"Robert Asen explores the ways that school board members in the U.S. engage each other to make decisions for their local communities. He addresses issues of ideology, scarcity, expertise, and trust while examining the perils and promise of local policymaking"--Provided by publisher.
This book defends the value of democratic participation. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it.
Today, deliberative democracy is the most widely discussed theory of democracy. Its proponents argue that important decisions of law and policy should ideally turn not on the force of numbers but on the force of the better argument. However, it continues to strike some as little more than wishful thinking. In this new book, Ian O’Flynn examines how the concept has developed over recent decades, the family disagreements which have emerged, and the criticisms that have been levelled at it. Grappling with the familiar charge that ordinary people lack the motivation and capacity for meaningful deliberation, O’Flynn considers the example of deliberative polls and citizens’ assemblies and critically assesses how such forums can fit within a broader democratic system. He then considers the implications of deliberative democracy for multicultural and multi-ethnic societies before turning to the prospects for the most ambitious deliberative project of all: global deliberative democracy. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of democratic theory, as well as anyone who is curious about the prospects for more rational decision-making in an age of populist passion.
Starting from the 1980s, this book provides the first, complete history of the idea of deliberative democracy, analysing its relationship with the earlier idea, and practices, of participatory democracy in the 1960s and 1970s.
MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time.
An understanding of the ways in which public deliberation can be extended to meet the needs of modern societies even in the face of increasing pluralism, inequality, an social complexity.
Bringing expert knowledge to bear in an open and deliberative way to help solve pressing social problems is a major concern today, when technocratic and bureaucratic decision making often occurs with little or no input from the general public. Albert Dzur proposes an approach he calls “democratic professionalism” to build bridges between specialists in domains like law, medicine, and journalism and the lay public in such a way as to enable and enhance broader public engagement with and deliberation about major social issues. Sparking a critical and constructive dialogue among social theories of the professions, professional ethics, and political theories of deliberative democracy, Dzur reveals interests, motivations, strengths, and vulnerabilities in conventional professional roles that provide guideposts for this new approach. He then applies it in examining three practical arenas in which experiments in collaboration and power-sharing between professionals and citizens have been undertaken: public journalism, restorative justice, and the bioethics movement. Finally, he draws lessons from these cases to refine this innovative theory and identify the kinds of challenges practitioners face in being both democratic and professional.