70 likes | 255 Views
Deliberative Democracy and the PINet Project. John Gastil Dept. of Comm. Arts & Sciences The Pennsylvania State University February 24, 2013. Articles on Deliberative Democracy. 1995. 2005.
E N D
Deliberative Democracy and the PINet Project John GastilDept. of Comm. Arts & SciencesThe Pennsylvania State University February 24, 2013
Articles on Deliberative Democracy 1995 2005 Number of peer-reviewed articles with search terms in record fields. Terms = (Deliberation OR Deliberative) AND (Civic OR Citizen OR Political OR Public OR Democracy OR Democratic). Full-text article search yields roughly 10x as many hits.
Research problems or agendas in deliberative democratic theory • How can we assess: • the degree to which government agencies (and executive branches generally) deliberate democratically? • legislative deliberation, both on the floor and in committees? • the degree to which publics are included in the wider governance process? • the deliberative quality of public discourse more generally on a range of issues (and across nations)?
A sampling of analytic methodsused in delib. dem. research • Discourse Quality Index (justifications, etc.) • Coding for analytic rigor (deliberation) and democratic social relations • Argument repertoire/diversity • Message homogeneity (talking points) • Holistic codings of process quality
PInetresearch competition ideas • Solicitation for developing an analytic method that lends itself to automatic coding, yet can withstand a validation test against more careful human coding approaches • Competition announced through two main associations/networks: Natl. Comm. Assn. and the Intl. Comm. Assn.
Questions and Concerns • The most feasible and reliable approaches to automatic coding may lack validity. • The most valid content analytic approaches may not be feasible. • Can we assemble a research team that can sustain the long-term investment of time and resources required to overcome the validity/feasibility problem?