Mapping and Measuring Deliberation is out!

At last, Mapping and Measuring Deliberation, written with my friend and colleague André Bächtiger, is out now with Oxford University Press.

It is, I hope, going to prove a little controversial. Essentially, it argues that much empirical social science has been confusing deliberation – the noun – with “deliberative”, an adjectival quality of democracy; and treating deliberative theory as a set of analytic criteria to apply at the level of individual institutions, instead using it to make system-level, macro judgements about the quality of opinion formation in a democracy on the one hand, or everyday practices of meaning making on the other.

It also contributes to attempts to make deliberative democracy more legible to comparative political science.

André and I will be writing a few short pieces setting out some of the key ideas over the coming month or so, but in the meantime, check out the video launch I did with another friend and colleague, Simon Niemeyer of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra back in November.