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Variations Of Institutional Design For Empowered Deliberation, Carolina Johnson, John Gastil

Journal of Public Deliberation

This paper lays out the practical and theoretical characteristics of formally empowered deliberation as a distinctive subset of deliberative processes. As part of a recent broad shift toward a more deliberative conception of democratic politics, participatory deliberative processes increasingly have been formally empowered as part of democratic governance. Governments have moved to delegate authority and deliberative responsibility from elite bodies to lay publics more quickly than scholars have been able to fully identify the implications of this institutionalization for the quality of both deliberation and democracy. This paper describes the emerging characteristics of formally empowered deliberation as a distinctive subset ...