and a wide range of substantive justifications. In other words: They should facilitate aggregate-level learning processes, and reasoned dissent is just as fine as an outcome as substantive consensus (Wessler, 2008).

But just how much deliberativeness is enough deliberativeness? And how should it be distributed across the various media forums? The answers to these questions are not obvious at all. They will, I contend, not be found in deliberative theory, but only through comparative empirical analysis. The division of labor among different media forums, and between them and the various political institutions, in the deliberative system needs careful comparative investigation. For example, we know that in systems with strong public-service broadcasting (PSB) citizens know more about politics and the world (e.g., Iyengar et al., 2010). In systems without strong PSB basic epistemic functions might fall on other media forums such as online news, fact-checking websites or even satirical news programs. It seems that there is not one ideal deliberative constellation of media forums, but that different systems call for different types of complementarity. But how should we be able to know what works best in a given context without that systematic comparison?

The research I am favoring here was pioneered in the seminal study “Shaping abortion discourse” by Ferree and colleagues (2002), a US-German team of researchers. The authors show that quality newspapers in both countries have somewhat different profiles of deliberativeness (for example, including more perspectives from nonaffiliated individuals and everyday experience in the US dailies, and emphasizing argument complexity to some degree in the German ones). On the whole, however, deliberative performance turned out to be quite similar. A few studies have since investigated elements of media deliberativeness in two or more national contexts, including newspaper and TV coverage (Benson, 2013), TV news (Wessler & Rinke, 2014), newspapers and websites (Gerhards & Schäfer, 2010) or blogospheres (Hyun, 2012). Conversely, a few studies have compared the deliberative performance of different media forums in the same national context (see, for example, Freelon, 2015; Sobieraj & Berry, 2011). But to my knowledge no study to date has done both at the same time, that is, none has studied the systemic complementarity of various media forums and compared them across political-cultural contexts. What I am advocating, therefore, is the comparative analysis of systems of mediated deliberation.

Political communication scholarship benefits from this type of inquiry in at least three ways. First, media users today use all sorts of media concurrently and for different purposes, and it is this variegated usage that characterizes their experience of citizenship. By studying systems of mediated deliberation instead of individual media, empirical deliberation research would thus capture the actually existing media experience much better. Second, the kind of mediated deliberation we find in a particular system strongly depends on the institutional and macro-social context in which it takes place. There are indications that more consensual systems of governance (like Switzerland or, to a lesser extent, Germany) on average produce more civil debates but less public justifications for positions than majoritarian systems (such as the USA) (Wessler & Rinke, 2014). But there is much more to learn here, including the effects of racial, ethnic or cultural divisions on the deliberativeness of public discourse. A well-grounded theory of the macro-social foundations of deliberative media performance is only just beginning to emerge. Finally, deliberative theory has long been driven by the quest for democratic innovations. In this context the comparative analysis of systems of mediated deliberation will conceivably help devise contextualized innovations, which interact well with other system components, instead of isolated transplants that might not work well in the end.

Notes on contributor

Hartmut Wessler (PhD, Hamburg) is professor of media and communication studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His scholarship focuses on political communication, mediated contestation as well as global media debates on climate change, migration, and religion/secularism.

References

Benson, R. (2013). Shaping immigration news: A French-American comparison. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: Democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Freelon, D. (2015). Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion. New Media & Society, 17(5), 772-791. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813513259

Gerhards, J., & Schäfer, M. S. (2010). Is the internet a better public sphere? Comparing old and new media in the USA and Germany. New Media Society, 12(1), 143-160. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809341444

Hyun, K. D. (2012). Americanization of web-based political communication? A comparative analysis of political blogospheres in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 89(3), 397-413. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699012447919

Iyengar, S., Curran, J., Lund, A. B., Salovaara-Moring, I., Hahn, K. S., & Coen, S. (2010). Cross-national versus individual-level differences in political information: A media systems perspective. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 20(3), 291-309. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2010.490707

Parkinson, J., & Mansbridge, J. (Eds.). (2012). Deliberative systems: Deliberative democracy at the large scale. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Sobieraj, S., & Berry, J. M. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication, 28(1), 19-41. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2010.542360

Wessler, H. (2008). Investigating deliberativeness comparatively. Political Communication, 25(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600701807752

Wessler, H., & Rinke, E. M. (2014). Deliberative performance of television news in three types of democracy: Insights from the U.S., Germany, and Russia. Journal of Communication, 64(5), 827-851. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12115

Iain Walker
newDemocracy Foundation, Sydney, Australia

There is an occasional tendency among the academic community to despair of meaningful, structural democratic reform opportunities. My observation is that they effectively cut half of the people out by assuming deliberation is only of appeal to the Left, so plan for hibernation at the arrival of a government of the Right. Moreover, they fear that the increase in mistrust of experts (consciously including themselves in that category) also applies only to ‘the other side’, and exacerbate this further by relying on assumptions that a weakened public service is run roughshod by a tough political culture replete with advisors.

A fine story, but try finding actual examples of it.

This is a set of assumptions not supported by my experience advocating for practical trials of deliberative process in Australia to Mayors, MP’s, Ministers and Premiers. While there is a mild skew to the Left in terms of the warmth of reception, the bigger skew is to the Centre. It is the lunatic fringes at each end of the political spectrum who feel they hold a font of absolute truth who truly oppose a role for randomly selected everyday people being given the chance to contribute an informed common ground view to the public discourse.

Where the Left has traditionally enjoyed the appeal of deliberative democracy’s flattening of the power structure (and inferred weakening of corporate interests), at the same time it appeals to the belief of the Right that they act for the everyday person in the street rather than noisy special interests. The appeal is equal. The methodology is geared toward facilitating practical reform because its appeal is balanced by the very nature of its operation. Elected representatives on both sides truly believe they act for everyday people against organised power, so how can the appeal be anything other than even?

The 2016 US Presidential election result has been a source of anguish in some democratic reform circles. I don’t share that. If there was ever an individual to whom you could sell the idea of changing democracy and disrupting the status quo, then it is President Trump who needs to hear from people who know how to “drain the swamp.” He may make a spurious claim he does not believe when he says elections are rigged, but aren’t we as deliberative advocates saying elections are fundamentally flawed?

In discussion with an Australian venture capitalist interested in our work, he noted that disruptive innovations rarely come from insiders. The team behind Airbnb never worked in hotels. The team behind Uber never had a taxi business. Elon Musk worked neither at NASA nor General Motors nor Visa, yet look at the disruptive achievements of SpaceX, Tesla, and PayPal.

His point to me was that the pattern of innovation comes from those outside the system, and that any politician who thought like he did would know to be looking for the radical reforms from us, not the incremental as a means of stemming declining party trust, membership, and public support coming from party-aligned think tanks.

This year in Australia we have seen a Left-aligned Premier in South Australia commit to what is likely the largest – and undoubtedly the most controversial – public policy deliberation: the question of whether South Australia should pursue a commercial opportunity to accept high-level nuclear waste from other countries. In isolation, that can be seen as evidence that one side of politics favors the use of deliberation more. But I base my judgment on the span of advocacy conversations we at the newDemocracy Foundation have including the projects we expect to announce in 2017. Based on this, I would predict (for Australia at least) that we will swing to projects for Right-aligned governments this year. Each year however, the baseline rises. The political understanding of “the jury” and of the vast difference between public opinion and public judgment is rising rapidly. The success of projects which involved deliberations by randomly-selected everyday people is known in more and more of the offices we walk into. That is the critical trend.

We are still comparatively ‘young’ in our time making public deliberation the natural course of action for large-scale public decision making. In a short time the fundamentals are becoming understood. Now is not the time, particularly for those in the US, to shelve action based on flawed assumptions. Democratic reform must be led by those who are non-partisan and hold no issue positions, and it must look for those not beholden to careerism. There are no ‘right’ answers to problems, there are simply informed positions which the vast majority of people decide is right for them and that they can live with. If you read this paragraph again and accept it, then you should see the opportunity for reform is accelerating and that the opportunity is there for those who can demonstrate trustworthy operations in practice. Especially in the United States.

Notes on contributor

Iain Walker (MPP, Sydney) is Executive Director of the newDemocracy Foundation in Australia. The work of the Foundation focuses on exploring and delivering systemic structural reform based on a role for randomly selected everyday people.