Vincent Price
"Assessing Deliberative Democracy"

Monday, November 6, Time: 4:30
Location:Carnegie Mellon University, Porter Hall 100

Sponsored by the Humanities Center

Abstract:

"Recent years have seen a burgeoning number of programs bringing citizens together for deliberations, both face-to-face and increasingly via web-based technologies. According to deliberative democratic theory, high-quality opinions emerge through open discussion and equal exchange among citizens, encouraging give-and-take and inviting arguments for all sides.   What's more, engagement in such deliberation is thought to have transformative potential, engaging citizens who might otherwise remain withdrawn from public life.   This presentation draws upon a series of innovative, online field experiments designed to explore the contours and effects of citizen discussion, set against normative standards of deliberative theory.   The data permit close empirical scrutiny of who deliberates, patterns of argumentation among different sorts of participants, within certain types of groups, and the extent to which these patterns are predicted by various survey measures including demographics, ideological dispositions, political knowledge and involvement, and other individual differences.   Effects of deliberation are also assessed, both as they pertain to the putative benefits of discussion for the quality of opinion and the theoretically transformative role of deliberation in fostering heightened levels of social trust, political efficacy and civic engagement."

Profile:

Vincent Price is the Steven H. Chaffee Professor of Communication and Political Science, at the University of Pennsylvania.