The State Government in Western Australia has portrayed itself as a champion of revitalising local democracy and civic engagement. This can be seen in the plethora of community consultation/participation policy documents that have emerged from the Premier's Citizens and Civics Unit over the past five years. Dialogue with the City, a major participatory planning process that formed part of the development of a new strategic plan—Network City—for metropolitan Perth, has been heralded as an exemplar of deliberative democracy. This paper draws on deliberative democratic theory, performative policy analysis and institutional discourse analysis to interrogate the efficacy of this claim by examining the discursive practices leading up to and including the Community Forum, a major consultative and participatory event of the Dialogue Initiative. (continue)

Fake public participation is widespread in United States government and in governments all over the world. Since fake public participation undermines true public participation, good government advocates should work to deter it. Fake public participation is a subset of fake democracy and occurs for the same reason: we live in an era when democracy is the only legitimate form of government, so the incentive to fake participation is great. To deter fake public participation, the nature of the problem should be recognized followed by the ... (continue)

Who Wants to Deliberate – and Why? is an article published as part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Faculty Research Working Paper Series, co-authored by Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, Ryan Kennedy, David Lazer, and Anand Sokhey. Abstract: Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists over the last twenty years. Many scholars in political behavior, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue (inter alia) that most people dislike politics, and that ... (continue)

Drawing on an example of President Bush's decision as to whether or not to fund stem cell research, the author explores what it takes to make a possible constituency-altering decision for politicians. A multitude of factors go into the mix for the decision, including who is involved in the public in the debate and how those people turnout to vote in the election. The author goes on to look at the feelings of Americans in times of crisis and the leaders' actions in response. (continue)

This article, written by a Palestinian attorney with many years of dialogue experience, describes some common problems with intergroup dialogue and suggests some basic solutions. Kuttab says at the end of the article, "I have written some harsh words about dialogue and its pitfalls; yet I am still a firm believer in it. Peace, justice and reconciliation can be advanced tremendously by an open dialogue between members of the oppressed group and those who are willing among the oppressor society." (continue)

Editorial addressing a study showing that people don't want more political power, and that many would prefer less. The study by John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth A. Theiss-Morse concluded that people want the government's most important decisions to be made by leading experts in the field. (continue)

In this paper, the authors begin by setting deliberative events in a broader context of deliberative forums or arenas. The authors distinguish three potential arenas of deliberation: the 'normal, the 'informal' and the 'staged'. They briefly describe three well-known deliberative events, citizens' juries, consensus conferences and deliberative polls. After setting out the benefits and criticisms of these three deliberative events, the authors realize that although the criticisms raise important issues, they do not justify abandoning deliberative events. (continue)