'Deliberative politics' refers to the role of conversation and arguments in politics. Until recently discussion of deliberative politics took place almost exclusively among political philosophers, but many questions raised in this philosophical discussion cry out for empirical investigation. This book provides the first extended empirical study of deliberative politics, addressing, in particular, questions of the preconditions and consequences of high level deliberation. Using parliamentary debates in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States as an empirical base, the authors measure the level of deliberation by constructing a 'Discourse Quality Index'. As deliberative politics moves to the forefront of political theory, this book makes an important contribution to deliberative democracy.

'Deliberative politics' refers to the role of conversation and arguments in politics. Until recently discussion of deliberative politics took place almost exclusively among political philosophers, but many questions raised in this philosophical discussion cry out for empirical investigation. This book provides the first extended empirical study of deliberative politics, addressing, in particular, questions of the preconditions and consequences of high level deliberation. Using parliamentary debates in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States as an empirical base, the authors measure the level of deliberation by constructing a 'Discourse Quality Index'. As deliberative politics moves to the forefront of political theory, this book makes an important contribution to deliberative democracy.

Der vorliegende Band umfasst eine grosse Bandbreite theoretischer Beitrage und empirischer Anwendungen raumlicher Modelle auf dem Gebiet der Politikwissenschaft. Raumliche Modelle existieren in diesem Fachgebiet in unterschiedlicher Form und verschiedenen Abstraktionsstufen. Haufig werden Politikraume konstruiert, um die Positionen von Wahlern, Parteien und Koalitionen in politischen Prozessen naher zu bestimmen. Wie solche Modelle entstehen, auf welchen Grundlagen sie aufbauen und wie sie auf aktuelle Ereignisse in der Politik angewandt werden konnen ist Thema dieses Sammelbandes."

Experiment und Simulation gehoren mittlerweile fest zum Kanon der etablierten Forschungsmethoden in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften. In der Grundlagenforschung dienen Laborexperimente dazu, Erklarungen des sozialen Verhaltens und Handelns modellgetreu zu uberprufen, wahrend in Feld- und naturlichen Experimenten reale Handlungsbedingungen abgebildet werden sollen. Mit agentenbasierten Simulationen wiederum lassen sich komplexe und wiederholte Interaktionen zwischen Individuen untersuchen. Das Jahrbuch stellt das Potenzial dieser beiden neuen Forschungsmethoden vor. In einem ersten Teil werden die methodischen Grundlagen und Annahmen von sozialwissenschaftlichem Experiment und agentenbasierter Simulation beschrieben. Die Beitrage des zweiten Teils zeigen exemplarisch die Bandbreite von Labor- und Feldexperimenten und Simulationen in der politik- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung auf. "

Deliberative democracy has challenged two widely-accepted nostrums about democratic politics: that people lack the capacities for effective self-government; and that democratic procedures are arbitrary and do not reflect popular will; indeed, that the idea of popular will is itself illusory. On the contrary, deliberative democrats have shown that people are capable of being sophisticated, creative problem solvers, given the right opportunities in the right kinds of democratic institutions. But deliberative empirical research has its own problems. In this book two leading deliberative scholars review decades of that research and reveal three important issues. First, the concept 'deliberation' has been inflated so much as to lose empirical bite; second, deliberation has been equated with entire processes of which it is just one feature; and third, such processes are confused with democracy in a deliberative mode more generally. In other words, studies frequently apply micro-level tools and concepts to make macro- and meso-level judgements, and vice versa. Instead, Bachtiger and Parkinson argue that deliberation must be understood as contingent, performative, and distributed. They argue that deliberation needs to be disentangled from other communicative modes; that appropriate tools need to be deployed at the right level of analysis; and that scholars need to be clear about whether they are making additive judgements or summative ones. They then apply that understanding to set out a new agenda and new empirical tools for deliberative empirical scholarship at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

Deliberation ist nicht nur zu einem zentralen Referenzpunkt in der politischen Philosophie geworden, die Idee verstandigungsorientierter Argumentation hat mittlerweile auch Eingang in die empirische Forschung gefunden. Das Jahrbuch bietet neue Perspektiven auf das Konzept der Deliberation: es beleuchtet die komplexe Beziehung von Deliberation zu bargaining und Verhandlungen, fragt nach dem Verhaltnis von Deliberation, Abstimmen und Wahrheit, stellt neue methodische Herangehensweisen an strategische kommunikative Prozesse vor und prasentiert eine empirische Umsetzung des Deliberationskonzepts im Kontext des europaischen Parlaments.

Deliberative democracy has been one of the main games in contemporary political theory for two decades, growing enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, in philosophy, in various research programmes in the social sciences and law, and in political practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought and discusses their philosophical origins. The Handbook locates deliberation in political systems with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliaments, courts, governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution, documenting the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world and in global governance.